Updates to Faithlife’s Strategic Direction

For those of you who don’t know me yet, I’m Vik Rajagopal, CEO of Faithlife. I want to take this opportunity to share more information about the strategic direction of Faithlife as we celebrate our 30th anniversary and step into our next thirty years.

The past 30 years

Our founder, Bob Pritchett, launched Logos Bible Software in January of 1992. Bob saw an opportunity to make Bible study more accessible, and for the past thirty years we have worked hard to equip the church and help our users go deeper in their study and understanding of the Word. 

In recent years, we branched out to offer a suite of tools that serve churches more broadly through church management software (ChMS), website hosting, live streaming, online giving, and more. While our product assortment has grown, our mission and vision have not changed. Our mission is to use technology to equip the church to grow in the light of the Bible. And our vision is to increase biblical literacy and accessibility for every Christian around the world.

Honoring our mission and vision

We believe good stewardship requires us to continually challenge and defend our decisions, priorities, and direction to make sure they’re aligned with our mission and vision, and are in the best interests of our customers. We spent the past year taking a critical look at our business—evaluating where we’ve been and where we’re going. What customer needs are we uniquely suited to address? What can we do with excellence? Which areas best enable us to increase biblical literacy and accessibility around the world?

As we assessed the state of our products, it became abundantly clear we needed to double down where we are uniquely positioned to serve the church—and that’s Bible study tools, content delivery, and digital discipleship. These things are fundamentally aligned with our mission and our vision—they’re why our customers love us, and they represent areas where we can offer unique value to the kingdom. And in this time of uncertainty, we believe those elements are in even more need today than they were thirty years ago.

… it became abundantly clear we needed to double down where we are uniquely positioned to serve the church …

Product–mission alignment

We also had to face some hard facts with some of our newer product lines. After eight years of development, Faithlife Equip and our integrated ministry platform were still missing key features our users needed. Addressing these product challenges would take us many more years. 

In the meantime, COVID encouraged churches to adopt other quality church management and online giving solutions on an accelerated timeline. And with our development and other resources split between church management and our flagship product, Logos Bible Software, we realized we were diluting efforts toward our most mission-critical work to stand up products that were peripheral to our vision.

That’s why we’ve made the difficult decision to exit the church management space and sunset parts of Faithlife Equip, effective June 30, 2023. The Equip sunset will include Sites, Live Stream, and core ChMS functionality. We will continue to offer Logos, Proclaim, Sermons, TV, and Pro Media and have plans to integrate these products further with our various Bible study tools in the future.

We do not do this lightly—this decision is the result of many months of discussion, debate, analysis, customer interviews, and even a few tears. But it’s what we believe is necessary and right both for our customers and our business. 

To those that placed their trust in us to deliver a compelling, full-featured integrated ministry platform, we are sorry we fell short of our promise. We know this decision will impact you, your team, and possibly your congregation. We will work to make your offboarding options and experience as simple and seamless as possible. Please know that our support team will remain available to provide the same excellent support as you navigate this product transition over the next nine months.

While I regret that we will not fulfill our vision for Faithlife Equip, I’m excited for the future, starting with an exciting product announcement we will make in the coming days.

We strive to help every Christian worldwide go deeper in the Word …

Resourcing every corner of the world

We strive to help every Christian worldwide go deeper in the Word, and we will be even more intentional in our efforts in the coming years. This starts with our next version of Logos Bible Software. We’ll build and grow from there as we seek to meet the needs of our users and leverage technology to bring Christians in every corner of the world closer to the Word. Our vision will require ongoing innovation and the delivery of awesome new tools and services that bring unique value to our customers. This is what we’ve been called to do, and this is what we will pursue with all of our energy and resources as we look to the future.