Sunday Bulletins: Editor, Publishing & Booklet Printing

In many church offices, Friday morning means typing the order of worship and announcements into a word processor for the copier, pasting them again into a website or mobile page, and copying them a third time into the weekly email. When a hymn number or scripture reading changes on Saturday, someone has to remember every place it was pasted.

Sunday bulletins in Parsonage let Owners and Admins prepare the service and announcements once under Bulletins (/app/bulletins) and share that single published version three ways:

• A folded booklet for the church copier (plus a one-click Large print edition for the usher table).
• A QR-code phone bulletin at your church’s standing link (/bulletin/<church-slug>) that opens right in the browser with no app or sign-in required.
• A prefilled church email digest that opens in the email composer ready to send to your congregation.

Every bulletin keeps a working Draft separate from its Published snapshot:

• Save draft saves your edits for staff without changing what the congregation sees online or what prints on paper. If a bulletin is already published and you save new edits, its badge changes to Changes not published so you can see at a glance that the draft is ahead of the public page.
• Publish (or Republish) copies your current draft into the published snapshot. The phone bulletin, the print page, and the Send as email digest all read from this published snapshot so paper, phone, and email always match.
• Unpublish takes the bulletin off the public page while keeping your draft safe in the editor. Delete bulletin removes it permanently.

Who can prepare vs. read bulletins

Owner & Admin

Create, edit, publish, unpublish, print, and delete bulletins; edit standing Church details; and review visitor cards and prayer requests in Responses.

Member

Cannot create or edit drafts. Opening Bulletins in the app shows a direct link to read this week’s published bulletin.

Congregation & Visitors

Read published bulletins at /bulletin/<church-slug> from a QR code or link with no account or sign-in required.

At the bottom of Bulletins (/app/bulletins), the Church details card stores the standing information that stays the same from week to week. Enter it once and click Save church details:

• About your church: Your welcome note, service times, nursery details, street address, phone number, and email address. This appears under About us at the bottom of every phone bulletin and on the back cover of every printed booklet. Web addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers are automatically tappable on phones.
• Regular services: If your church holds more than one service each week (for example, Traditional · 8:30 AM and Contemporary · 11:00 AM), click Add service to name them once. When you start a new bulletin, you can pick the service from a dropdown instead of retyping its name and time. Churches with a single weekly service can leave this empty.
• On the phone bulletin: Check Visitor card (“New here? Say hello”) and/or Prayer requests to show those buttons at the bottom of your phone bulletin. Submissions arrive privately under Responses.
• Online giving page (optional): Your church’s existing online giving address (starting with https://). Published phone bulletins show a Give online button, and large-print copies print the link.
• Time zone: Decides what counts as “today” for your church’s standing bulletin link (/bulletin/<church-slug>). Your standing link stays on Sunday’s published bulletin all day Sunday and through Monday before moving on to the next upcoming published service, so Monday follow-ups and late readers still see Sunday’s bulletin.

Click New bulletin on the Bulletins page to start a service. On wide screens, the editor shows your form on the left and a live Preview on the right; on smaller screens, use the Edit / Preview toggle at the top. If you try to leave with unsaved edits, your browser will ask before discarding them.

Starting a bulletin & carrying sections over

When you click New bulletin, the Service date defaults to the upcoming Sunday. If you have Regular services configured, pick one from the Service dropdown (or choose Another service… to type a one-off name and time such as Christmas Eve · 7:00 PM).

Under Start from, Parsonage automatically selects the most recent bulletin for that same service so each service keeps its own liturgy. You can also choose A blank bulletin or any other past bulletin, then check which sections to Carry over:

• Checked by default: Order of worship, Preacher, Serving list, and Prayer list.
• Optional to carry over: Announcements, Coming up, and Extra sections.
• Sermon title, Scripture, Birthdays & anniversaries, and Last week always start fresh.

Service details & the automatic Church year hint

In the Service panel, enter the Service date, optional Service name and Time, Preacher (with autocomplete suggestions from your church directory), Sermon title, and Scripture.

Right below the service date, Parsonage automatically displays the Church year observance from the Revised Common Lectionary—including the liturgical Sunday or feast day (such as 1st Sunday of Advent, Easter Day, or 4th Sunday after Pentecost · Proper 7) and the three-year lectionary cycle (Year A, Year B, or Year C).

