It’s no secret that conferences are expensive. Unless you live in the right city and incredible opportunities are in your own backyard, the biggest cost of that high-caliber teaching isn’t actually the teaching—it’s getting to the conference and reserving a place to stay for the weekend.
Thanks to technology, where you live or how much you make doesn’t determine who you can learn from. High-caliber education is increasingly becoming more accessible, and so are conferences.
We sat down with Kenneth Ching, author of Shattered Prayers: The Testing of a Father’s Faith, to talk about his book and the process of writing such a personal story.
Read more…
Kenneth Ching lived a comfortable life—with a great job, a big house, and an easy faith. He went to church and believed in God’s goodness. But when his son is born with a serious and rare genetic condition, his life is thrown into terrifying chaos.
In his honest and raw memoir, Shattered Prayers: The Testing of a Father’s Faith, Ching brings to life his experience of letting go while learning to truly trust the Savior he claims to know. Ching doesn’t shy away from asking the hard questions: Why does God answer some prayers but not others? How does prayer work? Is God even listening?
Shattered Prayers is ultimately a story about recognizing God’s presence and faithfulness in the midst of brokenness. And how one man thought God ruined his life by giving his son a terrible disease, but eventually realized God was actually fighting to save his faith and his son’s life.
Enjoy this excerpt from Shattered Prayers:
Every week, your church uses an ancient technology to collect contact information and track attendance: paper bulletins.
In addition to supporting the recycling and waste management services in your community, those paper bulletins create a lot of tedious work for your staff (or a very patient volunteer who deserves some appreciation). Someone has to collect all those bulletins and manually enter the information into spreadsheets—because what good is all that information if it isn’t organized?
That’s why Faithlife just made your bulletins digital. Collecting and organizing that information gets a whole lot easier, and your congregation stays more connected.
While you may not be ready to ditch your printer, technology is becoming increasingly valuable to churches. As of a year ago, about two thirds of your congregation has smartphones. The epitome of convenience is filling your pews every weekend. Your church can use that to your advantage.
Digital bulletins turn smartphones into assets, not distractions.
Faithlife.com now lets you create digital bulletins your church can access online—before, during, or after your service.
Every week, churches print off thousands of bulletins—most of which never actually leave the building. It costs money, wastes paper, and fails to remind most of your congregation about upcoming events, volunteer opportunities, and the key takeaways from your service.
Digital bulletins leverage smartphones to keep your church more connected.
Reading the Bible regularly can be hard. Sometimes it can feel like it takes too much work to understand what Scripture is really saying. And the last thing you want is for your Bible reading to become stale, or to feel forced.
If Bible study matters to you but you’re struggling to keep going, try some of these techniques.
Here are 15 ways to read the Bible with fresh eyes:
If you’ve been shopping around for church media, you probably noticed there are more than a few choices out there. You could wade through dozens of church media brands before you find what your church needs (or what you can afford).
Maybe you’ve been getting your church media a-la-carte, so you get exactly what you want and don’t pay for more than that. But buying sermon illustration videos, motion backgrounds for worship, church countdown videos, and still images for 10–15 bucks a pop adds up fast—and your church has a budget.
Proclaim Church Presentation Software is here to help.
When someone new sets foot in your church, what happens?
A greeter hands them a bulletin as they walk through the door, an usher helps them find their seats.
Now what?
Maybe your regulars introduce themselves and strike up a conversation. Maybe they don’t.
This is where your screen comes in. It’s an anchor for regulars and a lifeline for newcomers. With the right slides, newcomers can wander into your church and feel like they’re exactly where they’re supposed to be.
At the end of April, leaders from across the country gathered at Awana headquarters to get equipped for youth and children’s ministry with Sean McDowell, Ed Stetzer, Dan Lovaglia, and others.
Vantage Conference is all about relational children’s ministry, and each speaker shares a different aspect of how leaders and ministries can facilitate discipleship.
If you missed the live event, you can still get a ticket to watch it on demand.
Experience the conference with your team or on your own, from home, the office, or wherever. Watch it all at once, or break it up across several meetings. Since it’s on demand, it’s on your schedule.
Catch some highlights from Vantage Conference in the video below:
The Bible has a lot to say about orphans. The Hebrew word for orphan is yatom—usually translated fatherless. It describes a child who lacks the protection and provision of a family.
The best modern equivalent for this type of person is a foster child—a child whose parents are either unable or unwilling to care for them.
Let’s see what the Bible has to say about them.