Some of you already know that for 2011, Pathmakers Church has been setting aside 10% of our total income from giving and outside contributions and directing them to other ministries. This isn’t a “we take 10% of our giving and use it for our own efforts in outreach, compassion, helping the poor, etc.” that you might hear about at other places. This is literally 10% that we send to another organization with no strings attached. It’s one way we partner with others in efforts that expand the entire Kingdom of God, instead of our own little “kingdoms.” And the reason we tell you here is partly so you know where that portion of your gift is going and partly in case God spurs you to give more to the organization or effort directly.
This time, we’re proud to be supporting the creators of “EasySlides” from Belfast Chinese Christian Church. What you may not know is that churches often shell out hundreds and thousands of dollars on computer hardware and software in order to display lyrics, videos, and sermon notes during their worship gatherings. This isn’t a problem for most of your midsize or larger churches in the United States, Canada, UK, and Australia. However, it’s extremely cost prohibitive to smaller churches, brand new churches, and churches in developing nations.
And so the creators of EasySlides came to the rescue. As I understand the story from bits and pieces on their message boards, BCCC needed some features they couldn’t find in other church presentation software. A big part was the multi-lingual aspect of their worship times (they do services in English, Mandarin Chinese, and Cantonese, apparently at the same time sometimes). They needed something that would display lyrics in two languages at once. So, a leader in their church used his computer programming skills to create a church presentation software from the ground up for use at his own church.
But then he did the opposite of what most people in his position with his skills would do… instead of marketing a product to be sold, he has made EasySlides a gift to be given to any church that needs it. As a result, EasySlides is used in over 100 countries all over the world… and now, at Pathmakers Church in Castle Rock, Colorado.
Because of the generosity of the folks at BCCC, Pathmakers Church is standing with them in their effort to make an extremely high quality and easy to use program available absolutely free to the Kingdom of God throughout the earth. Because the program runs on more basic computer systems with less speed and hardware requirements, it’s easy for poorer churches to use the program. It could even find its way into the thousands of underground church in hostile countries and probably already has. As such, countless thousands of people are hearing the Good News and worshipping God all over the world using the exact same computer program. Now that’s kinda cool to think about!