Saturday, April 04, 2009
Church bulletins full of information
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Dance classes. Mountain hikes. Morning prayers.
The members of Raleigh Court Presbyterian Church are busy. And to keep fellow parishioners informed of their goings-on, they pack their weekly church bulletin with pages and pages of loose notes to invite people to learn things such as South Carolina shag dancing.
"In a sense, I want to say, 'Hurray! It's a very active church,' " pastor Tupper Garden said. "But I also want to say, 'You don't need a full-page insert.' "
Garden wrote a letter to his congregation in early February imploring them to be concise with their announcements -- "Suppose everyone limited their announcements to a few lines of script?" -- because he saw support staff could spend as much as two days a week working on the weekly bulletin.
But he's not the only pastor calling for that. At Virginia Heights Baptist Church, leaders of the congregation have been collecting members' e-mail addresses. That way they can keep people with Internet access updated electronically, and save "hundreds of dollars in postage, paper and copying (and time)," according to a recent bulletin.
Other small faith groups, such as the Religious Society of Friends or the Shantiniketan Hindu Temple in Southwest Roanoke County, have regularly sent out bulletins through the Internet.
At Raleigh Court, Garden's concern had three prongs: Thick bulletins can be wasteful, they can be time-consuming for staff and, finally, they can cram in too much information for people.
The pastor of a congregation with about 900 members, Garden has many other concerns, yet he takes a jazzy approach to the bulletins he says have become like little books with five to eight inserts per week.
"A lot of people like having something to read in church -- and who can blame them, considering the preacher?" the 56-year-old pastor said with a laugh. "The ushers give it out, and the insides fall out and it goes fluttering down the isle."
Garden urged members to, among other measures, use the church's Web site to advertise events and activities of fellowship.
"People are using the Web site more and more," he said. "But it's going to be an evolution."
Springing ahead
Ready for spring? Here's how some congregations have been preparing for grass to grow and flowers to blossom in the weeks before and after the vernal equinox (aka astronomical beginning of spring, March 20):
n Members of St. John Lutheran Church in Roanoke scheduled their sign-up sheet for lawn mowing to start March 28, according a recent newsletter.
n The vacation Bible school of Vinton Baptist Church began filling teacher and volunteer positions for their program, which will run June 15 through June 19, according to an early March church newsletter.
n Some members at Greene Memorial United Methodist Church in Roanoke put out a call in a March newsletter for a coed softball team.
Caring for kitties
St. John Lutheran Church had a message in a recent bulletin for friends of felines: "If you have both cats and Easter lilies in your home, please keep the cats away from the lilies. They are highly toxic to cats."
