People's habits don't change that much when they go to church. When we are in a new place or where we don't know ahead of time what is going on, nothing beats a piece of paper in our hands to inform us about what's going on or help us do what we want to do. Though we might use our smart phone for nearly non-stop interactions throughout the day and use our computers for business and school, consider these two situations:
In a restaurant when you sit down to eat
The menu might be on the restaurant website and/or the waiter may have told you about today's specials, but what do most of us do? We look at the menu in our hands and skim it to find the food we want to order. The menu might also tell us about this history of the place and any interesting specials they are known for. We may not want to ask again about specials or strain to look at a scribbled board. We certainly can't remember everything on the website and the social media feeds about what people enjoyed there aren't always what we are hungry for.
We want a menu. Our very own menu. We want it to make sense with accurate descriptions of the food and prices clearly marked.
We don't consider a restaurant out of touch or not with it because they still have a printed menu. We would be highly irritated if they didn't.
When you go to a play or concert
Though you may have found the performance or researched it ahead of time on the web, what do you do when you arrive and want to know specific details about the order of music or acts in a play?
You expect to be handed a program that you can refer to prior to and as the performance progresses. You read about the cast or musicians and the producers or sponsors. During the course of the performance you can quietly check the number of songs or acts remaining.
If you pulled out your brightly lit phone to check out these things, you would be asked to put it away and if everyone did that at different times it would be extremely distracting.
No concert hall or theater is considered outdated because they print programs and expect people to use them instead of digitally accessing information during a performance.
It's not that much different when people go to church
Particularly if you are new to the church or unfamiliar with churches overall, a church bulletin can be your subtle life-line. It can make the difference between you knowing what is going on and how you are supposed to act and standing or sitting and not knowing what to do and feeling very embarrassed. It can tell you what the church is like, what else it has going on, and who to contact if you have a need or question.
You many not have any idea how to look up these items online. You may not know how to access the church website or social media and even if you do, searching for the precise information you need (what comes next in the service and how you are supposed to respond) might take an unnecessary amount of time in the middle of the service compared to the glance down to a paper bulletin.
If all the above is true and most of us would agree it is, why is it many churches are doing away with printed bulletins?
I don't think anyone does away with printed bulletins to be unkind to the people who attend our churches. But in reality it is just as unkind as it would be if your local restaurant did away with printed menus and expected you to find out everything from their website or your local concert hall doing away with programs because they expect you to look up the performers and acts ahead of time and remember their order.
Paper bulletins are easy to use. Everyone has the same one. They are quiet and they don't tempt us to other distractions.
There are many reasons why churches do away with print bulletins and every person who works in the church office could certainly do with one less project to get done every week, but I suspect that many of the churches that decide to do away with print bulletins simply haven't thought in practical ways about what this does to the person who wanders into your church and either knows NOTHING about it or the infrequent attendee who has forgotten most everything that is going on or the person who for a variety of reasons doesn't have access to all the digital tools the tech team does.
Just because a website is an essential anchor to the communication ministry of the church today and social media an extraordinary tool for interaction and updates doesn't mean every communication is best in digital format. We have to remember the people who are the consumers of our communications and where and how they take in information to serve them best.
Paper bulletins don't mean you don't do digital bulletins and every other media format you can
We live in the time of multi-channel communications, of both/and not either/or. To say we need a paper bulletin doesn't mean we do away with any digital resource. Again, to go back to your local restaurant, we often like to thoroughly check out their website first if we haven't been before or if we are a regular and they have special events, to see what is happening when. We sign up for social media updates from the restaurant that get us to visit regularly.
But when we get there, we want the printed menu.
When newcomers or members want information they will often check out your church website, but for them to have the best experience possible when they come to your church—be sure to give them the menu, or in this setting, your printed church bulletin.
Afterwards—why I wrote this
Once again, because I subscribe to newsletters and updates from various communication groups even if I strongly disagree with some of the things they do, I've seen a number of heavily promoted products that push churches to go ALL DIGITAL!!!! This means, to them, doing away with anything in print and purchasing their totally digital church communication products.
Though I LOVE the digital world (you are reading this via the web after all) and strongly encourage churches to make the most of it, there is one communication piece that I do believe is best, at this for our current time, in print format and that is the church bulletin.
Please share your thoughts, comments, questions!