Let's Church State Of The Union 2026

A Free Hosting Model for Churches and Ministries

Churches and ministries produce a great deal of faithful preaching and teaching. Putting it online usually means choosing one of two paths. Commercial platforms offer extraordinary reach, but they're built around advertising and monetization.

Christian services built for ministries have shown how valuable independent infrastructure can be. But the ministry pays to host its preaching. What if the church had another model? No advertising, no subscription, no paywall, no charge to the ministry.

Supported by Christians who want everyone else to receive it freely. That's Let's Church, a Christian nonprofit building technology infrastructure for the church and giving it away. Many ministries pay $60, $200, or even more every month to host their preaching.

On Let's Church, it's free. We believe ministries should be supported, not sold. As Third John puts it, we ought to support such men so that we may be fellow workers for the truth. Last year, many of you trusted us with about $20 ,000.

Thank you. Here's what happened to it. About $16 ,000 went into servers we own. We moved off the cloud onto hardware this ministry controls. You helped turn this into this, the new Let's Church, built around the features that make it unique and live today.

Searchable Transcripts and New Platform Features

Searchable transcripts have been our foundation from the start. Since last year, we've built on them and implemented a number of new features, including agentic search, automatic scripture annotations, chapters and overviews, speaker recognition, Let's Stop Bible, and live streaming.

And the community is growing. Compared with September of 2025, more than 94 ,000 media uploads, up 77%, and about 2 ,707 days of content, up 78%. 128 channels, up 36%, 490 registered accounts, up 63%, and between 13 and 23 ,000 visitors every month.

Let's Church is becoming more than video hosting. It's becoming a searchable body of Christian teaching. A sermon becomes a transcript, with its speaker, its chapters, and its scripture references. And all of it becomes searchable.

With agentic search, you can ask a question in plain language and filter the results by Bible verse. Every message gets an automatic overview, chapters, and time-indexed scripture references. Not just explicit references, but even allusions.

Click a reference to jump to that moment in the media, or click through to the passage itself on Let's Dot Bible. Let's Dot Bible links scripture back to the teaching on it, alongside the complete text, interlinear Greek and Hebrew, and study notes.

The Financial Foundation for Free Access

Last year, you helped us build it. Now we're asking for your help again to sustain it. We've proven we can build the platform, but we haven't yet built the financial foundation underneath it. Altogether, our expenses come to about $1 ,100 a month, annualized.

With AI inference, we estimate about $1 ,300. Recurring donations today are $365 a month, and we're grateful for every partner behind them. We've been relying on large donations, for which we're truly grateful.

Right now, the baseline gap is about $735 a month. With inference, about $935. Storage alone is about $6 ,000 a year. About $500 a month keeps the library stored. The whole budget is only about $15 ,600 a year, a modest cost for public Christian infrastructure.

How Searchable Sermons Can Serve the Church

Imagine a pastor preparing to preach Romans 9, and finding faithful preaching on that passage across thousands of hours of teaching. Imagine a Christian asking a question and getting an answer grounded in real sermons, with citations, so they can go and listen for themselves.

Imagine a small church or a missionary with no technology budget getting the same hosting, transcription, search, and streaming as anyone else. Imagine decades of faithful preaching, preserved on infrastructure Christians control.

And imagine all of it remaining free. That's what we're building. The next step is storage. About $30 ,000 would bring our storage onto our own hardware, the way we did our servers, our largest recurring expense, owned instead of rented.

Raising Support for Storage and Future Features

There's more in the works, too. Free church websites and more features, like hymn search and mobile apps. So here's our request. We're praying for about 40 Christians willing to become co-laborers at $25 a month.

40 co-laborers would close the gap. If God has given you more ability, give more. If 25 isn't possible, give 10. And please, don't give anything that belongs to your local church. There are no perks.

The benefit is that everyone gets it. And there are three ways to co-labor with us. Give, upload, bring your church or ministry, and tell pastors, podcasters, and ministries about Let's Church. Let's Church isn't an idea anymore.

Keeping the Platform Free Through Christian Partnership

We're asking you to help sustain something that exists. Ministries should be supported, not sold. So we won't put these tools behind a subscription, and we won't run ads against the sermons. Free doesn't mean it costs nothing.

It means someone has chosen to bear the cost. Let's build infrastructure that serves Christ's church. And let's give it away. Soli Deo Gloria.