I got word today that the British Unitarians have published a toolkit to help with various needs like communications, safeguarding, finances, legal status and contracting. These resources are not universally useful, and some tools or information would only be useful for comparison or illustration in the United States context. But for those outside the British Unitarians “it’s the thought that counts” — the thought that useful resources (including those already existing) can be collated and attractively presented for easy access and with room to grow.
Universalist card files from the 1940s
My recent post about using more appropriate methods and resources in small churches comes from my own adoption — re-adoption, really — of older, simpler methods in the rest of my life. I’ll write more about this later, but suffice it to say now that I use plain text files and paper files more often and more intentionally.
I was tickled to see that Anna Havron, the author of one of the paper-files blogs I read is also a member of the clergy. She recently wrote about her prayer schedule at AnalogOffice.net
She cites a 1950 card filing reference, and that reminded me of three pages from Robert Cummins’s 1946 Parish Practice in Universalist Churches: Manual of Organization and Administration. At the time, Cummins was the General Superintendent of the Universalist Church of America and faced his own crisis of resources and organization.
Surely, Parish Practice is an “orphan work” — one that probably fell into public domain because its copyright wasn’t renewed, but one so little loved that nobody’s likely to challenge a claim. Little loved, and scarce. It took years to find my own copy.
So I’ll take the modest risk of putting up those three pages from chapter 9 (“Church of Office and Records”) related to card files in the interest of modest church administration. In particular, think the idea of having church members indexed spatially — I’ve seen this in church manuals from the 1920s — deserves reconsideration.
Pages 122 to 124 from Parish Practice (PDF, 231 kb)
Sunday-only calendar 2025
It’s not just Christmas that seems to come earlier every year! It’s August and I recently got a request for next year’s Sunday-only calendar.
Will I do it? Of course: after seventeen years, it’s the most popular thing I’ve ever published, a fact that puts my other writing into a humbling context.
Get your copy of next year’s — and this year’s if you have a need for next three months — at the original page from 2008.
Too many bits, not enough paper
I wonder if even small churches rely too much on digital resources and not enough on paper.
How many of the smallest churches could manage with hand-written checks and bookkeeping systems? (Like these.) An evergreen and simple website, sure, but reinforced by a well-maintained voicemail message? A standard order of service pasted into the hymnal (or handed out and reused) with announcements and hymn boards to fill in the variable bits. A newsletter printed on paper and handed out or mailed monthly? Or if that’s too much, a quarterly or annual calendar? Birthday cards send out, rather than Facebook? And a leadership roster to be stuck on the fridge, or even a church directory? Maybe even the neglected corkboard called back into use, as much a focus for shy persons at church functions as an information source.
These old, stand-by solutions took workers and resources, but I suspect in the smallest churches there are more people who can help this way than if all the systems are pushed through the bottleneck of comfort with computers, smartphones and social media.
Simple, low-cost tips for video services
While some people go bird watching, I go denomination watching, especially during the annual meeting season. When I learned about the Primitive Methodist Church, I knew I had to browse their websites.
They are a small denomination with congregational polity (unlike most Methodists) and a focus on practical mission initiatives like a school for ministry, a campground and a investment/loan fund. Little wonder then that their National Mission Board suggestions for video production — posted at the start of the pandemic — are low-cost, high-impact, briefly stated and practical. An admirable list, and the suggestion “DON’T record with the camera pointing UP at you. No one wants to see up your nose” made me laugh out loud.
What a joy it would be if every denomination had such useful information. Worth emulating.
Sunday-only calendar for 2024
Once again, by request — and for the 16th year! — I am renewing the Sunday-only calendar, useful for church planning. Get it, learn how we got here at the original post from 2008.
Quickly-made presentations
Some day I’ll go into my document processing workflow, but I have a workshop coming up and that’ll call for a presentation. That’s the theme today. It won’t be a “PowerPoint” — that semi-genericized term for meeting-killing, over-engineered presentation visuals — mind you, but a set of slides that exist as a PDF file, that are much easier to put together.
First, the text, like almost all of my work products, is set down in Markdown, a simple way of marking-up text to use as-is, or to post-process into other formats. (For those in the know, I use Github-flavored Markdown, an extended version.)
For the production of the slides, I use the beamer class within LaTeX. LaTeX is a hoary and rather difficult typesetting engine. commonly used in the hard sciences and mathematics.
But I want something easier, so I use pandoc, a command-line tool that processes a Markdown file through beamer to get the PDF output. Try pandoc through a web interface; beamer tranformations don’t work though.
Confused yet? This video should clear it up, and if that doesn’t appeal pandoc has other presentation options. and since it has found a vital place at the core of my document workflow, I’d recommend try it in any case.
Sunday-only calendar for 2023
By request — and for the 15th year! — I am renewing the Sunday-only calendar, useful for church planning. Get it, and the background, at the original post from 2008.
Lovely examples of order of service?
Another request. I’m looking for lovely samples of orders of service. Necessarily available in a downloadable format online, and preferably from a small church (of whatever stripe) or one that works with a tight budget. Feel free to chime in, even years from now.
There’s something dispiriting to visit a church and find something that was clearly made with love (I’m trying to be nice here) but is ugly, disorganized, jam-packed with add-ins or otherwise unpleasant to use.
I’d ask the same for newsletters, but those are harder to find in print. Alas.
Printing out sermon or service book pages
My face is still a bit sore from dental work, so another shortish article.
Back in 2015, I shared my workflow for printing out pages of a sermon or service that can be put in an attractive binder using half-size pace protectors. It’s neat and professional looking and not hard to assemble.
Here am I bringing that up to date. I use LibreOffice, which you can download and use for free. I’ve used it for years at home and in my day job, and can attest that it makes a good replacement for Microsoft Office. Since 2015, LibreOffice has added new features. In particular, it supports OpenType features, including the much desired small caps and old-style numerals, if they’re embedded in the font. This is a good tutorial for using this feature, and this is a good reason why you shouldn’t use your word processor’s “small caps” feature, in so far as they’re not true small caps and not good replacements. The Libertine (formerly Linux Libertine) font has those features, and you can now make use them in the standard release, rather than the Graphite text features I wrote about in 2015. Very few fonts support Graphite, so I won’t labor the subject.
I’ve also been modifying the template I use. Here it is to download. Or copy it to your own Google Drive and try it out with one of their available fonts.