Expand Your Church’s Reach

Serving your congregation and community means reaching people where they are, and the reality is most people in your community are online. That means that churches without online community, mobile giving, live streaming services, and a top-notch website are missing opportunities to share the gospel with those who need to hear it. Whether you’re an online novice or looking to improve your church’s current setup, Faithlife’s free and low-cost tools help you take your church online fast.

How to get your church online—fast

This page is dedicated to helping you get your church set up online in under 24 hours. We’ll only be covering the most critical technology needed to get your church online fast. Feel free to read the page from beginning to end or skip to the section most interesting to you right now.

• Build Your Community
• Set Up Giving
• Update Your Site
• Stream Your Services

Keep in mind, this page covers the bare minimum necessary to get your church online fast. But this is only the beginning. Once you’ve gotten your technology set up, make sure you also take the time to build out a solid digital discipleship strategy too.

Get started.

Who this page is for

Many small churches only have one or two full-time people on staff, and if you’re a team of one or a team of two, this page is definitely for you. If you’re in a larger church, here’s the church staff we recommend be involved with this process of taking your church online:

Pastoral Staff

Operations Team

Comms Director

IT Leaders

Worship Leaders

Gather your launch team together and go through the rest of this page as a group, starting with the video below.

The real reason churches should be online

Before you dig in on the technical work, take a couple minutes to watch this video so you can catch the vision for what this technology can do for your church

Create a Free, Private Online Community for Your Church

With growing privacy and data concerns on most mainstream social media platforms, it’s more important than ever to have a private and safe space for your church to gather online.

Stay connected even when you can’t gather together in person

By creating a Faithlife group, you give your church a way to stay up to date with church announcements and prayer requests, engage small groups, communicate one on one, distribute sermon recordings, and much more. It’s totally free, and it’s the first step to taking your church online.

Follow the link below to find or create your church group, then complete the steps in the dashboard.
Find my church.

Enable Your Congregation to Give Online

More and more often, church members prefer online and mobile giving, especially when vacation, illness, and online-only services keep them from giving in person. Furthermore, churches that invite their members to set up one-time or recurring online gifts see more predictable budgets, leading to more opportunities for ministry. How do you bring together your members’ desire to give cheerfully with your church’s need for financial stability? Online giving, that’s how!

Start worry-free for free

Be prepared to accept generosity with Faithlife Giving—which makes giving unbelievably easy. It’s so simple to activate, you can set it up Saturday night and start taking donations Sunday morning. Additionally, givers have the option to cover transaction fees with each offering, allowing 100% of gifts to go toward your ministry.

Learn more.

The Digital Front Door to Your Church

Your website is the digital front door to your church, so it’s vital that it clearly communicates what you’d want a visitor to know about you.

If you’ve already got a church website, make sure everything is updated, such as service times, location (especially where to join the service online), contact info, a giving link, and ways for people to get involved. Many churches also have pages explaining how people can serve or ask for help.

If you don’t have a church website, you can create a free, professional website in as little as an hour. See how Faithlife Sites makes it easy to build an elegant church website that updates itself.

A website that udates itself?

You read that correctly. Faithlife Sites keeps your content fresh automatically. Because Faithlife Sites is part of an integrated ministry platform, it’s always in-sync with the most current events in your church. Announcements disappear when the event is over, sermons publish to the site with a couple of clicks, and you can even automatically send emails to visitors!

Learn more.

Get Started with Live Streaming in No Time

When you live stream your church services, you can share the good news with people you’d never be able to reach otherwise. You can give people a look inside your church and show them what you’re all about. With everyone turning online for school, work, and connection, having a reliable way to stream your service is vital.

There are two simple ways to put your service online: live streaming (best) or prerecording and publishing your sermon online afterward.

Prerecording and publishing your sermon online

While live streaming is usually the best experience, some churches simply aren’t able to live stream. In these instances, churches still have several options for getting their videos out to those who may have missed the service:

• Publish your sermon recording online
  If you are already recording audio and video for your services, just upload the file to sermons.faithlife.com and give your church the link. It’s that simple. They can then watch from any device, anytime.
  Go to Faithlife Sermons.
• Publish your sermon to your church’s TV channel
  Your members can access your church’s Faithlife TV streaming video channel at faithlifetv.com or on Faithlife TV apps. If you’ve uploaded your recordings using Sermons or Proclaim, they will already show up in your church’s channel.
  Learn more.

Live streaming your service

If your church has the budget and resources, here are a few additional tools you might consider for a more polished recorded and/or real-time experience.

• Live stream your service
  Faithlife Live Stream is easy to use and even gives you the ability to host a live chat with the congregation. Even better, viewers can give right where they’re watching with convenient Faithlife Giving integration.
  Learn more and start a 30-day trial.
• Record and edit sermon presentations and audio
  Faithlife Proclaim is church presentation software with the ability to automatically record, edit, and publish your sermon, slides, and audio. Get started by downloading Proclaim, and get 30 days free.
  Download Proclaim.

This video on setting up live stream:

Bonus: 4 Tips for Worshiping Together Even While Apart

When you use Faithlife Proclaim along with all the other tools above, you unlock some additional features to make your online experience feel seamless. With Faithlife Proclaim 3.0, you can...

1. Overlay text on your live stream
2. Use on-screen annotation to draw more attention
3. Customize your monitors
4. Send notes directly to confidence monitors

Watch the video below to learn more about these awesome features.

Follow the link below to find or create your church group, then complete the steps in the dashboard. Find my church.

Getting Your Church Online Doesn’t Have to Be Complicated

For some, the idea of setting up new technology for all of the different things we listed above is both overwhelming and terrifying. We tried to make this page as simple as possible and provide all the resources you’ll need to get started. However, if you ever get stuck, our team is here to support you every step of the way.