Information for CRISTA Letter Service Customers

CRISTA recently discontinued their letter service after over 50 years of sending prayer letters. That is an incredible tenure of service, and we hope that we and our successors will be able to serve with that level of faithfulness.

If you were their customer and are looking for a new prayer letter service, we would like to work with you to make the transition as smooth as possible. We've been growing steadily for years, and would be happy to send your letters as well.

You can find out about our service using the links on the left. We've also included some specific similarities and differences between CRISTA Letter Service and prayerletters.us below.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us.

Turnaround Time

One of the biggest differences that you'll find between CRISTA Letter Service and prayerletters.us is turnaround time – we send nearly all mailings within two business days.

As a result, if you use first-class postage and send your letter to us on a Monday morning, everyone will usually receive it the same week. In addition, our price for a single-sided color letter using first-class mail is only slightly more than you would have paid for non-profit postage at CRISTA, which would have taken nearly a month from submission to delivery.

This should impact how you write your letters. It means that you can write about an event that's just a week away, and have people reading about it and praying for it in advance.

Online Features

As you're evaluating our service, please take a moment to create an account and click around in the My Account section, where you'll find a number of our distinctives.

You're able to do pretty much everything online here at prayerletters.us, including updating your mailing list, downloading old letters, and resending them to new people on your mailing list.

The Send a Mailing page lets you upload your files and tell us exactly how you want your letter to be sent. We'll also make a preview available online for you if you'd like, and you can see up-to-date status on your mailing at all times.

If you'd like to make your prayer letters available online, you can do that for free, as well.

No Setup Fee, No Annual Fee, No Commitment Required

We want it to be very easy for you to try out our service, without any sense of being locked in.

While you're evaluating new prayer letter services, we invite you to take advantage of this to try us out for one mailing.

We certainly hope that you'll enjoy our service and stick with us for a long time. If you're not happy, however, you can download your mailing list and other files at any time, and try another service instead. (We do hope that you'll let us know before you do that, though, so we can try and address any concerns you have.)

First-Class, Standard, and Non-Profit Postage

We recommend first-class postage for missionary letters since it's the fastest delivery method and has the fewest restrictions, but we can send mail at standard and non-profit rates as well.

Because we're not a non-profit organization, we don't have our own non-profit permit, but we can use your ministry's permit. This means that your ministry's name and return address will be used for your mail (if you use standard or first-class postage, you can choose any return address). Our name doesn't need to be anywhere on the letter or envelope unless you want us to handle your returned mail.

Starting in May, we should be able to add a barcode to mail that will allow us to receive address changes for you regardless of what is used as the return address. (We'll only do this at your request – our normal approach is to make the letter look as personal and non-commercial as possible.) This will be most important for non-profit mail, as your ministry's mail room is most likely not equipped to handle address changes for you.

Please contact us if you're not sure which postage option to use, and we'll help you figure out which one makes the most sense for your circumstances.

Design Services

We proofread letters and make layout adjustments as needed, but we don't design letters from scratch. If CRISTA has been providing this service for you, and you can send us the template they were using for your letter, we can include your text and pictures in that template for future letters.

We also have a few templates on hand that we can copy your text and pictures into, in case you're in an area of the world that makes it challenging to send a formatted letter over the Internet. But our preference would be that you write and format your own letter – it adds a personal aspect that we can't duplicate.

The best programs for writing letters, not including high-end page layout programs such as InDesign, are Microsoft Publisher (Windows) and Apple's Pages (Mac). There are many other options, but these two have numerous built-in templates that can be easily adjusted to fit your needs. Publisher in particular can be used for all sorts of documents, and is worth the investment if you don't already own it.

How Can We Help?

Our goal is to reduce the administrative burdens of being a missionary, and we'll do whatever we can to make the transition process as easy as possible for you.

Please don't hesitate to contact us if you have any questions, and we'll get back to you right away.

If you're ready to send your first mailing, you can get started right now and have your letter ready to be sent in less than 15 minutes.