If you own a smartphone, there’s a good chance Life.Church has already been in your pocket whether you’ve ever attended one of its services or not. The Oklahoma church founded by Craig and Amy Groeschel became one of the pioneers of the multisite and online-church movements, but its influence extends well beyond its own congregations. Life.Church created YouVersion, the organization behind the Bible App, and later began giving away an enormous library of sermons, graphics, children’s curricula, software, and other ministry resources through its Open Network. In the process, a church that began with a handful of people in a garage became one of the clearest examples of what nondenominational-style Christianity can look like in the digital age.
There’s a slight complication with calling Life.Church nondenominational, however. Life.Church is actually affiliated with the Evangelical Covenant Church. In practice, though, its public identity, ministry model, worship style, expansion, and influence place it squarely in the world most Americans associate with nondenominational evangelicalism. Most people encountering Life.Church aren’t encountering it as the local expression of a denomination. They’re encountering Life.Church.
Craig Groeschel and the Beginning of Life.Church
Craig Groeschel didn’t begin with a plan to build an enormous multisite church or develop one of the world’s most widely distributed Bible applications. Life.Church traces its beginning to 1996, when a small group began meeting in a garage in the Oklahoma City area. The church was originally known as Life Covenant Church, and from the beginning Groeschel emphasized reaching people who weren’t particularly interested in traditional church culture. That concern would eventually shape almost everything associated with Life.Church, from its preaching style and technology to the way it thinks about buildings and campuses.
Groeschel belongs to the generation of evangelical pastors that came of age after the church-growth and seeker-sensitive movements had already challenged many assumptions about how churches should operate. Life.Church adopted some of the same instincts without simply becoming another Willow Creek. Services were contemporary, sermons were practical and accessible, and the church was willing to experiment with methods that previous generations would have considered unusual. One of its best-known values eventually summarized the approach rather well: the church would do anything short of sin to reach people who didn’t know Christ. That leaves quite a bit of room for experimentation.
Growth created an obvious problem. A successful church could build a larger sanctuary, keep adding services, or start additional congregations. Life.Church increasingly chose the third option, but with a technological twist. Instead of developing each location as a largely independent church with its own senior pastor and preaching ministry, Life.Church developed a multisite model in which campuses shared the same identity, leadership, teaching, and ministry strategy. Campus pastors provided local leadership while Groeschel’s teaching could be distributed throughout the church.
One Church in Many Locations
That distinction matters because Life.Church isn’t really a network of independent churches in the way ARC is. Its physical locations are campuses of one church. The model depends on centralized leadership, shared resources, common branding, coordinated ministries, and teaching that can be delivered across multiple locations. Video preaching, which once seemed suspiciously close to watching television in church, became ordinary enough that many younger Christians probably wonder what all the fuss was about.
The theological argument behind the model is fairly straightforward. If the New Testament doesn’t require every local gathering of Christians to have a different preacher standing physically in front of it every Sunday, technology can be treated as a tool rather than a theological problem. Critics have reasonably asked whether the model concentrates too much influence in a prominent senior pastor or weakens the relationship between a congregation and the person teaching it. Supporters answer that local campus pastors still provide pastoral leadership while technology allows a gifted communicator to serve far more people. Life.Church didn’t invent every element of multisite ministry, but it helped demonstrate that the model could operate on a very large scale.
The same willingness to experiment led naturally to online ministry. Long before churches were forced to learn livestreaming during the COVID era, Life.Church was treating the internet as a genuine ministry environment rather than simply a place to post sermon recordings. Life.Church Online developed interactive services, prayer, chat, and opportunities for people to take spiritual next steps. The church later made its Church Online Platform available to other congregations as well.
What Life.Church Believes
For all the technological innovation, Life.Church’s basic theology is conventional evangelical Christianity. It affirms one God eternally existing as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; the full significance of Jesus’ sinless life, atoning death, resurrection, ascension, and return; human sinfulness; salvation through Christ; and the inspiration and authority of Scripture. Its statement of faith describes the Bible as the supreme source of truth for Christian belief and life and affirms it as without error.
Life.Church practices believers’ baptism as a public declaration of faith and places considerable emphasis on conversion and spiritual growth. Its stated mission is “to lead people to become fully devoted followers of Christ,” which explains why its ministry language tends to focus heavily on next steps. People aren’t merely encouraged to attend services. They’re encouraged to trust Christ, be baptized, join a LifeGroup, serve, give, invite others, and develop regular spiritual habits.
The church’s denominational affiliation with the Evangelical Covenant Church is easy to miss because Life.Church doesn’t foreground denominational identity. The ECC grew out of Swedish evangelical Pietism and historically emphasized biblical authority, conversion, spiritual life, mission, and a measure of freedom on theological questions where Christians disagree. That provides a reasonably comfortable denominational home for a church whose public identity is much more defined by mission and method than by a detailed confessional tradition.
