My inbox is flooded with junk email. Well, technically it’s not junk, it is stuff I signed up for and agreed to receive updates. However, when I open my inbox on a Monday morning, and I have to sift through what feels like 1300 emails to discover which ones are actually relevant, it certainly feels like junk.

When we decided to start sending out a weekly email, that was one of the major questions in our minds. If we’re going to drop another piece of email in people’s inboxes, what can we put in it that’s going to be worth them opening it?

That’s a question we continue to ask ourselves each week. We want to add content that is important and links that you might use or need. Our hope is that sometimes, the content might inspire you to forward on the email to a friend (“hey, check out what my church is doing!”) or use as an FYI (“hey, this is the time of that event I was telling you about.”) We also hope that it will be a quick read—if you open it on your phone, we don’t want you to have to use more than three thumb swipes.

One of the things that you can expect moving forward is that we’re going to rotate the weekly column between our different authors. I want our church to hear more from Pastor Chris and Pastor Jay, as well as our other staff and ministry leaders. They’re doing incredible ministry that doesn’t always get recognized.

Our communications team (yes, we have a communications team) suggested that if we were going to do that we should be clear about who the author is on any given week by putting in their picture and name somewhere. Since I was writing the first column, I got the first banner. (Don’t worry; the banners will only get better from here!)

If there is anything you’d like to see added to these weekly updates, let us know! I know how quickly an email I wanted becomes an email I delete before even opening it. We’re doing well so far with the Weekly Update according to MailChimp’s analytics, and we’re hoping to keep it that way!

Thanks for reading, and I hope to see you Sunday.