Creating a bulletin

A bulletin is your church's weekly handout, gathered in one place: the order of worship, this week's events, the prayer list, a giving note, and your announcements. Psalmly pulls most of it together for you, so building one is mostly tidying — not typing from scratch. You'll find Bulletins in the admin sidebar.

Starting one

Click New bulletin and pick a date. A bulletin can be for any day — most are for a Sunday, but a Christmas Eve service, a Wednesday gathering, or a special event all work the same way. You can even have more than one bulletin for the same date (say, a 9:30 and an 11:00 service) — just give each its own service time so they're easy to tell apart.

When you start a bulletin, Psalmly gathers the week for you — the events on your calendar for the seven days from that date (up to 12), recent prayer requests (up to 8), your recent church-wide announcements (up to 5), and a giving note, laid out as a starting point. Nothing is sent or shared yet; you're just shaping a draft.

What's gathered is kept current: prayer requests from the last month, and announcements from the last two weeks. Older ones aren't suggested, rather than being reprinted as this week's news.

That's a suggestion, not a limit. Every gathered section has an Add… button in its header, and it offers things the gather left out — any event on your calendar, whatever its date, a prayer request of any age, an announcement you sent months ago. If your event is next month, or last week, or you built the bulletin before you added it, put it on: it's your sheet. Adding an event copies it onto this bulletin and leaves your calendar untouched, and anything you add by hand is marked You added this so you can tell it from what Psalmly suggested.

Two things are never offered, at any age, and this is the one place the answer is no. A bulletin goes to everyone — printed, emailed to your whole church, and possibly on your public page — so prayer requests a member marked prayer team only, and announcements you sent to a single group, stay off it. That restriction belongs to the person who set it. A note meant for the youth group or the deacons never lands on the pew sheet.

A quiet week is fine: empty sections disappear from the sheet rather than printing an empty heading or a placeholder. On a paid plan, if the gather comes back with very little you'll also see a short note saying so — "We may not have much to work with yet" — with a shortcut to the order-of-service drafter. That note is only ever shown to you, never to your congregation.

Already published last week's? Use Start next week to clone it as a fresh draft for the following week — your theme, order of service, service time, and the order you arranged the sections in all carry over, so you're not rebuilding each time. Only the week's content is gathered fresh.

The composer

The composer is a split screen: you edit on the left, and on the right you see a live preview of exactly what your congregation will get. Use the Printed sheet and Email tabs above the preview to switch between the two views.

The header

The top of every bulletin shows your church name and logo, the date, and an optional service time (free text — type "9:30 AM Service", "Christmas Eve", whatever fits). Your logo and church identity stay constant no matter which theme you pick.

The order of service

The order of service is the heart of the bulletin — the run of the gathering, line by line (Welcome, Opening Hymn, Scripture, Sermon, Benediction, and so on). Each line has a kind (the small label printed above it) and a title, and hymn lines can carry a number or reference.

• Add a line with the quick-add chips, edit any title inline, and remove what you don't need.
• Reorder lines by dragging the grip handle on the left of each row.

A sensible order is pre-filled the first time, so you're editing, not starting blank.

The kinds cover the common acts of worship across traditions — Gathering, Hymn, Scripture, Prayer, Confession, Creed, Passing of the Peace, Sermon, Offering, Communion, Baptism, Invitation, Response, Sending and Benediction. If your church calls something by its own name, use Custom and type the label you want printed — a patronal feast, a testimony, your own word for a thing. Leave that label blank and the line prints with no label at all, which is better than a wrong one.

Drafting your order of service

Typing out a full order is the one part of the bulletin the gather can't help with. If your church is on a paid plan, Draft with AI in the order-of-service header does it for you. There are two ways in, and you can switch between them:

• Describe it — say how your service usually goes, in your own words: "We open with a hymn, then announcements and the offering. Communion on the first Sunday. Sermon, closing hymn, benediction."
• Paste one — paste last Sunday's bulletin straight in. Rough text is fine: line breaks, hymn numbers, dot leaders, the names of whoever was reading. Psalmly reads the structure out of it and ignores the rest.

You get back a list of lines to review before anything changes — remove any you don't want, then Keep these lines. Nothing is saved until you do, and throwing a draft away costs you nothing but the credit that made it. Keeping them replaces the lines you have now, which is usually the point: it's how you get your order in place of the generic one.

It's there on every bulletin, not just your first — a new pastor, a Lent or Advent format, or a week that runs differently are all good reasons to use it again. Each draft uses one AI credit.

The week's content

Below the order of service are the gathered sections. Each one has an on/off switch — turn off anything you don't want this week, and it simply disappears from the bulletin (no empty placeholder) — and an Add… button in its header for putting in anything the gather didn't suggest.

• A word from the pastor — a short, warm welcome at the top.
• This week — events gathered from your calendar. Check which ones to include, or Add… any other event, whatever its date.
• Prayer list — recent requests, plus any older one you Add… yourself. Anonymity is always kept: a request marked anonymous shows the words but never the name.
• Giving update — one gentle line, pre-filled from your giving summary.
• Announcements — your recent announcements, pulled in, not retyped. Choose which to include, or Add… an older one.
• Add your own — free blocks for anything else: a verse, a thank-you, a sign-up.

Drag the section handles to reorder these blocks top-to-bottom. The order you choose is the order everyone sees — on the printed sheet, in the email, and in the app.

Choosing a theme

The Theme control recolors the bulletin — the printed sheet and the email — with a preset season color or a custom color you pick. Your church logo and identity stay the same; only the accent changes. The brand option tracks your church's own color.

Letting Psalmly write the welcome

At the top of the composer, paid plans get Write the welcome & giving note. Click it and Psalmly reads the week you've gathered and writes those two warm connective parts — the pastor's welcome and the giving note — which you then edit. It writes only those two: your order of service, events, prayers and announcements stay exactly as they are. Each draft uses one AI credit.

(For the order of service itself, see Drafting your order of service above — that's a separate button, in the order-of-service header.)

Telling it about your week

Some of what matters most on a Sunday isn't on any calendar. Under the button there's Add a note about this week — a small, optional box where you can say what's on your heart, in your own words:

We're commissioning the mission team, and Ruth's mother went home to be with the Lord on Tuesday.

Psalmly builds the welcome around what you write there. You don't have to use it: leave it closed and the button works exactly as it always has, for the same one credit.

What it will and won't write

It writes the prose, never the facts — your events, prayers, and announcements stay exactly as gathered — and it won't invent names, amounts, or scripture.

That holds even when you ask for one. If your note says "tell everyone how much we raised for the roof fund," Psalmly doesn't know that figure, so it will thank the church warmly and leave the number out rather than guess. Put the number in your note yourself — "we raised $8,400 for the roof fund" — and it will use it just as you wrote it.

The snapshot — what "gathered" means

A bulletin is a snapshot of the week you gathered. That's deliberate: once you've built it, it won't quietly change as your calendar moves on. If you add a new event to your calendar after starting the bulletin, the bulletin won't pull it in on its own — you stay in control of what's on the sheet. When you do want it, Add… in the This week header will offer it. You can always edit a bulletin by hand, including after it's published.

When you're ready to put it in front of your congregation, see Publishing and sharing a bulletin.