free Christian resources » fun

Free food for Christians!

David at freeChristianresources — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 20:18:07 +0000

I’ll make a disclaimer at the start that this post is linking to an irreverent article that made me laugh rather than anything deep! In Jon Acuff’s article “Developing a sixth sense to locate free food at church” he discusses the various ways you can get free food at churches. You can see the full list at his blog, but here is a small extract:

1. Tail Volunteers.
Most churches realize that to keep Sunday School teachers, ushers and other volunteers on their “A game” they’ve got to be well fed … the first thing you need to do is find a volunteer and tail them …

You can read the rest of the post at his blog, Prodigal Jon.

GodTube is relaunched Tangle

David at freeChristianresources — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 21:02:28 +0000

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Tangle (formerly known as GodTube)
main website

YouTube and myspace wrapped up into a Christian website!

GodTube has now relaunched as Tangle. It is completely revamped both in its content and design.

The design is more reminiscent of myspace than youtube as it has more of a social element to it. However the content is more focused on videos. The redesign is very successful and makes uses Tangle much easier and more fun with easy to navigate menus and a clear layout.

Tangle is not as overtly Christian as GodTube, with the main emphasis being on safety. However, the artists featured are predominantly Christian and under the tools menu there is a bible and a prayer wall.

As with YouTube it is easy to embed videos into your own websites, two that I watched are shown at the end of this post.

Tangle certainly seems a much more exciting prospect than GodTube. It will be interesting to see over the coming months if they can get more Christian artists to add profiles to allow it to compete with the other social networks.

The 15 best free Easter card websites

David at freeChristianresources — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 01:41:18 +0000

Finding high quality free Easter cards is a challenge to say the least. If you want to send a card with East eggs or bunnies on it, then you are in luck. Otherwise, you may struggle to find something good. Hopefully by collecting these websites here it will save you some time scouring the internet. It is grouped into eCard websites and printable card websites.

The best Easter eCard websites

123 greetings splits their Easter cards into 15 sections and the pictures are sometimes of a high quality.
Hallmark has a reasonable selection that are usefully grouped into different styles (cute, religious, classic and humor)
American Greeting has loads of cards. If you sift through the pictures carefully there are some good ones in there!

Alternatively, you may want to use a website that allows you to upload your own photo

ecardpics.com
Care2.com
Regards.com

Other Easter eCard websites

GoodFridayCards has a very Catholic style to their cards.
BlueMountain has 47 Easter ecards, many of them are just chicks and eggs but they do have a couple of more original ones that are worth a look.
Blessedeaster is the place to go if you want an Easter card with flowers on them.
Deliver.net has a good idea of allowing you to use flickr photos to create a more interesting Easter Card. You cannot choose from the whole of flickr though, so choices can be somewhat limited.
HappyDays has a couple of decent ecards.
Care2.com has chicks, bunnies and eggs galore!

Make your own craft Easter cards

If you want to make something a little more special and personalized then these websites may help”

CraftIdeas.info has a good guide on making a collage Easter card. You can see a picture to the right.
boogiesbc.ro has instructions on how to make an Easter card with Photoshop. This one is not for the fainthearted!
Hoover Web Design has a collection of 5 cards (bunnies and eggs style) that you can print out and use.

Find more Easter resources
You can find extra free Easter stuff including sermons, cards, music, clip art, devotions and much more at the Easter page.

image by dtcchc.

Hillsong YouTube video for kids

David at freeChristianresources — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 08:17:59 +0000

This YouTube video is not quite as high brow as many that I feature but I thought it was pretty fun, I guess it reminded me of my youth working days! Hillsong provide lots of great YoutTube videos for both adults and children.

You can find more great Christian YouTube videos at the free Christian resources YouTube playlist, or at the YouTube page at free Christian resources.

Watch the Christian video below, or at the YouTube website

GodTube to change name and relaunch

David at freeChristianresources — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 20:36:17 +0000

GodTube is soon going to relaunch and combine the elements of Facebook and MySpace as well (obviously!) YouTube. It will be interesting to see how effectively they can achieve this, it could become a superb website for Christians.

Here is the video that the YouTube site released. CrunchChurch have posted an article suggesting the name will be tangle.com, however you can’t yet log in.

Free Parable Videos

David at freeChristianresources — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 21:28:08 +0000

ModernParables are currently providing all of their videos free online. This is for a limited period so act now if you are interested.

The parables include:

Hidden Treasure
Samaritan
The Shrewd Manager
The Widow and Judge
The Sower
Prodigal Sons

iPhone bible verse quiz

David at freeChristianresources — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 21:08:00 +0000

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Which Verses
main website | apple website

Quick bible quizzes to test your knowledge.

Which Verses is a simple iPhone based website that test s your knowledge of the bible.

It is straightforward to use, and dye to it’s simple layout is quick to load. One very useful feature added recently is the ability to save your scores. This obviously helps see if you are getting any better. You need a gmail account to do this.

You select a group of books from the bible and then have to say which of those books a specific verse comes from. So for instance here is one of the questions:

Then went he inward, and measured the post of the door, two cubits; and the door, six cubits; and the breadth of the door, seven cubits. So he measured the length thereof, twenty cubits; and the breadth, twenty cubits, before the temple: and he said unto me, This is the most holy place. After he measured the wall of the house, six cubits; and the breadth of every side chamber, four cubits, round about the house on every side.

