“Commit your work to the Lord, and your plans will be established.” Proverbs 16:3

When you’re on the business end of ministry, it’s easy to get caught up in tasks.
Launching Scripture+Shared was, and still is, a task-heavy project. Planning
curriculum, booking spaces, ordering tech equipment for small groups—the list goes on. But here’s the amazing thing: tasks serve a purpose, and when we cross things off the list, we don’t count them as complete; we count them as passed to God, and God moved quickly and in big ways.

On the marketing side, we began advertising the church’s free Bible study app through our Google AdWords grant. We shared the material with our followers on social media. We told our friends and family what the church was doing through Scripture+Shared. We did whatever we could to spread the word, and spread it did.

Our vision was to create a free resource with study materials that could be accessed with the push of a button and get 2,000 people to study the Bible in community. We knew that this would spur incredible spiritual growth for our people, and it worked! We have approximately at least 1,600 people studying the Bible together at St. Luke’s with about 1,200 of them using the Scripture+Shared app. There are 2,530 app downloads and 100,148 impressions. We were stunned, but God saw an even bigger picture. Not only did our church members and attendees start studying the materials in the app, but people across Texas and even the United States began studying the same things we were studying. All along, we were aiming to “be the church” for St. Luke’s, and God surged us into being the church for a much larger community.

Now about that to-do list: There is something to be said for the tasks. They really are more than our daily, weekly, or monthly chores. Instead, they are moments of
obedience dedicated to God’s divine purpose. When I consider all the work that went into the launch and continued maintenance of Scripture+Shared, I think of the ways the Lord took our to-do lists and church’s vision and created something bigger than we ever could have imagined. God helped us be the church to people we may never meet
face-to-face and formed faith-building relationships. Isn’t that just what God does best?

It’s not too late to study Galatians with us! Download the app or access the study materials here.