There’s a reason New Year’s resolutions like “pray more” tend to fail. “More” is vague—when will you feel like you’ve reached your resolution? And if you’re talking about a church giving campaign goals, “more” means practically nothing to your donors. (more…)
Do you ever feel like you’re in an uphill battle for your congregation’s attention? If so, you’re not alone.
People are more distracted than ever by screens. And even if we happen to have the TV on, chances are we’re probably doing something on our mobile devices. As of 2019, the average person spends four hours per day watching TV. That adds up to 20 hours on weekdays alone and doesn’t include time spent on social media.
There’s a healthy, even spiritually beneficial way to watch TV: viewing Bible-based content in community.
One way to bridge the gap between mobile and face-to-face relationships is to invite your church to enjoy faith-inspiring films together. Faithlife TV Church is a churchwide subscription that gives your whole congregation access to video lectures, Bible-based documentaries, films, kids’ shows, and more.
Your Faithlife TV Church subscription gives you and your congregation access to over 7,000 video lectures from prominent Christian teachers—plus more than 1,000 documentaries, Christian films, and kids’ videos.
Here are the different ways your members can benefit from Faithlife TV Church.
Give your congregation a Christian alternative to secular streaming services. With a robust library of Christian content, you can rest easy knowing your members have access to good Bible teaching, Christian TV, kids’ shows, family-friendly movies, and exclusive Faithlife Original content.
Learn from respected theologians through 5- to 10-minute video lectures, perfect for busy schedules. The courses cover topics ranging from basics of the faith to complex theological ideas including:
These videos span hundreds of theological topics that can provide years of small group study opportunities. With more than 7,000 Mobile Ed videos at your disposal, your options are extensive. Explore apologetics together. Dive into a focused study of Matthew. Choose a Christian living topic and discover new insights.
Faithlife has been using technology to equip people to study the Bible for over 25 years, and we’ve now added original faith-based films to the mix. We want to help people in many walks of life engage with the truths of the Bible—from kids to lay leaders to scholars—and we’re using Faithlife Originals to do just that. Here are a few examples of the Faithlife Original movies only available through Faithlife TV.
Join Dr. Craig Evans as he travels the globe to track down the most ancient New Testament manuscripts. Along the way, he highlights groundbreaking new evidence, demonstrating that the case for the reliability of the New Testament manuscripts is stronger than ever.
In this surprising and entertaining film, Dr. Mark Ward explores the challenges facing readers of the King James Bible today. He shows why every English reader can benefit from today’s translations—and why you might not be as fluent in KJV English as you think.
Bible Agent 7 is a cartoon series for children designed to spark their curiosity about the Bible. Bible Agent 7 is on a mission to rescue a fellow Bible agent who has gone missing. To find him, she’ll have to rely on her ability to search the Scriptures—and the help of her friends.
With a Faithlife TV Church subscription, you can automatically publish every sermon to your church’s own Faithlife TV channel.
Your congregation can rewatch the sermon or catch it if they missed it. You can also upload discussion questions or study guides to go along with your sermon, perfect for small group study.
Faithlife TV Church includes Faithlife Sermons because we want to help you build a stronger message.
Faithlife TV Church can transform the screen into a discipleship tool, with enough variety to match everyone’s tastes and tech habits. Learn more about Faithlife TV Church.
Here are this week’s top deals, brought to you by Faithlife Ebooks. For more deals, visit our sale page or get our Free Book of the Month. Some of these deals are only good for a few days, so act fast to get these books at the sale price! [Read more…]
Preparing for church services is hard work. It takes a lot of prayer, planning, and teamwork to consistently construct services that encourage others and glorify God.
That said, sometimes we make it harder than it has to be. Here are three mistakes to avoid when planning your services—and how Proclaim can help you with each one.
There is an African proverb that says, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” The same is true about teamwork in the church. You may be able to design the bulletin or set up the stage faster than anyone else, but have you thought about the corollary to that? You are minimizing what you could accomplish if you were to spread the work around.
What are those aspects of preparing for Sunday morning where you are needlessly working alone? Comment below to share ideas for how to collaborate more effectively. What have you found that works well? What doesn’t? There is no end to exploring what it means to be a body of believers working together to achieve one purpose.
