In this category, you will find many inspirational stories to be used for your Church Bulletins, Church Newsletters and/or Inspirational E-mails.
One of the more difficult things for someone on a weekly basis is to prepare content for the church bulletin or newsletter.
Usually, it’s a tug-of-war trying to get information from department or ministry leaders concerning the events taking place soon. Plus, the attempt to get an article from the Pastor can be an adventure due to the busy-ness of their schedule.
We want to do our part by adding a new category called “Church Bulletin Articles”. These will be brief and inspirational and may be used within the context of the church communications to the congregation via e-mail, bulletin or newsletter.
Perhaps some of them would even work as Sermon Illustrations! Stop back often as we plan to build the selection in the weeks and months ahead.
In reality, all our letters can be easily modified for that purpose. So, some of the content will be similar to our letters, while most of it will be new stories.
On May 24, 1965, a thirteen-and-a-half-foot boat quietly slipped out of the marina at Falmouth, Massachusetts. Its destination? England. It would be the smallest craft ever to make the voyage. Its name? Tinkerbelle. Its pilot? Robert Manry, a copy editor for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, who felt ten years at the desk was enough boredom for a while, so he took a leave of absence to fulfill his secret dream.
Manry was afraid, not of the ocean, but of all those people who would try to talk him out of the trip. So he didn't share it with many, just some relatives and especially his wife, Virginia. She was his greatest source of support.
When I was a boy growing up outside of New York City, I was an avid fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers. In fact, I have not yet quite forgiven them for moving west. The archenemy in my childhood was the New York Yankees. I had seen them only on television and heard them only on the radio until I was invited by my father to skip school and to go to the World Series game between the Yankees and the Dodgers.
I'll tell you, it was one of the great thrills of my childhood. I remember sitting there, smelling the hot dogs and hearing the cheers of the crowd and the feel of it all. I knew those Dodgers were going to shellac those Yankees once and for all.
Browsing in a London bookstore last summer, I ran across a little volume by Mrs. Leslie Stevens, called Notes from Sickrooms. It was a volume of instructions for domestic nurses. My eye fell upon this passage as I looked through it:
“When an illness has gone on for some time, the sick person becomes very weary of the things that surround her. She has looked at all the pictures which hang on the walls and at the patterns which ornament or disfigure the paper till she can bear them no longer. The nurse cannot, of course, alter all these things, but she can give them a certain change in the aspect of the room. A looking glass, so placed that it can reflect the sky and the trees–or if the sufferer is in London, some portion of the street–will be a refreshment to the eyes which have for so long not pierced beyond the narrow boundary of the sickroom.”
In the Winter 1981 interview with Leadership, Eugene Peterson said, “Every pastor involved in hospital visitation should read Specimen Days, by Walt Whitman” (Boston: David R. Godine).
The book tells how Whitman was sent out by the YMCA's Christian Commission to minister to the Civil War's sick and wounded. On January 20, 1863, Whitman left with the following charge from the commission: “His work will be that of … circulating good reading matter; visiting the sick and wounded to instruct, comfort, and cheer them; helping chaplains in the ministrations and influence for the good of the men under their care; and addressing patients individually and collectively in explanation of the work of the Christian Commission and its delegates, and for their personal instruction and benefit, temporal and eternal.”
In his book Living Life on Purpose, Greg Anderson shares the story of one man's journey to joy:
… his wife had left him and he was completely depressed. He had lost faith in himself, in other people, in God–he found no joy in living.
One rainy morning this man went to a small neighborhood restaurant for breakfast. Although several people were at the diner, no one was speaking to anyone else. Our miserable friend hunched over the counter, stirring his coffee with a spoon.
In one of the small booths along the window was a young mother with a little girl. They had just been served their food when the little girl broke the sad silence by almost shouting, “Momma, why don't we say our prayers here?”
