How to Create a Christian Editorial Calendar

Introduction

To create a Christian editorial calendar, start from your church's actual calendar (services, events, Christian holidays like Christmas and Easter), define a few regular content categories with a frequency your team can sustain, record everything in a shared spreadsheet, and designate one person to approve content before publication. That's it. No need for expensive software or a professional communications team.

In this article, you will see why this simple spreadsheet changes the life of a communications team, then the four steps to build it: start from your church's year, choose sustainable categories and frequency, set up your tool and approval process, and finally intelligently repurpose your existing content.

Why Your Church Needs an Editorial Calendar

An editorial calendar is a planning tool that helps you anticipate events and structure publications by date, channel, format, and target audience. Without one, communication becomes haphazard: you publish when you think of it, announce the youth camp five days before departure, and the church's page goes silent for three weeks.

For a church, the stakes go beyond marketing. Good communication prevents misunderstandings and serves the harmony of the community; it involves the entire body of Christ, not just the pastor or the social media manager. Planning is not anti-spiritual: Jesus himself asks the question, in Luke 14:28: "For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it?" Sitting down to plan your communication is exactly that.

Concretely, an editorial calendar gives you three things:

Consistency: your members and visitors know the church is alive, week after week.
Coherence: every publication aligns with your church's vision and identity, instead of going in all directions.
Peace of mind for the team: everyone knows what to prepare, by when, and who gives the green light.

The editorial calendar is not the strategy itself: it executes it. If you have not yet laid the foundations (vision, audience, channels, objectives), start with our pillar article How to Create a Communication Plan for a Church, then come back here to put it into action.

Step 1: Start from Your Church Calendar and Christian Holidays

The good news is that you are not starting from a blank page. Your church already lives according to an annual rhythm, and the Christian year provides a ready-made backbone for your content.

Key Moments of the Christian Year

The Christian calendar commemorates the history of salvation each year. Some churches observe it in full, while many evangelical churches focus on a few major dates. These seasons remain valuable for celebrating Christ and his Gospel, and they are natural communication opportunities:

Advent, which begins the fourth Sunday before Christmas: a series of publications about waiting and hope.
The Christmas season, from December 25 to January 6 (Epiphany): invitations to celebrations, messages about the incarnation.
Lent, forty days of preparation before Easter, echoing Jesus' forty days in the wilderness: meditation or fasting programs.
Holy Week and Good Friday, commemorating the crucifixion.
Easter, the most important day of the year, celebrating the resurrection: your annual communication peak.
Ascension (fortieth day after Easter) and Pentecost (fiftieth day), whose origin Acts 2:1 recalls: "When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place."

Your Church's Own Rhythm

Next, add dates specific to your community: the September kickoff, baptisms, camps and outings, sermon series, evangelistic evenings, the annual general meeting. Place all of this over twelve months, and you will see the busy periods (where you need to plan ahead) and the quiet ones (where your regular categories will fill the gap).

Practical tip: block a time in summer to map out the twelve months ahead in your spreadsheet. Event communication should ideally be prepared several weeks in advance, not the night before.

Step 2: Define Sustainable Categories and Frequency

Before filling in boxes, two fundamentals. First, your identity: your church's vision, mission, and values. Second, your audience: who are you speaking to? A proven method is to picture two or three typical people from your community and your city, and to test each publication with a simple question: will it speak to my audience? The most common pitfall is creating communications that appeal to us without thinking about the people who will receive them.

Choose 3 to 5 Recurring Categories

A category is a type of content that recurs on a fixed schedule. It is what makes the calendar easy to fill: you no longer ask "what should we publish?" but simply "what goes in Thursday's slot?" For example:

A weekly verse or devotional thought;
An excerpt or summary of Sunday's sermon;
Upcoming announcements and events;
A testimony or member spotlight;
A photo from church life.

If you need inspiration to fill these categories, browse our 50 publication ideas for a church, and to know which types of content work best on different platforms, read What to Post on a Church's Social Media?

Set a Frequency You Can Sustain

The golden rule: less and consistent is better than a lot and abandoned. One publication per week per channel is a healthy baseline to start with. Experts also recommend not spreading yourself too thin: choose a limited number of priority platforms rather than chasing all of them. For a church with a volunteer team, one or two well-maintained social accounts are worth more than five neglected ones. Set specific and measurable goals (for example: two posts per week on Instagram for three months), stick to the pace, then increase if the team can handle it.

