It is Friday afternoon. Four o’clock. The newsletter went out at two. You had planned to leave at half past four because your daughter has a dentist appointment at five, and you have been looking forward to the drive for two days because it is the only part of the week that does not involve someone else’s deadline.
Three emails have arrived since you returned from lunch.
The SVP wants a late addition about tomorrow’s food bank collection. The finance committee wants the quarterly summary posted today, because it was supposed to go out last week and somehow did not. The head server wants the altar rota updated before weekend Masses because Thursday’s email was wrong.
All three are “urgent.”
Your tea has gone cold three times. You are looking at the screen and something in you is deciding, without your permission, that you do not care what they do.
This piece is for you.
The reframe you need first
What feels like a personal time management problem is almost always a structural problem.
The parish has not agreed what “urgent” means. It has not agreed what counts as a legitimate late addition. It has not agreed who the curator can say no to, and on what grounds. Until those things are agreed, every request feels like a judgment call, and every judgment call costs you energy you did not plan to spend.
Your inbox is not asking you for content. It is asking you, over and over, to invent a submissions policy on the fly, alone, on a Friday afternoon, for a parish that has never sat down to write one.
You are tired because you are doing the work of three roles at once: curator, policy author, and enforcement officer for a policy that does not exist.
The fix is not more energy. The fix is a policy, held firmly, with pastoral warmth. This piece is about how to hold it.
The triage framework
Three categories. Every request goes into one of them.
Genuinely urgent. A Mass time has changed because of a funeral. A safeguarding communication is required. The heating has failed and tonight’s confirmation rehearsal is relocating. A named person’s death needs to be announced before the weekend. These go in immediately. These are the cases the existence of the word “urgent” is designed for.
Time-sensitive but not urgent. The SVP’s food bank collection tomorrow is time-sensitive. It could have been submitted on Tuesday. It was not. The person who submitted it late is not a villain; they simply did not plan. Time-sensitive requests go in if capacity allows, but they do not bump other work. If you cannot accommodate them this week, they move to next week or to a different channel.
Neither urgent nor time-sensitive. Most submissions, including most things labelled “urgent” by their submitters. They go in at the next suitable publication window, which may be this week, next week, or later depending on what else is happening.
Your judgment about which category a submission falls into is legitimate, and should not be negotiable. The submitter’s sense of urgency is about their own priorities; your sense of urgency is about the parish’s whole communications rhythm. These are not the same thing, and the curator’s view is the one that has to hold.
The phrases
Specific sentences that do the work. Keep them handy. Use them often.
- “I can hold this for the next newsletter, which goes out on Friday. Does that work for what you need?”
- “This is the kind of thing I’d normally need by Tuesday to get into Friday’s bulletin. Can it wait for next week?”
- “Thanks for thinking of this. Given where we are in the liturgical calendar, I think it will land better in two weeks than this weekend. May I hold it until then?”
- “I can’t get this in today, but let me suggest an alternative: we can put it on the parish Facebook page this afternoon, and into Friday’s newsletter properly next week.”
- “This feels like a pastoral matter more than a communications one. May I pass it to Father?”
- “This one’s outside what we usually publish. Can we talk about whether it fits our parish’s voice before I put it into the queue?”
These are not scripts; they are starting points. Adapt them to your parish. The common feature: they are warm, they offer something (a slot, an alternative, a conversation), and they do not apologise for holding a line.
Do not apologise. The line is the parish’s, not yours. You are protecting it on the parish’s behalf.
The harder nos
Sometimes the right answer is not “later.” It is “not at all.”
A submission that duplicates what is already published. A submission that names people without their consent. A submission that is genuinely not suited to the parish’s voice, whatever its good intentions. A submission that, if published, would embarrass the submitter a week later when she realised how it read.
For these, the phrase is gentler but firmer:
“I need to hold this for now. May I ring you this week to talk it through? There’s something I want to check with you before we go any further.”
Then you ring. You explain. You offer an alternative where one exists. The submitter, nine times out of ten, is relieved. She had a vague sense the submission was not quite right; she just did not have the language for why. Your call gives her that language.
The tenth time, she is not relieved. She is annoyed. She escalates to the priest. This brings us to the next section.
The priest’s support
If you are being overridden, or if you are not being supported when you decline, that is a conversation with the priest. Not an email. In person, over a cup of tea, when both of you have fifteen minutes.
The priest who has commissioned you has committed to supporting your editorial authority. That commitment is meaningful only when it is tested. The first time a submitter escalates, what the priest does shapes the next two years of the role.
If he backs you, the role is viable. Submitters learn that the curator’s no is also the parish’s no, and most of them adjust their expectations without drama.
If he folds, the role is not viable. Submitters learn that the curator can be gone around, and they will go around you every time, and you will be exhausted within eighteen months.
If you are being folded on, that is a real conversation to have with the priest. The Pillar 3 posture of invitation and patience applies to the priest himself. He may not have realised what he was doing. He may need help to see it. You are allowed to say so.
Closing
Saying no is not a failure of pastoral care. It is pastoral care.
The curator who says no to the fifth urgent notice of the week is protecting the quality of every other piece of communication the parish produces. Her no is what makes the yes mean something. Her no is what lets Friday’s newsletter arrive as a considered document rather than a jumble of everyone’s urgency. Her no is also, quietly, a form of love for her readers, who are receiving the newsletter at the end of their own long weeks and deserve a better thing than a fourteen-item panic.
Your no is legitimate. It is yours to give. It is the parish’s own discipline, expressed through you.
Go to the dentist’s with your daughter. The food bank collection will be fine.
This piece is part of the Pillar 1 series within the True Light Digital Formation framework. For the full cornerstone essay on which it is based, see truelight.digital/formation/communications-champion/.