We’re glad you asked. There’s a ton of them! Pastor and Author, Zach Zehnder, gives you 5 reasons why a 40-day church challenge could be right for your church in this short video here. This is the first video of a FREE 10-part video series to help you determine if a 40-day church challenge is right for your church. Find the other videos here.

Great news! We have a FREE 10-part video series to help you launch a 40-day church challenge. We’ve had the privilege to work with hundreds of churches and have many best practices to share. For those churches that order 50 or more copies, you can schedule a FREE 30-minute phone call with Pastor and Author Zach Zehnder and ask further questions by emailing us.

We suggest at least a 4-week lead-in time with the books at your site. We always offer a FREE promotional video you can use, as well as a host of graphics like flyers, posters, slides, etc. in our FREE graphics package in the Free Resources menu. To learn more about promotion and distribution, check out this video.

These are the 5 best times we’ve seen to launch a 40-day church campaign.

1. Beginning of Year: You can promote heavily in December and at Christmas and build some serious momentum in the new year.
2. 40 Days prior to Easter: Many churches will encourage people to give up something for the 40 days of Lent. We love this practice, but also, we’ve seen many churches encourage their people not just to give up something, but to start something new as well. There is nothing better to start than putting the words of Jesus into practice!
3. 40 Days after Easter: You can promote heavily at Easter and really give your church something exciting to come back to the next week. Usually a church will have 6-8 weeks left after Easter while families are still in school and this can provide some great momentum going into the summer months.
4. Summer: While most churches decrease in attendance in summer months, the RLC is a great opportunity to start the summer with a jump, not a slump!
5. Fall: Weekly worship attendance is normally at its strongest in the Fall. Why not start the fall with a powerful 40-day church discipleship challenge? We encourage a start time any time after the school session is back and encourage churches to wrap up by Thanksgiving.

We believe that children and youth can and do have what it takes to put the words of Jesus and the principles of RLC into practice. In the past, we’ve seen student ministries (both middle and high school) interact very well with our workbooks and resources. The content is simple to understand, but challenging in its practice. It is written in a simple-to-understand way that youth and adults can both understand. Hear Pastor and Author Zach Zehnder discuss how to involve student ministry more by watching this short video.

For all of our challenges, we create a FREE RLC weekly kid’s curriculum and FREE RLC weekly kid’s curriculum to be used on Sunday mornings for your kid’s ministry so that the kids are learning the same main principles as the adults. We have also written a companion Kids workbook that targets K-5th grade. It mirrors the themes and days of the RLC workbook, but is written specifically with a K-5th audience in mind. Therefore, the devotions and the challenges are more kid-friendly. Also, based on how children best learn, there is an incredible narrative woven throughout the book to help kids engage with the content even more. Because of its nature to challenge children, we do highly suggest parent involvement, no matter if it’s a 1st grader or a 5th grader. Hear Pastor and Author Zach Zehnder discuss how to involve kids ministry more by watching this short video.