So it becomes a platform that is completely free but allows people to understand Scripture in a more interesting way based on the content that that pastor or church leader is producing.
Then, more recently, we started to create a set of features specifically for churches.
Churches can have a presence in the app today. Here in the U.S., you go through and register your church and create a kind of a page, which would be like the equivalent of a page on Facebook, and it has your service times [and] your location of your church.
If you are a multi-campus church, you have all the campuses and everything that you have available, and then people within your congregation that use the Bible app can associate or affiliate themselves with your church.
And when they do that, it unlocks a whole set of features for pastors and church leaders. One is pastors and church leaders are able to see the aggregated engagement of their congregation during the week.
They can’t see anything individually for privacy reasons, but they could see the types of Bible plans that their congregations are reading and the types of searches that people are doing inside the app.
So it really becomes a big resource to see how effective their church is at helping their congregation engage in Scripture during the week, as well as maybe inform them about some of the felt needs that their congregations are struggling with—if they didn’t already know—that could inform their teaching.
It’s another communication channel for them as well.
If they have a church page in the app and have people connected to it, they can actually send push notifications through the app to their congregation from their church.
And then they can feature a Bible plan.
A lot of churches, whatever they’re teaching, they might have a Bible plan that they want to feature for their whole congregation to go through at the same time, and so that’s another example.
We have plans to add many more features, and we’re testing some things in Australia right now where we actually imported all of the churches in Australia into the app.
And we’re letting people claim their church a little bit more like Google Local or Yelp has done.
