10 Best Church Newsletters Examples For Your Church in 2023

The best church newsletters help to keep an active and informed church community. They also increase engagement between the church leadership and its members.

Some churches find it difficult to effectively use this mode of communication because they do not know the types of newsletters to send out. In addition, they struggle to find newsletter ideas.

Well, not yet. Because we are here to help you figure out which types of newsletters to send out at what time and frequency to keep an active church community.

In this blog, we will share the best church newsletter examples that get opened, clicked on, and increase church community engagement with a focus on different newsletter goals for church communities. 

Table of Contents

1. Full Round up – What’s on!
2. Weekly inspirational message newsletter
3. Announcements & News
4. Pastoral message
5. Church missions
6. Gratitude for collections and prayers
7. Wellness newsletter – well-being, health, fitness, etc
8. Children’s ministry updates
9. Celebrations – church events, holidays, Christmas, Lent, Easter
10. Monthly Calendar

1. Full Round up – What’s on!

This newsletter is best for giving weekly updates to your church congregation. It outlines everything that will go on in the following week as well as revisiting the previous Sunday morning service for readers who might not have attended it.

This newsletter example by Trinity Community Missionary Baptist Church is a great example.

It starts off with a welcome message for reading the newsletter and proceeds to provide little updates. The newsletter links out to every update for anyone who might need more information. It has updates about the Sunday morning service, preaching lineup, books available for sale, Friday mission, a message about will, obedience, and surrendering, and health and fitness nuggets.

2. Weekly inspirational message newsletter

In the course of the week, there is a need to nourish the faith of your congregation as a pastor. One of the best ways to help your church community go through the week with feelings of God’s remembrance and grace is to send them short preaching in the email with scriptures.

Crossway Church does this pretty well through Senior Pastor Dale Stephenson. In his inspirational message to his church, the title is clear “God has not given up on you.” It continues to share scripture and a message that God will not give up on his people; he will finish what he started in their lives.

Isn’t that encouraging?

This message not only speaks to the general members of the church but might also connect to anyone going through a tough week. The best church newsletters must continue to give hope to the community because so many people need that.

3. Announcements & News

Like most communities where a lot of people occasionally gather, the church has several announcements and news on a weekly to monthly basis. To keep the churchgoers in the loop, creating a newsletter with announcements and news featuring weekly, monthly or bimonthly periods of time is important.

In this example, the newsletter is sent by Christ Church Inner West. It features announcements for the couple of weeks that follow. It has announcements about outreach opportunities, an upcoming community event, a member of the pastoral team going on leave, the midweek service, a fashion parade, and more news coming up.

Church members will appreciate a separate update like this to know what they would like to participate in and what is going on within the leadership team. In the example above, the newsletter ends with a request to the church members to pray for different church points.

4. Pastoral message

Occasionally, the pastor of a church community needs to send out a pastoral message. It fosters a great relationship with the church pastor. Most of the time, the beginning of the month is a good time for the pastor to usher the church into a new month with a personal message of encouragement, hope, and love.

For instance, the Greenfield Lutheran church pastor sent this newsletter out at the beginning of January 2019. In his new month message, he spoke of the “Aha!” moment that Christians might go through. I’m sure we all have that moment!

At that moment they get an epiphany enabling them to understand some things that might have happened in their past.

To build a strong relationship between the church and the leadership team, these nuggets of short pastoral messages are an important part of the best church newsletters.

5. Church missions

Churches have various missions and partnership opportunities throughout the year to which they send a select group from their congregation. One of the best church newsletters we saw included updates from such a mission to the church members, most of whom could not be a part of it.

The Touch of Light Missionary Ministries sent out a newsletter to their community with updates on their mission in France. They included beautiful photos of the people they met and the places they visited. In a more elaborate fashion, they detailed their days throughout the mission with the church in Paris, France. They also give little details about their journey.

This is a great newsletter if you have any church team doing ministry in another location, or young people volunteering to effect change in their communities. For such updates, photos and links to videos showing some of the activities will make you look like a pro at newsletters.

