What is a bulletin for?
It cannot be what we immediately think: “It’s a way of communicating the order of worship to the congregation and potential newcomers.” This is an inadequate explanation of the phenomenon of its arrival in churches. After all, the books that contained orders of worship already existed before the bulletin and ably served the role of communicating the order of worship to the congregation and potential newcomers. The bulletin introduces, in fact, a complexity to the smooth operations of a church, considerable expense, and an unfathomable amount of waste. What justifies the significant disadvantages bulletins introduce over against the book-bound order of worship?
Another answer is tempting but ultimately inadequate: Bulletins are more user-friendly. When a worshiper uses a book, he must inevitably flip back and forth from the ordinary service to the various propers or appointed lectionary readings. Add to that a hymnal, usually an entirely separate book. All this flipping back and forth ends up bewildering the newcomer, whereas a bulletin collates the elements of the proper and ordinary and the music in one seamless document.
There are several reasons to be skeptical of this explanation. First, if this were the case, we would expect that bulletins would be a re-ordered version of exactly what appears in our service books. I have not made a systematic study of it, but I’d guess that bulletins are characterized by the ways in which they are unlike the service book. In Anglicanism, this may look like a collect being reworded, or the sequence of events being reversed, or readings omitted, and so forth. In Presbyterianism, it is the subtle but continual departure from the Directory of Public Worship. The Directory, after all, can be followed without the aid of any written help, and this was precisely its glory until the introduction of the bulletin, whereupon its concomitant shame is to be utterly irrelevant to the operations of any major denomination that claims it as a part of its “standards.” It’s these little interventions and intrusions into the order of service printed in the bound book that give us an important clue in answering the question, “What is a bulletin for?”
This becomes clear in the second reason for skepticism: it is true that bulletins may be less confusing for the first Sunday, but it becomes more confusing thereafter. There are three reasons why a world without bulletins is less confusing than one with bulletins over the long term.
First, in a world without bulletins, anyone who uses a service book will quickly come to use it only for the propers, that is, the elements that change every Sunday (hymns, readings, and so forth). The congregant with a service book quickly memorizes the ordinary, the elements that do not change. The congregant clearly knows what the ordinary is, and what its relationship to the proper is, and uses the service book only when his memory doesn’t suffice. Thus the service book enables a clear and quick sense of what the service is and how it is composed.
Second, in a world without bulletins, a congregant notices when the pastor deviates from the norm, as must happen from time to time. But it helps to keep the pastor accountable if deviations from that norm are noticed.
Third, most importantly, a world without bulletins enables a congregant to memorize, and even encourages him to do so. The service book is a tool for this congregant: It is a tool for his piety, for his devotion, for his memory, for his ability to worship God with gladness and singleness of heart.
But whomever it is that bulletins serve, it certainly does not serve the long-time congregant. Much that was clear with a service book becomes blurred for the returning congregant using a bulletin. Only over the course of a year does he come to have a clear sense of the distinction between the proper and the ordinary. He is never aware of deviations from the norm, since he does not know there is a norm or what it is or where to find it. And he is not incentivized to memorize.
The conclusion we must reach, then, is that the bulletin is a tool for the pastor. Its great inconvenience and expense—the fact that it is produced every week and subsequently thrown away—is precisely what makes it useful to the pastor, since it is able to accommodate the pastor’s caprice and whimsy. It is a tool, also, for pastors who find themselves in a tradition but unwilling to commit to it fully. Remember that the “normal” path of the big-box evangelical church is screens, not bulletins. The bulletin is there to give just enough of the “vibes” of liturgy, but does not commit us to any one instance of it—as a friend of mine puts it, “the urge to liturge.” All this is demonstrated well by the fact that, in our strange times, “the liturgy” often becomes synonymous with “the bulletin,” as in the sentence, “Did you get a copy of this morning’s liturgy on your way in?” Another friend of mine put the perfect analogy forward for this: Liturgy, particularly for the trendy Presbyterian pastor or the newly-converted Anglican rector, becomes a little like a DJ’s set, something he mixes ad hoc from a variety of sources. This sort of behavior, however, is a unique affordance of the bulletin; the bulletin for the pastor is a technology akin to the turntable for the DJ. It is also a perfect gauge of the degree to which a pastor is genuinely committed to working within their tradition, whether Anglicanism or Presbyterianism or otherwise. Ordering 250 copies of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer or the Trinity Psalter Hymnal would be a level of financial commitment to one’s tradition that few pastors, sessions, rectors, or vestries are willing to outlay.
Of course, all of this is rather short term thinking, since ultimately bulletins are much more expensive. But they aren’t a big commitment, and that is central to their appeal.
The adoption of the bulletin comes with other high costs. Set aside the expense. Set aside the serene, ascetical acceptance of the mountains of waste paper and hours of printer frustration. The use of a bulletin ensures that the flock of God’s special care and attention, the poor and destitute, will be able to make no use of your “liturgy.” In a 2024 study, 21% of adults in the US were illiterate and 54% had literacy below a sixth-grade level. Obviously, there is a high coincidence between their literacy and their poverty: 50% of unemployed young adults ages 16 to 21 are functionally illiterate, and around 50% of illiterate American adults have an income below the poverty line. The illiterate should be in your churches; there is no shortage of them.
Notice that, in principle, there is nothing about liturgy that makes it less likely for an illiterate person to be involved, provided that liturgy be allowed to remain stable. And notice as well that, in this respect, the megachurch and the old service-book church both do better than the church with bulletins. The megachurch that uses screens and the old parish with a musty metrical psalter both are able to welcome such people into their worship in a way that a church with bulletins cannot. The truth is, it won’t take an illiterate person much longer to learn 150 metrical psalms by heart than to learn that neverending stream of Hillsong and Bethel top hits by heart. Indeed, the former has happened for centuries, the latter only for decades. But that illiterate person will never be able to track the vagaries of a pastor with a bulletin. Any order of service not designed to be memorizable will, eventually, exclude the illiterate. The bulletin will, over time, self-select your congregation out of the ability to fulfill Matthew 25:34–40 in the worship service.
