I am the music director at a Lutheran church in NJ, and to make our service accessible to visitors (and to help out existing members), we print musical incipits of all the congregational sung responses throughout the serivce (the "ordinary" if you will, plus some other responses). The poor secretary at our church has been doing this for years via a literal cut-and-paste method using scissors, tape, scanning, printing, saving...it's a really time consuming process! 

Her life was recently made more difficult when we started to change up the congregational responses for some music that I was writing. I did everything I could to make it easy for her; changing page size, saving to pdf, etc. But she still has to print out, tape, copy, etc, because you can't just insert a pdf as a picture object in a Word document. No, that would be too easy, wouldn't it? It becomes really hard to manipulate, which is why she resorts to the copier method.

So one day in my brainstorming, and seeing the recent Finale sale, I wondered if anyone had created a "church bulletin" template for Finale. The great thing is much of the text is repeatable from week to week, so those text blocks would be quite easy to move around. She would just need to copy and paste in scripture verses for the day or if the prayers changed, but that's not too much typing or manipulating of text. Of course, now I would have the big brunt of the work creating all the responses in Finale from scratch, but I don't mind so much. But then there would be the issue of moving margins around to make room for text blocks, etc. Maybe this is also too much work. I wondered if anyone had experience with this? The problem is our bulletin is neither fish nor fowl, it's literally half music and half text, so no program is ideal to handle this as I see it, unless someone has a magical template that might remove some of the startup issues. 

Any ideas are welcome, or we could entertain perhaps someone willing to do some initial setup work (or template if it's your own creation!) and I would discuss with them what the church could pay for something like that. 

Michael Wittenburg

Music Director, Christ Lutheran Church, Paramus, NJ