Our church switched last january (2007) to a monthly calendar/bulletin that worked okay but then at Christmas they switched back and we again have weekly's. Its an older congregation; many/most of the people are at least 45, aren't new christians and have been in the church forever (same pew, same bulletin) - we started a saturday gathering about 2 years ago and they don't use a bulletin at all and seem fine - they are mostly teens and early 20's - as for my opinion, I think a monthly system works great if everyone communicates, but that is what killed ours - the saturday crowd communicates on the spur of the moment so their info was rarely shared - I guess that looks worse on a monthly level rather than a weekly? Makes the web development hard too - but since our congregants rarely surf the web, I guess it doesn't matter...

The main portion of our weekly paper that's handed out is the sermon outline, and only secondary is the "bulletin" content; since a sermon outline is handed out every week, I figure we might as well hand out the bulletin content as well.

That said, I'd prefer that our church website was upgraded to post-1999 era functionality so we could have a calendar and so on there too, but hopefully that'll happen soon. :)

I am a church secretary and I love preparing our bulletin, but I also love it when innovative ideas are tried, even if they don't work out in the long term. It's like trying anything new - some things, ‘Yes!’, others, ‘Never again, you’ve got to be kidding!’ The staff I work with, pastoral & secretarial, is gracious, creative, vibrant, future-thinking, with a tremendous love for the Lord & vision for the lost & the congregation. All of us have at times been willing to put in the extra time - notice I did not say we never complain about it :) - required to help people feel & know the Lord. I can really relate to Lanelle's comment about people not getting information to the staff networkers (webmasters & secretaries & staff) in a timely manner, but if this is going on in your church, keep requesting from the necessary sources. One of our singles' groups continually forgot to let me know about their events, finally I discovered they had a class emailing, asked that when this email went out to their group, I get one as well, they added me to their database & now I am able to highlight their events & they love it.

We've been using a monthly bulletin for a while (since before my 2-year tenure at our present church) and it seems to be fine EXCEPT that it's created in January when the annual calendar is created. The information is often created so far in advance that newer items aren't filtered to the calendar creator. The people who have been at our church for a while seem to be deft at ferreting information from who knows where, but for the newer staff members, to say nothing of the congregation, it's extremely frustrating.

I am a church secretary and I would like for our church to try a monthly bulletin. It would give us the time to communicate in different ways. Right now, we just don't have the time to set up proper ways to communicate more effectively. I feel like half of the congregation reads the bulletin and the other half just stares at it and doesn't digest the information.