I may also briefly speak from my own personal experience: the statistics above do not represent another important illiterate demographic of your congregation, which is very young children. Repetition helps them. To have an undeviating order of service that children can memorize and parents can practice at home is a boon.
The pretext most pastors would offer to change the liturgy, in their own minds, is probably the sermon. To have the elegant tie-in of two hymns, a lectionary reading, a psalm, a responsive reading, or a different collect or prayer is felt to justify the rupture. I can assure pastors, as an experienced layman, we hardly notice. When we do, what does it get us? Anyways, our work of prayer to God is not the proper site of your rhetorical whims. Our prayer to God is serious, as serious as your exposition of Scripture, and the two should not be made to war against one another.
Of course, pastors have always needed to intervene, occasionally, in the liturgy for exigent reasons. This was even the case in Medieval Catholicism or Orthodoxy, which were never as stable as the repristinations of their traditionalist adherents. Nevertheless, if a tradition has a normed liturgy, as in Anglicanism and Lutheranism, or if its worship is normed by a liturgical format, as in Presbyterianism, then these norms represent the primary way the pastor shows his unity with other members of his ecclesial body. A pastor threatens that unity—he makes it meaningless—if he intervenes ceaselessly. If none of the congregation ever knows the kind of worship that marks its ecclesial identity, then I deny that there is any ecclesial unity or identity to speak of.[1]
What is most appalling about bulletins is that the rationale for them is not truly theological. It is mere affordance. Bulletins are an affordance to pastors to depart from their traditions while having had no theological justification offered before widespread adoption. Of course, any number of theological justifications can be retroactively imposed upon the practice of bulletins, but the practice itself is just the accidental result of the invention of the Ditto and Xerox. The Ditto and Xerox did more to transform liturgy than the entire liturgical renewal movement, and it continues to do so. Without these machines, bulletins would be impossible, and with them, they have become unquestioned. But the intervening transformation of Christian worship had no theological justification before and is barely recognized even to have had the transformative effect that it has.
This is also why, in part, it is difficult to blame pastors. Pastors are constantly being cajoled by their laity into adopting “best practices” which do not seem to have any theological freight and to carry with them great benefits. This is the terrible danger of circa sacra techniques—bulletins, microphones, recordings of the sermon, blogs, podcasts, and so forth—for they easily become the tail that wags the dog, and yet it is difficult, before they are adopted, to anticipate what their unintended consequences will be and, after the fact, very hard to reverse. Every single pastor I know, including all those pastors I have loved, respected, and under whom I have grown more into Christ’s image, has used bulletins. And I hope that they all will stop doing so. But we live in a modern liberal democratic society, and many things that redound to the health or sickness of the Church are determined by that ultimate ruling magistrate of our society: the consumer. The consumer has ultimate sway circa sacra. We laity were probably the problem in the first place, and we must be the solution. We should humbly encourage all of our pastors to have the boldness to set aside the practice of bulletins, while (I hope it goes without saying) equally humbly accepting the guidance and direction of our pastors should they decline.
Should they accept, however, I could limn a bright future for American Christianity: a renewed vigor of the worship in the church’s various traditions. Pews with, at most, two things: a psalter (if necessary, containing metered psalms, and a judicious few hymns) and the prayerbook (for Anglicans) or Bible (for Presbyterians, as their Directory directs). The propers are indicated on lovely wooden boards—now there’s a tool, a bit of technology for you!—and that’s that. Pastors are accountable to their people and their traditions and their bishops and their presbyteries. The church is more unified, and it is more welcoming and hospitable to literate and illiterate alike. Christians continue to become people in whom the word of Christ dwells in us all the more richly.[2]
John Ahern is the Director of the Te Deum Music Fellows Program at Theopolis. He has a PhD in musicology from Princeton University. His dissertation was a survey of the sacred music of the fifteenth-century French composer Fremin le Caron. He has been a church organist, pianist, and choir director at several churches and within several denominations, and he is now worshipping and playing music in the PCA. He currently teaches Latin and humanities at The Wilberforce School in New Jersey. Together with Medora, his wife, he enjoys the antics of his brood of children whose number is ever increasing such that, were it specified here, this biography would almost certainly be out of date by the time it is read.
NOTES
[1] This is as true of Presbyterian and Reformed worship, by the way, as it is of more “high” liturgical forms and is a good reason to return to the practice of an evening catechism service: The catechism does not really mean much if it is merely the private opinion of each individual congregant; it is saying the catechism together, proclaiming it to one another, that makes it meaningful. To proclaim, to witness publicly, to attest, is the essence of Protestantism—it is what the word “protestant” literally means.
[2] This is the first of a series of posts I would like to write about practices or techniques related to the life and liturgy of the church which do not squarely sit within the realm of the church but have momentous impact upon it. These I am calling circa sacra heresies, three of which I will single out: bulletins, microphones, and recordings. In each case, it would be easy to imagine that I am simply a Luddite or curmudgeon. I am not anti-technology, nor am I merely admiring “all centuries but this and every country but my own.” Rather, I insist that we be clear about what these tools actually accomplish. They do not always do what we think they do. It’s not simply a cost-benefit analysis, asking, “Do the benefits of this tool outweigh the costs?” It is instead a continual belief that a tool is doing one thing and an unawareness that it is doing another. And so, with bulletins, microphones, and recordings, we have to begin with the question, “What is it for?” and carefully answer it before proceeding.