Proclaim: Supporting Church Planters

Church planting is most difficult in urban centers—exactly where new churches are most desperately needed. Thankfully, many brave souls are stepping out to answer God’s call on their lives. The Acts 29 Network supports intrepid church planters with training, encouragement, and other resources, but nothing can fully prepare a church-planting team for the range of challenges they’ll face. Certainly, nothing could prepare Claude Atcho for the challenges he faces.

Less than 60 days after a pair of bombs ripped through the crowd at the Boston Marathon, Claude, his wife Kelsey, and their team moved from their native Washington state to a hurting community more than 3,000 miles away. Though the Atchos left a lot behind when they moved last month, they made sure to bring along one vital ministry tool: Proclaim church presentation software.

Here’s what Proclaim helps Claude do:

Simplify

Churches scale in complexity as they grow. Megachurches are necessarily more complex than young church plants, but their size affords them access to resources and personnel to shoulder that complexity. Young churches, though, grow in spurts, in some phases lacking the volunteers to support a ministry that’s growing. Proclaim automates much of the service-planning process with templates and smart media, relieving stress so that pastors can focus on pastoring.

Collaborate

Cloud-based and cross-platform, Proclaim enables Atcho and others like him to collaborate with a team, maximizing creativity and sharing the load. Many young churches experience a bottleneck in service planning at the “worship computer.” Sunday mornings can become hectic: wrestling with file formats, uploading and organizing media, arranging slides, and double-checking song lyrics. But they don’t have to be. Proclaim makes it easy to work with a team to build a breathtaking church presentation and avoid Sunday-morning chaos.

Engage

Technology is often villainized as a major distraction during the service. Nobody likes to see the congregation speckled with glowing phone displays, but as more and more congregants are using their mobile devices to access Bible apps like the Faithlife Study Bible, the tide seems pretty inevitable. Proclaim makes it easy to redeem technology during the worship service. With Signals, pastors can broadcast announcements, Bible verses, web links, and even surveys to every mobile device in the room.

Pastor Atcho has a great task ahead of him, but he also has plenty of support, from his Acts 29 team alongside him to Proclaim church presentation software in his hands. We won’t be surprised to hear of the great things God does through Redeemer Boston.

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If you’d like to engage your congregation, collaborate more efficiently, and simplify your service planning, download Proclaim for free at ProclaimOnline.com/Download.