YouVersion and the Bible App
Life.Church’s most consequential innovation may not be a church campus at all. In 2006, Bobby Gruenewald, a member of the Life.Church leadership team, began thinking about how emerging technology might help people engage with Scripture more consistently. The original YouVersion website launched in 2007 and wasn’t an immediate sensation. Then Apple opened the App Store in 2008, and the team turned the concept into a mobile Bible application.
The timing was remarkable. The Bible App was among the first 200 free applications available when Apple’s App Store launched, and 83,000 people installed it during its first weekend. What began as a Life.Church digital ministry eventually became something much larger than a church app. By 2025, the YouVersion family of applications had passed one billion installations worldwide.
The decision to make YouVersion free is also important to understanding Life.Church. There are no advertisements wedged between Leviticus and Numbers, and the ministry wasn’t built as a clever way to monetize Bible reading. Life.Church and its partners have treated digital Scripture distribution as ministry, working with publishers, Bible societies, content providers, and volunteers to make Scripture and Bible-reading resources available around the world. A church known for screens and technology ended up using those screens to put the Bible into hundreds of millions of hands. Whatever someone thinks about the modern megachurch model, that’s a significant part of the Life.Church story.
The Open Network
Life.Church took the same approach to many of the resources it developed for itself. In 2006 it launched what became the Life.Church Open Network, through which churches could obtain sermons, graphics, children’s ministry materials, training, creative resources, and eventually software without paying for them. The principle was simple: if Life.Church had already spent the money and effort developing something useful for ministry, why make another church reinvent it?
That generosity also created a different kind of network. Open Network isn’t a denomination, and participating churches don’t surrender their property or governance to Life.Church. Churches can simply use the resources, while those that want a closer relationship can participate as Network Churches. Those congregations remain autonomous but can align themselves with Life.Church’s teaching content and ministry strategy, including using Groeschel’s messages on the same schedule as Life.Church campuses.
This produces an interesting organizational category. A Life.Church campus is part of Life.Church itself, while a Network Church is an independent congregation that may use Life.Church teaching and resources. Beyond both of those are countless churches that download Open Network materials without becoming part of anything resembling a formal church structure. Open Network says it has served more than a million pastors, church planters, and leaders since 2006. Life.Church therefore exercises influence well beyond the number of people who would ever identify it as their home church.
Innovation as a Ministry Philosophy
Life.Church is unusual because innovation isn’t merely something it does; it has become part of the church’s culture. Its stated values emphasize excellence, generosity, risk-taking, evangelism, participation, and service to the larger “capital C” Church. The church even rejects the megachurch label in favor of describing itself as having a “mega-vision,” which doesn’t exactly make it smaller, but it does reveal how Life.Church understands itself.
There are strengths to this philosophy. Churches can become remarkably skilled at preserving methods long after everyone has forgotten why those methods were adopted in the first place. Life.Church starts from the opposite direction and asks whether a new method might help accomplish an old mission. Video teaching, online church, smartphone applications, free digital resources, and centralized multisite ministry all came out of that willingness to reconsider the machinery without necessarily reconsidering the message.
There are also legitimate questions. Innovation can become its own tradition, and churches built around exceptional leadership, sophisticated technology, strong branding, and highly reproducible systems can begin to resemble organizations that succeed because the machinery is exceptionally good. Efficiency isn’t the same thing as discipleship, and a polished weekend experience can’t substitute for the slower work of pastoral care, Christian community, theological formation, and spiritual maturity. Those concerns aren’t unique to Life.Church, but Life.Church’s success makes them especially visible.
Life.Church and Nondenominational Christianity
Life.Church illustrates why modern nondenominational Christianity is becoming difficult to describe simply as churches without denominations. Technically, Life.Church has a denominational affiliation. Operationally, it has developed a centralized multisite church larger and more sophisticated than many denominations. Through Open Network, it also provides independent congregations with teaching, resources, training, technology, and relationships—many of the very things denominations historically provided.
Yet Life.Church generally hasn’t tried to turn those relationships into ecclesiastical control. Its approach is closer to giving away the infrastructure and letting other churches decide how much of it they want to use. That distinguishes Open Network from a denomination and also from church-planting networks such as ARC or Acts 29, where membership in the network itself carries more organizational significance.
That may be the most important reason Life.Church belongs in a discussion of contemporary nondenominational Christianity. The old question was usually, “What denomination is your church?” Increasingly, that doesn’t tell you very much. A congregation’s real family resemblance may come from the networks it participates in, the conferences its leaders attend, the worship music it uses, the pastors it watches, the resources it downloads, and the ministry systems it adopts.
Life.Church has helped build that world. It began as a local church in Oklahoma and discovered that digital technology could allow a church to distribute far more than sermons. It could distribute Scripture, software, curricula, training, organizational methods, and even a model of what church could look like. Whether every part of that model should be copied is a separate question. Life.Church’s more interesting contribution may be that it chose to give so much of the model away.