As we continue to bring back accoutrement from the “before times,” I have begun to have parishioners ask me about bringing back the bulletin. The short answer is that this newsletter is our parish bulletin. The long answer is…well…longer.
When I first arrived at Assumption, I knew that at some point I wanted to do a major overhaul of the bulletin. It always seemed cluttered to me, and when I sat down to read it, I found I was just skimming over a whole lot of items which were printed week-in and week-out without changing. The newest information was sometimes hard to find. (This is, of course, extremely common for church bulletins across the country.) When COVID hit, the first few weeks were such a quickly changing crisis that I scrapped the entire bulletin and went to this format, because I wanted to communicate with our parishioners clearly and concisely about the most important pieces of COVID information. I did not, at the time, expect this to become our permanent format, but as time went on it seemed like an extremely effective way to communicate and one that parishioners were responding well to, so I decided to keep it.
In case it is not clear, I have intentionally set up our weekly bulletin like a newspaper, with sections, headlines, and information, and a very firm policy that we do not repeat any information (just as newspapers do not re-run stories). My hope is that, like with a newspaper, our parishioners can quickly find the information they need each week. Also like a newspaper, we are hoping to make the transition to mostly digital distribution, though we will still have some printed copies for folks after Mass once we figure out how to do that affordably. (Our previous printings were funded by ads.)
All that said, I do need your feedback. I am aware that there is probably a happy medium between the old format and the new, so please fill out this survey telling us what you liked and did not like about the old bulletin. Please also use the survey to suggest a name for this bulletin/newspaper of ours. I picked an old-timey newspaper name for this edition, but I do not expect it to stick. Hopefully there are some good ideas out there.
Fr. Moore 