Proclaim was built for church collaboration. It comes with unlimited installs on Mac and PC and syncs everyone’s work automatically. That means that all at once, the church administrator could be building announcement slides, the worship leader lyric slides, and the pastor sermon slides. It saves you from passing files around, and everyone can chip in easily to build a great presentation. Check out the video below to learn more.
Part of being a good steward, whether of time or money, is following the cost-benefit principle. Is your investment (cost) worth the outcome (benefit)? It may sound a bit calculated, and you can’t always measure it objectively, but generally, it’s a great paradigm for decision-making.
Here’s a question that can help you apply it in your service planning: Has someone already made what I need, and is it worth using rather than building myself? This could include curriculum, a website, or even slide backgrounds.
For example, Proclaim comes preloaded with hundreds of designs made just for churches by a team of professional designers, plus options for thousands more. This saves you scouring the internet for stock images and graphics, as well as spending time meticulously designing just one slide. You can also check out Unsplash.com, which has thousands of beautiful photos you can use for free for any purpose.
Have you ever undertaken a simple task that ends up taking well over an hour? It’s frustrating. If someone were to look at your workday hour by hour, would you be embarrassed by your level of busywork?
One key to efficiency is targeting tasks you do daily or weekly, and then learning to do them quicker. If you work at a church, this could include preparing Bible lessons, sending announcements, or even designing presentations. Between changing font sizes and colors, aligning text, or adjusting color schemes, it can literally take hours just to put together a handful of slides. And that’s just for one week. Multiply that by 52 weeks over however many years, and you’re talking about hundreds or even thousands of hours designing presentations.
One way Proclaim helps you streamline this is by doing the formatting for you. You simply type in what you want a slide to say, and Proclaim plugs it into predesigned slides so it looks great right away. Plus, it remembers all the slides you’ve ever built, the templates you most recently used, and all the songs you’ve ever sung—including the verse order—so you can easily reuse past work. You can even link your CCLI subscription with Proclaim to avoid ever having to type a lyric again.
What are some ways you’ve streamlined weekly ministry tasks without sacrificing quality? Share your ideas in the comments below.
A lot of work goes into planning services—and rightfully so. But avoid these mistakes and you can make sure you’re using your energy well, rather than wasting it.
You can always turn to Proclaim for help avoiding these mistakes, too. If you haven’t tried Proclaim, now is a great time to start a free trial. For a month, you and your whole church will get access to powerful church presentation software, plus over 14,000 professionally designed pieces of media (no credit card required).
By Mark Holmen, adapted from Faith Begins @ Home Grandparents.
When you read the first 13 verses of Joshua’s farewell address in chapter 24, you see that Joshua begins by recalling all the things that God has done for the people of Israel. It is clear that Joshua does not want them to forget who their God is and what their God has done for them. [Read more…]
With Logos Bible Software, we’ve been helping people explore Scripture in more depth for over 25 years. And now with Bible Agent 7, we’re helping you share those insights with your kids. [Read more…]
Reading takes you to new worlds, immerses you in unfamiliar cultures, even transports you in time. But it’s more than an experience. It teaches, informs, challenges, and engages. It expands vocabulary, improves memory, and sharpens concentration. It even improves writing skills and reduces stress. [Read more…]
Have you joined the free media club yet?
Okay, so it’s not an “official” club, but when you sign up, you get at least 10 pieces of free, professionally designed media sent to you every quarter. So even though we don’t have t-shirts or membership cards, it’s still pretty great. [Read more…]
Here are this week’s top deals, brought to you by Faithlife Ebooks. For more deals, visit our sale page or get our Free Book of the Month. Some of these deals are only good for a few days, so act fast to get these books at the sale price!* [Read more…]
By John Stott, adapted from The Radical Disciple.
In the introduction to his book Knowing God, Dr. J. I. Packer writes that we are “pygmy Christians because we have a pygmy God.” We could equally say that we are pygmy Christians because we have a pygmy Christ. The truth is that there are many Jesuses on offer in the world’s religious supermarkets, and many of them are false Christs, distorted Christs, caricatures of the authentic Jesus. [Read more…]