Step 3: A Spreadsheet Is Enough, but Decide Who Approves

You do not need a sophisticated tool. A shared spreadsheet (Google Sheets or Excel) works perfectly: one row per publication, one column per piece of information. The essential columns:

Publication date and time;
Channel (Instagram, Facebook, newsletter, announcement sheet...);
Category or theme;
Format (image, video, text, story);
Message and call to action;
Person responsible for creating the content;
Status: to create, to approve, scheduled, published.

The "status" column is the key to teamwork: at a glance, everyone can see where each piece of content stands. You can complement the spreadsheet with free tools used by church communications teams: Google Calendar to centralize the team schedule, Google Drive to store texts and visuals in one place (and ensure continuity if someone is absent), and a team messaging tool for quick exchanges.

Who Approves Before Publication?

In a church, a publication represents the entire community. So designate an approval person: often the pastor or an elder for substance (theology, tone, sensitive information), and the communications manager for form. The workflow should stay simple: the creator moves the row to "to approve," the approver reviews, corrects or approves, and the row moves to "scheduled." Also take time to train volunteers on the chosen tools and remain attentive to the privacy of members' data (photos, first names, personal situations). Paul sums it up in one sentence, in 1 Corinthians 14:40: "But all things should be done decently and in order."

Step 4: Repurpose Your Content and Evaluate Your Calendar

The secret of teams that go the distance is not creating more, but repurposing better. Your church already produces its richest content every week: Sunday's sermon. A single sermon can become:

A powerful quote as an image on Monday;
A short video or audio clip on Wednesday;
A three-point summary in the weekly newsletter;
A discussion question for small groups.

One source, four pieces of content, zero creation from scratch. Build this repurposing directly into your categories. The newsletter is the natural extension of this workflow: if your church doesn't have one yet, our guide How to Create a Church Newsletter walks you through step by step, and an email tool allows you to send regular, even segmented emails (youth, families, prayer team).

Review and Adjust Regularly

An editorial calendar is never set in stone. Plan three check-ins:

Each month: a short team meeting to fill in the next month and brainstorm ideas.
Each quarter: a look at what worked (most-viewed publications, member feedback) to adjust categories and frequency.
Each year: a full review, collecting community feedback, because digital habits evolve quickly.

Regular evaluation is not a luxury: it is what turns a well-filled spreadsheet into communication that bears fruit.

Key Takeaways

A Christian editorial calendar is a simple spreadsheet that plans what to publish, when, where, and by whom: it executes your communication plan, it does not replace it.
Start from what exists: Christian holidays (Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, Pentecost) and your church's key moments already form the backbone of your year.
Choose 3 to 5 recurring categories and a frequency your volunteer team can sustain: a consistent weekly publication is better than five abandoned accounts.
A shared spreadsheet is enough: date, channel, category, format, message, person responsible, and status, with one clearly designated person to approve before publication.
Repurpose Sunday's sermon into posts, clips, and newsletter content, and re-evaluate your calendar every quarter.

Personal Application

What are the five key moments of your church's year that you could place in a spreadsheet today?
Does your current communication speak to your actual audience, or mainly to those who produce it?
What publication frequency can your team honestly sustain for six months?
Who will approve your church's publications, and is this process known to all the volunteers involved?
What existing content (sermons, photos, testimonies) could you repurpose starting this week?

Verses Cited

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between an editorial calendar and a church communication plan?

The communication plan defines the underlying strategy: your church's identity, vision, audience, channels, and objectives. The editorial calendar is its day-to-day execution tool: it specifies which publication goes out on which date, on which channel, in which format, and who approves it. The plan is reviewed once a year; the calendar is filled in every month.

How often should a church post on social media?

One post per week per channel is a healthy and sustainable baseline for most churches. A consistent rhythm you can maintain over time with your volunteer team is better than a daily pace abandoned after six weeks. Start low, keep the rhythm for three months, then increase if the team can handle it.

What tool should you use to create a church editorial calendar?

A simple shared spreadsheet (Google Sheets or Excel) is more than enough to get started: one row per publication, with columns for date, channel, category, format, message, and status. You can complement it with free tools like Google Calendar for the big picture and Google Drive to store visuals and texts in one place.

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