Church birthday and anniversary directory template

Two pages that pay for the whole directory

Ask who uses your directory and you'll hear about two groups: people looking up a phone number, and whoever sends the cards. The card ministry doesn't want family pages — they want every birthday in March on one page, in order, with the day beside the name.

So that page is built for you. Every birthday you've entered anywhere in the directory is gathered by month, sorted by day, and set with dot leaders running from the name to the date. Anniversaries get the same treatment on their own page.

You never maintain these lists. Add a family in July, and the July block has them. Correct a date, and both the family card and the month page are right.

The year stays private

Birthdays are stored as month, day, and — only if you have it — year. The year never prints. A card that says “March 14” is exactly as useful as one that says 1962, and considerably more welcome.

That means you can ask for birthdays without the awkward conversation. People who don't mind giving a year can, and it stays in the office.

Anniversaries work the other way, because couples like the number: if you know the wedding year, the family card can show “June 14 · 23 years”, worked out fresh every time it prints.

How the entry works

• Type dates the way they come to you: 3/14, *3/14/1985*, *March 14*, or *1985-03-14* — all read correctly.
• The year is optional everywhere it appears.
• Import a whole list of birthdays from a spreadsheet; anything unreadable is reported line by line rather than silently dropped.
• A month with no birthdays is simply left out, so you don't print a page of empty headings.
• A busy month splits across columns and pages with a “(cont.)” heading — no names are ever quietly cut off.

Ways churches use these pages

• Card ministry: print the two pages alone at the start of the year and hand them to whoever writes the cards.
• From the front: read out the week's birthdays and anniversaries on a Sunday, off a phone.
• Milestone anniversaries: the years-married figure makes 25ths and 50ths easy to spot before they arrive.
• Nursery and children's ministry: children's birthdays are in the same list, which is often the only place they're written down.
• Newsletter: copy the month's names into the bulletin without cross-checking family pages.

Print the whole directory, or just these pages

The birthday and anniversary pages are part of the printed directory by default, sitting after the family cards. If you only want them, switch off the welcome page, the family cards' extras, and print the pages you need from the print dialog's page range — the sheet count is shown before you print.

They also appear in the shared web copy as their own tabs, so somebody can check next week's birthdays on a phone without carrying paper.