Should we "kill" the bulletin?

Check this blog posting from Tim Shraeder. This really resonates with me. While I am a big proponent of communicating early and often (although I'm still improving on this front...), the worship folder takes time and energy that we may not be spending wisely.

According to Tim, the pro's of removing the regular "bulletin"?
  • the budget savings... we cut our monthly printing budget 75% going this route
  • the environmental savings… we’re not killing as many trees. It’s a “green” choice and one that people in our church would rally behind.
  • in terms of our organization, it forced our ministry leaders to plan out their events way in advance and caused them to be more organized instead of waiting to the last minute… which tended to be how we did everything.
    it forced us to prioritize and condense. We went from publishing everything to being careful to choose what would further the mission and vision of our church. And we had to do so in a few sentences versus a whole paragraph.

The Con’s of this choice…and what Tim did about them…

  • what about people who aren’t there on the Sunday you hand them out? Easy. We hand them out on the last Sunday of every week and subsequent weeks they are available at our Guest Services table. We make reference to them each week in our announcements on stage and tell people to pick one up if they want to know what’s going on.
  • what about first time visitors and the visitor card? Well, we put visitor cards in the backs of all of our chairs and direct first-time visitors to stop by Guest Services. We’ve actually gotten more of those cards back than the ones we put in our programs!
  • what about sermon notes? We always had a page for sermon notes, so to remedy that problem we created inexpensive sermon notepads that are in the backs of all of our chairs. If people want to take notes, that paper is there!
  • what about things that change or are left out? We are now continually driving people to our website… and enews can catch what may have been left out.

What do you think? What kind of change would we have to endure to do this?

Comments

Anonymous said…
I'd say punt it and do announcements on the screen as before. I look through mine on Sunday morning and throw it away as I'm leaving the church. I can also check on-line under Weekend Worship folder.
August 5, 2008 at 2:21 PM
...greg smith said…
This comment has been removed by the author.
August 5, 2008 at 6:46 PM
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