Life-Changing 40-Day Experiences in Your Church
We’ve launched 40-day Jesus-centered challenges in more than a thousand churches around the world and seen God move mightily—are you ready? Let’s do this!
Grace-Based, Jesus-Centered
Church Growth Catalyst
Proven Results
Want 692 hours of FREE staff time done for you?
Running a church, though rewarding, is tiring. Maybe even exhausting. Church staffs love our materials because we’ve got everything turnkey and ready-to-go. We certainly don’t mind when churches add their unique contributions to our challenges, but when you team up with us, nobody on your church staff should ever have to start from scratch.
How it Works
Hundreds of churches have successfully launched Challenges across all denominations.
Choose Your Challenge
If this is your first 40-Day Challenge, we suggest starting with the original Red Letter Challenge. Then, Being Challenge, Forgiving Challenge, and Serving Challenge.
Pick Your Launch Season
New Year Kickoff – Jan. 5 or 12, 2025
Lent Kickoff – March 2, 2025
Post Easter Kickoff – April 21, 2025
Summer Kickoff – June 1 or 8, 2025
Fall Kickoff – Sept. 7 or 14, 2025
Transform Your Church
Focus on Jesus and not the little details. Sharing this journey will energize, unify, and transform both you and your church.
Red Letter Living Featured on:
Why Launch a 40-day challenge in the Next Season?
Create a Time to Self-Examine
Our 40-Day Challenges offer daily, practical, clear, yet challenging next steps for people to not only examine where they are in their faith today, but to push them, by grace, through faith, to become even greater followers of Jesus. Our challenges are simple to understand, but challenging to put into practice.
Churchwide Unity
Doing what Jesus calls us to do is fulfilling, but challenging. By doing a 40-day challenge together as a church, you'll do more together. Watch momentum, energy, and excitement build as the entire church encourages and supports one another in their pursuit to follow Jesus.
Done-For-You Church Campaign Kits
Rather than being buried in the logistics of running a 40-day church sermon series, we’ve done our best to take care of every logistical detail from promotion to completion. Included in our FREE library of resources for each 40-day challenge are small group materials, kids weekly curriculum, social media graphics, sermon manuscripts, and more.
Custom and Ready-To-Go Church Packs
Our best rates are found in our ready-to-go discounted church packs (link below), which range from 10 to 1000 books. If you are looking for a custom quantity, just fill out the custom quote form below.
The Challenges
You can choose any 40-day challenge to start. However, if this is your first time launching a 40-day challenge with your church or small group, we suggest starting with Red Letter Challenge. Then, move on to Being Challenge, Forgiving Challenge, and Serving Challenge.
Red Letter Challenge & Red Letter Challenge Kids
Being Challenge &
Being Challenge Kids
Forgiving Challenge & Forgiving Challenge Kids
Serving Challenge &
Serving Challenge Kids
The Free Resources
Red Letter Living has dynamic, turnkey resources that make it easy for you to challenge every person in your church to become a greater follower of Jesus Christ.
Resource Library
Don’t reinvent the wheel. Along with our challenges come professional, pre-made graphics, small group Bible study resources, sermon resources, kids curriculums, and more that help create a turnkey 40-day experience at your church.
Proven & Practical Discipleship
Our 40-Day Challenges have been launched and completed in more than 1200 churches of all different shapes, sizes, and denominations. We’ve designed our 40-Day Challenges to be practical and simple to implement. After helping more than a thousand churches, we’re confident our resources will be a fit for your church, no matter the context. From kids to senior adults, it’s the perfect all-in churchwide campaign.
40% growth in small groups in 40 days.
250,000+ people have completed a 40-Day Challenge
100% of pastors highly recommend!
What Church Leaders are Saying
“In an era where people are struggling with discipleship, diving into the words of Jesus is one of the best things you can do. I love how Red Letter Challenge makes it easy to get an entire church diving deeper into the teachings of Christ.”
Carey Nieuwhof
Founding Pastor of Connexus Church, Author and Speaker
“If you feel like you were made for something more or if you are tired of checking religious boxes, the Red Letter Challenge is for you! By challenging people to go back to the good news message of Jesus, I truly believe this will help you find the life you were made for.”
Mike Foster
Secondchance.org
Our congregation has used RLC resources in congregation-wide efforts three times over the last two years, from RLC itself in Lent and in Fall, as well as kids’ materials. We are convinced that these have allowed us to not only stay vibrant during the last 20 months of craziness, but we’ve seen folks more engaged in serving others as well as in generosity for God’s work. We love “sitting at the feet of Jesus!” And then getting out and living out His love!
Rev. Jonathan M. Dinger
Pastor, Grace Lutheran Church
Free Book for Pastors!
Pastor, our team would be honored to send you a free 40-Day Challenge book!
Just fill out this quick form and we’ll ship it out to you. * For USA Pastors Only
Hours We Save Your Staff
6 sermon manuscripts: 20 hours/per sermon = 120 hours
6 sermon videos: 3 hours/per video = 18 hours
6 weeks of kid’s curriculum: 15 hours/per week = 90 hours
6 weeks of small group study guides: 3 hours/per week = 18 hours
6 weeks of teen small group study guides: 3 hours/per week = 18 hours
6 weeks of small group video writing, filming, and editing: 20 hours/per video = 120 hours
100+ graphics: .5 hours/graphic = 50 hours
12 How-to-Videos for how to launch a 40-day challenge: 1/hour per video = 12 hours
41 daily devotionals: 3 hours/per daily devotional = 123 hours (for first drafts)
41 daily kid’s devotionals: 3 hours/per daily devotional = 123 hours (for first drafts)
FAQ
Yes. We love letting pastors see our 40-Day Challenge books. Simply fill out this quick form so we know where to send it and we will mail you one.
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. 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 on our get started page.
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 100 or more copies, you can schedule a FREE 30-minute Zoom with Pastor and Author Zach Zehnder. Additionally, you can ask further questions by contacting us.
These are the 5 best times of the calendar year to launch a 40-Day Church Challenge.
- Beginning of Year: You can promote heavily in December and at Christmas and build some serious momentum in the new year.
- Lent: 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 and habits of Jesus into practice!
- 40 Days after Easter: After the big celebratory Easter Sunday, it’s important you follow it up with great momentum. Usually a church will have an 8-week window open after Easter while families are still in school. A 40-Day Church Challenge can provide some turnkey resources that will keep momentum strong going into the summer months.
- Summer: While most churches decrease in attendance in summer months, a 40-Day Church Challenge is a great opportunity to start the summer with a jump, not a slump!
- Fall: Weekly worship attendance is normally at its strongest in the Fall. Launching a 40-Day Church Challenge in the Fall will provide momentum and energy for your church to sustain this high attended season. We encourage a start time any time after the school session (Ideally the Sunday after Labor Day) is back and encourage churches to wrap up by Thanksgiving.
Yes, please contact us and we will be happy to give you a comparable quote depending on whatever size you need
Zach does offer a limited number of Sundays to speak at churches. Additionally, he is a sought-after conference/event speaker. His topics that he excels in are discipleship, church growth, spiritual keystone habits, forgiveness, and anything related to his works. Fill out the Speaker Request Form with some needed information on our end and our team will get back to you.
All of the free resources are located in our resource library.