Jeremiah

Isaiah

Ezekiel

Lamentations

It would be good if there was a difficulty setting for those that are more well studied in scripture. Other potential improvemts might include different types of question (e.g. How many wives did Soloman have).

You can also play it on a normal web browser on your computer, which is a slightly easier version to use due to the larger screen

All in all this is a fun application to use that is a good way to get you to read a variety of verses.

Top 3 free Christmas card websites

David at freeChristianresources — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 21:47:48 +0000

If you want to send online Christmas cards this year to save money or reduce your carbon footprint then here are the best three websites for cards with a Christian message.

There are plenty of other ecard websites but these have been picked because they have the best pictures and all are focused on the Christian message of Christmas. Please let me know if you find any other good websites!

Cross Daily.com

Cross Daily has a selection of 52 free Christian Christmas cards available for you to choose from. You can highly personalize the message and formatting of the card to make sure it is exactly as you want.

You can also sign up for a free account at Cross Daily and get access to plenty of other Christian resources.

Heartlights Heart cards

Heartlights Heart has 29 free Christian Christmas cards that you can send. You can add your own personalized message and even select a Christmas hymn to play in the background when it is viewed.

Heartlight’s website also includes lots of devotions, graphics and articles that you may also find interesting to look through.

DaySpring

The Day Spring website cards tend to have animations, a few of which are Jesus focused.

Find more Christmas songs and resources
You can find more free Christmas stuff including sermons, advent calendars, music, clip art and much more at the Christmas page. You can also find lots of free Christmas songs at the ‘free Christmas songs’ section. image by rache.

Free Christian advent calendars

David at freeChristianresources — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 22:12:03 +0000

With the beginning of December just a few weeks away thoughts may be turning to getting hold of a good advent calendar. Advent calendars where first used by German Lutherans in the early 19th century, often by simply drawing chalk lines on their doors each day. Now they are often used for children as a great way to count down to Christmas Day when we celebrate the birth of Jesus.

Sadly most advent calendars these days are stuffed with chocolate and may not contain any references to Jesus. Here though are some of the best free online sources of Christian advent calendars, please leave a comment if you know any better ones!

The Nativity advent calendar

The Nativity advent calendar is provided by New Line Cinema who created the Nativity film. You need to download the software (Mac and PC versions are available) and you can then run it each day. Every day you get a picture from the film and a verse from the bible by clicking on the stars. I’m assuming once it actually gets to December the correct star for the day will flash otherwise it is quite tricky to work out which one to press!

Graphically the Nativity calendar is impressive, and it is clear Christian too.

Make it from scratch!

If you’re artistic and creative then you may want to make the entire advent calendar yourself. St Luke’s Episcopal Church has a simple to follow guide.

If that all seems at bit much then the advent calendar template used at Presentation Helper may be of use. It is not actually Christian as you can see from the image to the right. However it would be easy to tweak it to have a Christian theme. It comes in a powerpoint format that you can use on your computer, or you can print it off to make it more of a traditional advent calendar.

Advent calendars for your website

Sean McManus’s javascript advent calendar is only for the brave! If you own your own website you can create your own advent calendar page that gives a message when you click on a given box. Obviously this can be made as Christian (or not) as you like.

The example provided works, but I’d imagine it would take a little bit of effort to get this advent calendar looking good for your website.

Advent devotions

The American Bible Societies advent page is not strictly an advent calendar, but it does have lots of devotional materials with a particular focus on the gospels.

Other advent calendars

The Jesse tree is an online version of the tradition of hanging symbolic ornaments on Christmas tress that represented the Messianic prophecies.
Artcyclopedia 2004 advent calendar is very good if you like traditional Christian images and Renaissance art.

Find more Christmas songs and resources
You can find more free Christmas stuff including sermons, advent calendars, music, clip art and much more at the Christmas page. You can also find lots of free Christmas songs at the ‘free Christmas songs’ section. image by rache.

Free 2009 Christian Calendar

David at freeChristianresources — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 20:55:36 +0000

If you are about to start looking for a calendar for 2009 then look no further! I’ve created a 2009 Christian calendar that you can download for free. Each month has a high quality picture and a bible verse. There is also space for you to write your diary entries. You are free to distribute and print the calendar as many times as you like.

The calendar is in a PDF format and was created in iPhoto. Simply follow the steps below to print out your free Christian calendar for 2009.

1) Download the free Christian Calendar
To save space I’ve zipped the file. If you have a PC right click here with your mouse and select “Save target as…” . If you have a Mac then right click or hold [ctrl] and click here and choose “Save link as…” from the menu.

2) Print the free Christian Calendar
You have a couple of choices here. If you like life to be easy you could pay a printer to print it off professionally. Obviously this isn’t free but you may get a better output depending on how good your printer is.

The alternative is to print it out yourself. You could just print it out on normal paper if you need to save costs. For best results though use proper photo paper and put the pictures on the glossy side (apart from the cover page).

3) Make the free Christian calendar

Create a hole single hole punch in the middle of all the top of each of the pictures. You’ll use this hole to hang it up. Then you just need to attach all of the pages together either by using a spindle or some other method. You should be able to get a good idea by looking at the pictures in this post.

Credits
Most of the pictures for the calendar have come from Flickr. These have been provided free of charge and legally by whoever took the pictures. The links to all of the pictures are given on the calendar on the relevant page.