Publishing the preaching plan: making it easy to read and share

Ask a Methodist what their circuit publishes and most will say one thing: the plan. It tells preachers where they are going, stewards who is coming, and members where to find a service on any Sunday of the quarter. For all that, the plan is often the hardest document in the circuit to read, and putting it online raises a few questions that the printed version never had to answer.

Know who is reading it

The plan has at least three audiences, and they want different things from it.

• Preachers want to see their own appointments at a glance, and to hear about changes quickly.
• Stewards want to know who is coming to their church and what kind of service it will be.
• Members and visitors want to know when and where they can go to church, and very little else.

The printed plan has always tried to serve all three at once, which is why it can look like a railway timetable. Online, you can separate them. The public website only needs to show services by church and date. The full grid, with every preacher’s appointments, can sit behind a login for the people who need it.

Protect personal details

The back page of many printed plans carries the names, addresses and phone numbers of every minister and preacher in the circuit. That is reasonable on paper handed to members, but it is a different matter on a public website, where anybody can read it and search engines keep a copy.

A sensible approach is to publish two versions.

Ask your preachers how they would like to be listed, and keep a note of their answers. It is their information, and asking is a courtesy as much as a data protection matter.

Explain the codes

Every circuit has its own shorthand: HC for Holy Communion, a letter for a united service, a symbol for an all-age or café-style service. Regulars learn them, but to a visitor a column of initials means nothing. Put the key on the same page as the plan, write it out in full, and where you can, describe the service in plain words on the website instead.

Publish it as a page, not only a PDF

A PDF of the plan is quick to produce and it prints well. But PDFs are awkward on a phone, hard for screen readers, and of little help to somebody searching for a Sunday service near them. If you publish the plan as a PDF, publish the services as a web page as well, so each church’s next few services can be found and read on any device.

This is one of the reasons circuits use Planmaker. The plan is built online, and once it is finished the services appear on each church’s page of a Chrestos website, and in the calendar, without anybody retyping them.

Handling changes

No plan survives the quarter unchanged. A preacher is taken ill, two churches hold a joint service, the weather intervenes. Decide in advance how changes are made and who makes them, so that the online version is always the one people can trust.

• One person should be responsible for changes to the published plan.
• Tell the steward of the church affected and the preacher, not only the website.
• Show the date of the last change, so people know they are looking at the current version.

Checking the plan against the website fits naturally into a simple monthly website routine.

A document worth taking care over

The plan is a remarkable thing: a whole circuit’s worship, organised quarter by quarter, largely by volunteers. It deserves to be as clear and as easy to use as the people who make it deserve. If your circuit would like to see how plan-making works in Planmaker, get in touch and we will show you.