Fun | free Christian resources

Nov 15

Free Christian advent calendars

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.

Nov 13

Free 2009 Christian Calendar

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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.

Sep 17

A wordle picture tells a thousand words

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Wordle is more of a diverting website than one you will visit again and again. It allows you to put in a website url or a list of words (say from a book in the bible) and it creates an image of the words. The more a word appears, the larger it is in the picture. The image above was based on recent posts at free Christian resources so as you can see Christian, God, books, prayer and website were the most popular words.

You can play around with the settings to create different variations. I’m not 100% sure where this could be used, maybe for an outreach leaflet or something?

Aug 05

iPhone bible hangman game

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iPhone Bible Hangman
main website | apple website

A simple hangman game based on words from the bible

Bible Hangman is a version of hangman with a biblical theme. This version contains a dictionary of 8,935 words. You have the option to set the difficulty and time limit which help ensure it should remain challenging.

It includes a good mixture of words with plenty of names and places included. It is more difficult than normal hangman due to some of the obscure words, a couple of examples from my games were Peruda and Husham, and that was on the easy setting!

The graphical design is very basic and it would be great if this could be brought more in line with the coolness of the iPhone!

Apr 30

free movie clips with a Christian message!

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Wing Clips is a great website that provides free downloadable movie clips for pastors and teachers to use in their messages*. I first heard of Wing Clips at Jonny Baker’s blog when he highlighted that the medium resolution clips are provided free. If you want the high resolution clips, or sermon outlines that go with clips, then there is a premium membership option from $11.59 per month.

* Private users do not have permission to download files.

The clips vary from roughly 30 seconds to 4 minutes in length, and come from commercial films such as Juno. This could be a superb way to illustrate your preach and help people apply aspects of the gospel and the bible to their life.

Whilst the free downloads are only for pastors or teachers you can be based in a non-profit organization that isn’t a church, or in a school too. The menu bar on the left allows you to search the clips either by a keyword (e.g. apology, anger etc.) or by the film

Jan 25

“Christian” movie quotes and parables

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film_series Movie Parables is a fun website that provides quotes and parables around movies that are similar to those found in the bible. As well as being fun, it may also come in handy for preparing illustrations for sermons if you want to use something the non-Christians in the audience will be able to relate to. The content is split into several areas as follows:

Movie quotes/parables

This is a list of films sorted in order of topic (e.g. attitude, believing) which then gives a quote from the film and a similar biblical quote. The structure of the list makes it easy to find what you may be looking for. Here is an example from A Knights Tale:

From A Knight’s Tale (2001):
“Hope guides me, that is what gets me through the day and the night.”

From Hebrews 6:19a (KJV):
“Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast.”

Movie concordance and mini reviews

This section of the website is more meaty than the quote section. The movie concordance gives a detailed summary of the movie with a specific biblical truth highlighted in each. As with the quotes, is is sorted into topic order. Alternatively there is a mini-review section which gives a small review of each film with a spiritual/biblical truth in alphabetical order of the movie.

Other 6 finds God - recently stumbled upon

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Other 6 is a website that simply asks: “Where have you found God today” or “Where do you need to find God today”. The premise of the website is that if you need God’s help or you have seen God at work in you life then you add it to this website.

It is a simple idea that is very well executed. As much as a website can be it is very peaceful and this is achieved both through the visuals and the subtle background noises. If you want to contribute you simply type in your comment and it appears as a little bubble on the screen. It is a great way to see how God is working in various peoples’ lives.

Links
http://www.other6.com/

You can find more of the websites that I have given the thumbs up at my StumbleUpon page, or by looking at the StumbleUpon widget in the sidebar.

Oct 20

Free ESV bible verse screensaver

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Andy Thompson from the Coded for Worship blog has created a way to have an ESV bible verse that changes every day as a screensaver. It uses a program called rsssaver (PC only sadly) to show the ESV daily verse feed as your screensaver. This is a great idea to keep your screensaver from becoming boring and the same day after day!

Website: http://tydnablog.wordpress.com/2007/10/05/my-esv-bible-screensaver/

Sep 24

Add ESV bible verses to FaceBook

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Many may argue that facebook is a waste of your precious time, so why not add a bit of biblical truth to your page?The ‘Holy Bible’ application simply puts a random daily verse onto your facebook page for you or your visitors to view. Alternatively you can select it to display a specific verse.

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