6. Gratitude for collections and prayers

Many churches are transparent with collections from their services. They provide occasional updates on the church’s finances. Aside from that, there are several prayers or fundraising requests put across during church services by church members. To appreciate the church members who answer the call to raise money, give to the church, or help other members, some churches send out newsletters.

Our Lady of Light & Saint Osyth parish sends out weekly updates to inform the churchgoers how much was collected the previous Sunday. They also thank them for their contributions and gifts.

7. Wellness newsletter – well-being, health, fitness, etc

Who says the church cannot send well-being newsletters? No one?

Well, it cannot be forgotten that one of the biggest needs of humans is to be at peace with their bodies, fitness, health, and mental being. The church can be a part of creating awareness of how their church members can be more mindful of their health.

Wayside Christian Church sends out newsletters to remind, educate and inform their churchgoers to eat and sleep better, work out, and follow a diet even with or without fasting, among many other well-being messages. In this example, they have written articles based on various topics. They range from healthy foods to veganism, fasting, and nutrition plans.

Additionally, during fasting seasons, some members might not know how to best watch their diets. This church has dedicated an article on that in this newsletter.

Such a newsletter made it to our best church newsletters because we think that it shows the church’s deep care about the health of their congregants and takes part in educating them.

Let’s all help the doctors out.

8. Children’s ministry updates

The children’s ministry is one of the core mandates of any church. The leadership team works continually to help children grow to become God-fearing and responsible adults. In order to do this more effectively, the church cannot rely on the Sunday services alone. It is said that children learn through playing and observing.

Therefore, every church with ministries for children needs to organize community events where parents get to participate with their children in various activities. Besides, within that newsletter, the church can include announcements related to the children’s side of the church.

This newsletter example by Asbury United Methodist Church does a good job detailing the events and announcements related to the kid’s church. It helps parents stay in the loop about events for the children and the ministry as a whole.

9. Celebrations – church events, holidays, Christmas, Lent, Easter

During the year, there are several holidays for which Christians celebrate. From Easter to Lent and Christmas, these holidays and celebrations are treasured in the church community. Therefore, it only makes sense to send early updates about them. This is so that the church members can know what the church has planned in store for the celebrations.

Faith Radio sends out its programmings early. In this newsletter, the message and celebration of the 2019 Christmas season were relayed. It begins with an update about how the Christian-based radio will be playing Christmas songs from early on. It also lets them know that there will be more Christmas music on Christmas eve.

The newsletter is completed by encouraging the listeners to spread joy through donating so that the radio can celebrate Christmas with the less fortunate in society. Your church can adopt a newsletter like this for church celebrations across the year.

Who doesn’t want Christmas updates? I know I do.

10. Monthly Calendar

In order to help the church members understand what is happening when a calendar is essential. Since there are many activities happening in most churches throughout the year, sharing a monthly calendar is a great idea for a separate church newsletter.

The Asbury United Methodist Church shares this out as a simple write-up that church members can follow. It includes a calendar for weekly recurring events like weekly sermons and one-time events or meetings throughout the month. It is a newsletter that does not want to overwhelm the church members. Therefore it is organized in a well-laid-out manner that makes it very easy to read and understand.

Conclusion

These best church newsletters examples are only a drop in the ocean. There are many other reasons why a church should send out newsletters. However, it is not just the sending of email newsletters that is important but also the message in the newsletters.

The bottom line is that the channel of communication needs to always be open between the church leadership and the congregation. As a summary, other subjects you can send newsletters for that we did not include in the examples are:

• The title and text of the upcoming sermon
• The list of worship songs for the next Sunday
• Monthly memory verse
• A weekly devotion
• A feature of what volunteers are doing in the church ministry
• Photos during church events and services
• Prayer items for the week

Some churches opt to include a set of any of these messages in one email newsletter but usually not all at once. For the best strategy, you can monitor your open and click rates in order to understand what works best. However, one rule of thumb is to keep your newsletters a good size. You don’t want your members screaming…

With just the optimum amount of information, it does not become too confusing and overwhelming.

Your church members will be delighted to receive everything you have in store for them. In addition, they will be happy for all the updates they get to receive during the week.