A few ministers have asked why some member letters are reaching brethren in their congregations before the letters reach them. The main reason for the delay has to do with a system established by the U.S. Postal Service whereby the Work is given substantial savings in postage costs by pre-sorting First Class letters.
Under this system, when there is a sufficient quantity of letters going to a specific zip code area, these letters can be sent by the "presort" method. These particular letters are bundled and marked so as to bypass many of the operations in the Post Office. Therefore, they would reach their destination earlier than normal First Class mail.
Apparently, some ministers' member letters have been in smaller numerical groups which have gone through normal mail channels, whereas some of their congregations' letters have been in bundles large enough to be pre-sorted and these letters arrived a day or two earlier.
We in Mail Processing do understand your desire to receive information fast, and we always want to give the best service we can. It does save the Work thousands of dollars a year for us to take advantage of postage discounts given by the Postal Service, but we're working on improving delivery time for you. Normally, the difference between pre-sort and regular First Class delivery time should only be a day or two.