MORE THAN A NEWSLETTER
A newspaper is so much more than a newsletter. For our church, our online newsletter is distributed primarily to church members to stay in constant contact with them. Our newspaper, however, is an outreach ministry. Our paper consists of eight 11x14 pages filled with articles about marriage, parenting, self-improvement, and Christian living.
Eight pages is a lot of information! It enables me to introduce our church, the pastor, and our ministries in ways that people will relate to better.
GET THE RIGHT VISION
Before you begin, get the right vision. "Where there is no vision, the people perish." Knowing what you are trying to accomplish is important to the development, name choice, and distribution demographics.
For example, if you want a paper that is more newsy about your church for your church, then your articles ought to relate to real church news and people. Write articles about church members and upcoming events. Your distribution, however, will be limited in its effectiveness. People who are not associated with your ministries won't find any way to associate with your articles or news.
For our newspaper, we chose the title 'The Christian Family Quarterly'. Our paper is specifically targeting our community. The articles attempt to reach a broad base of people both churched and unchurched. We divided our paper into four sections-and in the following order:
Marriage
Family and Parenting
Self-Improvement
Christian living
With the high divorce rate out there, we felt that putting our front page articles about marriage would grab the most attention. Our goal is to help families in a variety of means, get the Gospel to them, introduce them to our church, pastor, and church family, as well as prepare them in advance to our door to door soul winning efforts.
We always include things like word-searches, word puzzles, and things of that nature. We want it to have the feel of a newspaper, but with the content that will draw people into the paper.
The first person we gave a newspaper to was a fellow sitting on a park bench. He looked to be single, and if he had children at all, they were grown. If david hoffmeister church youtube was not a Christian or had any real religious inclinations than much of the paper would not appeal to him. I saw him glance at the headlines and then put the paper aside. However, that lasted for about half a minute. He then snatched it up, opened it up, and apparently began to read.
That is the appeal of a well designed and written ministry newspaper!
Your paper name and content is determined on what you are trying to accomplish. Make sure you understand your vision before you make those choices.
THE PAPER AS AN OUTREACH MINISTRY TOOL
What we do is postpone our normal door to door soul winning for a period of two weeks. Instead, we just pass out 10,000 papers throughout our community. We place them in businesses and distribute them throughout neighborhoods. We have been able to see many folk come out to distribute papers that never come out to go door to door.
Each of our papers has some sort of salvation or gospel message in it. And we just put the papers on the front door step. My son came running into our house about an hour after distributing the papers in our neighborhood. He said, "Dad, I saw something exciting! I saw someone come outside and pick up our paper and take it inside!"
The headlines are designed to mean something to the majority of our society. The paper format is not seen as a tract, flyer, or church brochure. People will read it.
After we pass them out, we then follow up through the areas that we distributed them to. Many of the families have read the paper, been helped, or intrigued. When we come knocking, they already have some sort of association with us.
