Life-Changing 40-Day Experiences for Your Church
Experience unity like never before as every person in your church is challenged to put the words of Jesus into practice!
Daily Challenges For All Ages
Jesus-Centered
Turnkey, Free Church Resources
You should not have to reinvent the wheel with discipleship.
Leading a church the past two years has been tough to say the least. Keeping everyone on one mission with everything that is going on in the world, pandemic opinions (mask vs. no mask, vaccine vs. no vaccine) political tension, racial oppression, some saying you need to speak up here, or some offended you said too much there, wow...division is at an all-time high, and the church hasn’t been immune to this. Pastors, one of the wisest things you can do in divisive times, when noise is really loud all around you, is go back to the basics. Go back to the Good News. What unifies our church more than anything else? It’s Jesus. You shouldn’t have to spend hours searching for discipleship programs and Bible studies that you’ll have to spend days rewriting. Red Letter Living creates turnkey resources and sermon series for churches with proven results that are focused on the words, habits, and life of Jesus. Our 40-day challenges not only will teach Jesus-centered content, but will challenge every person in your church to take steps toward Jesus!
How it Works
Over 600 churches have successfully launched challenges across all denominations.
Choose Your Challenge
Choose the discipleship challenge that best fits for your needs. We suggest starting with
Red Letter Challenge.
Follow the Step-by-Step Process
We’ve created training videos, blogs, graphics, and free resources to help you run a successful challenge.
Transform Your Church
Focus on Jesus and not the little details. Sharing this journey will energize, unify, and transform both you and your church.
Why Launch Our 40-Day Church Challenges?
Jesus-Centered
Jesus is the greatest disciple-maker in the world. Putting His words into practice helps people of all ages find the life God designed them to live. By staying focused on Jesus and the simple command to “hear and do” His words, we ensure a unifying experience for the whole church from beginning to end.
Practical Daily Challenges For Everyone
Everyone is personally invited to follow Jesus. Our challenges offer practical, clear, yet challenging next steps to help people of all ages grow in their faith. Watch momentum, energy, and excitement build in your church as the entire church encourages and supports one another in their pursuit to follow Jesus.
Done-For-You Church Campaign Kits
Your time is best spent shepherding and guiding your members through the journey. Rather than being buried in the logistics of running a 40-day all-in 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.
Church Packs
From 10 books to over 1500 books we have a bundle that will will work for your church size.
The Challenges
Comprehensive Church Packs designed to guide churches or small groups of all sizes through a life-changing 40-day journey. You can choose any 40-day challenge to start. However, if this is your first time launching a 40-day challenge with your congregation or small group, we suggest starting with Red Letter Challenge. Then, move on to Being Challenge and Forgiving Challenge after that.
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, and kid curriculums that help create a complete sermon series.
Personal Assessment
Any individual can take the free Red Letter Challenge assessment to measure how they are pursuing Jesus according to five discipleship targets.
Blog
Discover the latest church leadership insights and tips to help you grow your church.
Free Book for Pastors
Pastors, 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.
Proven & Practical Discipleship
As pastors and church leaders, we have experience guiding all church sizes through 40-day challenges. We’ve designed our 40-day challenges to be practical and simple to implement. After helping hundreds of churches launch challenges, we’re confident our resources will be a fit for your church, no matter the context. Perfect as a sermon series or church 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
“Leading churches are using campaigns to increase engagement in their community. Red Letter Challenge is not only a plug and play campaign to help your church gain a better insight into the teaching of Jesus but it will also help your church grow because of deeper engagement!”
Rich Birch
Founder of unSeminary, Author, 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
Free Book for Pastors
Pastors, 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.
FAQ
As many of the answers as we have!
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.
Absolutely! Click on the book you would like to sample: Red Letter Challenge, Being Challenge, Forgiving Challenge