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.
We may take that same model to the U.S. And the reason for that is, the more people that we can get connected to churches within the app, the more people we’ll know who are not connected to churches, and then we can create features that are pathways for people to connect to local churches.
Our goal ultimately is to help someone grow spiritually but to do that in the context of community, meaning, we really want to help people get engaged with the local church if they’re not. So ultimately, the way it will serve pastors and church leaders, in addition to all those ways already mentioned, [is that] it will hopefully be a way that their church grows.
ChurchLeaders: Obviously, people can support your efforts by downloading the app. Are there other ways people can support what you’re doing?
Bobby Gruenewald: We obviously appreciate everyone’s prayers, and we have many churches and people that pray for our ministry. As you can imagine, any time that you’re engaged in distributing God’s Word, there’s spiritual attacks, there’s things that the team encounters, and it’s not lost on us that we’re fighting a spiritual battle every day that we wake up.
We also have churches that started reaching out to us really about a year or two ago and asking if they could financially support YouVersion because it’s donor-supported. They started to realize that because their congregation uses the app, this might be a mission partner that becomes really easy for them to explain to their church.
It’s easy to say, ‘You guys understand this app. We can help make it available to other people in other parts of the world.’ And so we have several churches that financially support YouVersion, and we’re blessed and honored to do that. Our church did that on our own for the first years, all by ourselves.
And as it grew, God began to bring other people and families and individual donors. And so there are many people that donate small amounts to YouVersion that all might be a part of other churches, and we’d love for them to actually be able to give through their church to YouVersion instead of just directly to us, because we think that is a more compelling and stronger way to do it.
So while it’s not an expectation of a pastor and church leader, it’s definitely something that we do see people doing out of either of their missions budget or as a new mission partner that they challenge their church to support.