Order of worship formatting shortcuts

Add hymns, readings, prayers, and responses in the Order of worship panel and use the up/down arrows to reorder them. Two built-in plain-text shortcuts handle liturgical typesetting automatically without a complex formatting toolbar:

• Standing indicator (*): Start an item’s name with an asterisk—for example, *Opening hymn or *Gloria Patri—when the congregation stands. Whenever at least one item starts with *, the bulletin automatically adds the footnote “* Please stand as you are able.” at the end of the order of worship.
• Responsive readings in bold: In an item’s Details box, any line that starts with People:, All:, or Congregation: (case-insensitive) is automatically printed in bold so the congregation knows what to read aloud, while lines starting with Leader: or One: stay in regular weight.

Announcements & Extra sections

• Announcements: Give each announcement a title and details. When you carry announcements over from an earlier bulletin, Parsonage tracks when each one first ran and displays a badge such as “3rd week in the bulletin, since Nov 1” so you can easily spot and prune stale announcements.
• Extra sections: Need a special section this week with its own heading— like Baptism today, Altar flowers, or Special music? Click Add a section under Extra sections.

Pulling from your calendar, directory & groups

Instead of looking up dates and rosters in separate tabs, you can pull them straight into the bulletin. Everything added is copied as editable text into the bulletin’s snapshot:

• Coming up (Church calendar): Shows upcoming, uncancelled events from your church calendar within 60 days of the service date. Click Add next to any event to copy its name, date/time, and location into the bulletin, or click Add event to type one in by hand.
• Volunteers serving today: List roles such as Ushers, Greeters, Lay reader, or Nursery. As you type names, the field suggests people from your directory, or you can choose Fill in from a group… to insert the active members of any group (leaders listed first) and trim anyone not serving this Sunday. If a person also served in the previous two weeks’ bulletins, Parsonage shows a gentle heads-up: “Served the last two weeks too. This would be a third week in a row.”
• Birthdays & anniversaries: Lists directory birthdays and wedding anniversaries falling in the 7-day week starting on the service date. Nothing is included automatically—click Add next to the people you want to celebrate, or Add one by hand. Deceased directory records are excluded, and only the month and day are ever shown (never the birth or wedding year).
• Prayer list & Last week: Enter public prayer requests in Prayer list (printed in space-saving columns) and church-wide figures such as Attendance or General offering under Last week (never individual gifts).

1. 1

   Publish your bulletin

   Click Publish (or Republish after making changes) in the top right of the editor. Your bulletin is now live at your church’s standing link and ready to print or email.

2. 2

   Share your standing link & QR code once

   On the main Bulletins page, the Your bulletin link card shows your permanent address (/bulletin/<church-slug>) along with Download PNG and Download SVG buttons for its QR code. Because the standing link always opens the current published bulletin, you can print that QR code on pew cards, welcome signs, or slides once and reuse it every week.

3. 3

   Print half-fold booklets or large-print copies

   Click Print in the bulletin editor (/app/bulletins/<bulletinId>/print) and choose Booklet or Large print.

4. 4

   Send as an email digest (optional)

   Once published, click Send as email in the bulletin editor to open the church email composer prefilled with a clean digest of the service, announcements, events, and a link to the full bulletin.

How half-fold booklet printing works

You don’t need desktop publishing software or manual page numbering to print a folded Sunday booklet:

• Automatic sheet count and text sizing: Your browser measures every block of your published bulletin and picks the smallest booklet that fits—starting at 1 sheet (4 booklet pages on US Letter landscape) and stepping body text from 11 pt down in half-point steps to 9 pt before adding a second or third sheet (up to 3 sheets / 12 pages).
• Ready to fold in half: Pages are automatically imposed in nested folding order (for example, on a 1-sheet booklet, Page 4 and Page 1 print on the outside, and Page 2 and Page 3 print on the inside). Print double-sided, flipping on the short edge, at actual size (100%), stack the sheets in order, and fold them in half together.
• Covers and spare pages: Page 1 is a centered front cover with your church name, service date, time, sermon title, scripture, and preacher. The back cover holds your standing About us details and a QR code to the phone bulletin. Any spare inside pages automatically become ruled Sermon notes pages so no page looks unfinished.
• Toner-friendly & overflow-checked: Printed pages drop background fills and decorative shadows to save toner. If a bulletin is ever too long for 3 sheets at 9 pt—or if your church details overflow the back cover—the print page warns you and names the exact sections to shorten instead of silently clipping text.