Well, that’s a bit of a stretch, but I always dreamed of God using my talents for his kingdom, I just didn’t know at the time I was dreaming for the “International News Bulletin.”
As an art student converted in 1991, I started dreaming of using my talents for God and his kingdom. Those were the days of the LA Story newsletters and shortly after came the KNN videos that were produced as encouragement for all of the ICOC churches. I loved seeing God’s family come together through written and video stories of good news around the world as we came to know, and be inspired by one another. Over the years I’ve been grateful to be used by God in my home congregation, but over the last 3 years, my original dream has come true through serving Disciples Today with the weekly International News Bulletin. This month marks the 3rd Anniversary of the launch of the bulletin, and to celebrate, we’ve even given it a facelift!
Maybe you are dreaming of an International News Bulletin and don’t know it yet either! Bulletins can be a lot of work. The church information isn’t as hard because its just news of what’s going on in your congregation, events, prayer requests, phone numbers. The hard part is the design and creating or finding ‘lead’ stories to draw people in. For any size congregation, creating and keeping up with this can be a daunting task. Disciples Today has done it for you, and its free, reliable and worldwide.
For those not familiar with it, please check it out! It still works the same way, just looks a little different. Each week one main story and several headlines are pulled from the DisciplesToday.org website and compiled into a legal size outer ‘shell’ in a PDF format for anyone to download and print. Available with that, is a ‘blank’ Microsoft Word template that each group can populate with their own announcements, phone numbers, calendars and stories, or you can just use it for ideas on how to set up your own. The intention is to be very flexible regardless of the size of your group. The bulletin can be used by bible talks, house churches, sectors, regions or entire churches. Some churches post it on their website, and many hand them out at their Sunday service. It is available by Thursday morning each week and dated for Sunday services.
Because its free, we don’t even know how many churches or groups actually use it! We only know that it gets a lot of ‘hits’ on the website. There has also been great feedback about its usefulness and effectiveness in keeping disciples all over the world connected and learning about Disciples Today.
To access the International News Bulletin, look under “LINKS” in the left hand menu. Please continue to send feedback of how you are using it and how its working! To God be the glory.
