Church newsletters are a great way to reach out to church members and keep them informed of the goings on at your church. Being on the creating end of a
church newsletter can be a time consuming and tedious task. The main obstacle is of course, coming up with the content to put into your newsletter. The amount of content you will want to include will depend on whether your newsletter is weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or yearly. In this article I will include some tips, tricks, and ideas for generating church newsletter ideas and content, and hopefully answer some questions about what is normally included in a church newsletter.
First of all, try to establish the purpose of the newsletter. In general newsletters serve to inform readers about scheduled upcoming events, to summarize past happenings to help keep readers up to date, and lastly there is often some form of fun element that is intended to entertain the reader with some interesting news, I’ll elaborate more on this later.
For the covering upcoming scheduled events, many newsletters employ a calendar. A weekly or monthly calendar which shows what days the events take place, alongside their times and a brief summary about what it is will help attract people to participate in the event. The calendar format is also usually better than a regular line item list with dates because it is more clear to the reader what is happening and when. You can also include regularly scheduled events such as Sunday church with respective times.
Having reoccurring article themes makes an effective tool for summarizing weekly or monthly events that happen at the church. For instance you could have a weekly column titled “What you missed last week” with a breakdown of the events that took place, and a few words about what happened during them. Another great idea to add informative content is to have a weekly article dedicated to introducing a member of the church staff. Maybe even include a little interview with the staff member to help the readers get to know them.
It is also fun to create other reoccurring columns. These are great because they take the burden of having to create new content off you as the writer; instead you just have to fill the column weekly and already have a guideline as to what to fill it with. Another idea is to include a bible verse for each newsletter, and let that verse be the theme of the newsletter. Hopefully with a little creativity you can expand on these ideas come up with some of your own church newsletter ideas and have a thriving, fun newsletter that helps support your church!