Missional Learning in the Digital Age
e-Learning for Faith & Mission
In a world where being the church has never been more difficult, Christians are challenged to adapt rapidly to new opportunities with new ministry skills and methods. Many groups and individuals have responded by creating online learning. CHURCHx invites them into a single, unified platform where both learners and educators benefit from shared access to a university-grade learning website built around the needs of Christian communities.
Join more than 7,600 learners
Join a network or take a course to become connected to an expanding web of the curious faithful.
Benefits of joining
- Multiple Partners with diverse content
- Powerful features for learning and collaboration
- Beyond email and Zoom links
CHURCHx is
a Home for
Ministry Resoursesa Community
The Anglican Diocese of Toronto
CHURCHx supports the Diocese of Toronto by hosting the “Hybrid Worship Network” this is collaboration between the Diocese of Toronto and the Innovative Ministry Centre to connect churches that are conducting hybrid online and in-person worship services. The Network hosts regular meetings on topics such as “Building Resiliency and Troubleshooting Problems” and has resources such as a Wiki with descriptions of technical terms used in livestreaming and case studies highlighting best practices. In addition, the Diocese is working to create asynchronous versions of Stewardship Development workshops that were formerly only available in-person.
The Anglican Church of Canada
The Anglican Church of Canada uses CHURCHx as the home of its Council of General Synod--a governing body of both staff and volunteers which is responsible for the leadership of the national church between meetings on Synod. This is a private, invitation-only group that includes a forum for discussion, links to upcoming Zoom meetings, a calendar of meetings and events, and protected links to important documents held in the National Churches SharePoint file system. The most important benefit of hosting these materials on CHURCHx is that ALL the committee members could access the materials whether they belonged to the organization’s Microsoft Account or not. CHURCHx makes it easy to communicate with all the committee members at once, and members can manage their own communication preferences. Members can easily access all their committee documents and correspondence in one place without the need to search email inboxes for missed messages.
EDGE
EDGE is a project of the national offices of the United Church of Canada with a mandate to support innovation and new forms of ministry in the United Church of Canada. It developed an entire series of asynchronous courses called the “Signpost Series” designed to walk congregations through a process of discernment and renewal. Additionally, EDGE uses CHURCHx to host several networks that gather congregations in regular Zoom sessions for mutual support and resourcing. The Networks include schedules and links to upcoming Zoom sessions, resource sections, and an announcement forum that makes it easy for facilitators to communicate with members. Posts made to the announcement forum are automatically emailed to emailed to members (unless the members have opted out of receiving email messages) and are preserved in the announcement forum in the network in case anyone has missed a message. CHURCHx also hosts several other courses for EDGE including two combining asynchronous material with Zoom-based sessions: ”Theory of Change” and ”Leading Adaptively.”
Canadian Council of Churches
The Canadian Council of Churches is currently developing several courses on issues of bioethics from a Christian perspective. The current intention is that these courses would include a hybrid of both asynchronous material and Zoom discussion sessions.
The GO Project
The GO Project is a Sunday School Curriculum developed for use in United Church of Canada congregations. Before CHURCHx, this material was distributed as PDF’s emailed out with an email list. CHURCHx has allowed them to vastly expand the resources available to teachers to include video, resource collections, and discussion forums for peer-to-peer support. CHURCHx also simplified the subscription management and financial aspects of selling access to the curriculum. Churches can buy access to the curriculum and then each teacher has their own team-based access. CHURCHx has allowed the Go Project to sell parts of the curriculum a la carte as one-off modules as well as bundle them together into packages.
New Church Ministry (Disciples of Christ)
New Church Ministry is a ministry of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in the United States and Canada that trains, equips, assists, and multiplies emerging and affiliating congregations and leaders from the DisciplesNEXT methodology, which focuses on contemplative action, prophetic advocacy, and faith-rooted organizing. CHURCHx supports their work by hosting the “Leadership Academy” courses. These are composed of text, graphics, and videos as well as online and in-person sessions of gathered students.
Junius Johnson Academics
Dr. Junius Johnson, an independent scholar, offers courses on a variety of theology related subjects through CHURCHx. Courses such as “Medieval Theology” combine readings for students to do on their own with live class sessions held on Zoom. One of the most important benefits to Dr. Johnson of CHURCHx was that it made it easy to post courses to the catalog. CHURCHx manages the financial transactions and pays Dr. Johnson directly without the need for him to manage a financial gateway himself. As an experienced University Professor, he appreciates access to the same learning activities as he would expect on a University Grade Learning Management System.
Lawrence Park Community Church
Lawrence Park Community Church in Toronto has a podcast called “The Rooster Crows.” This podcast is available for free through the usual channels of distribution. CHURCHx created a member’s network to support the podcast that includes ways for the audience to contribute financially and conversationally to the podcasts. Members can read additional “show notes” about the episodes, discuss them with other supporting members of the podcast, suggest ideas for upcoming episodes, and interact directly with the podcast creators. This network “pulls” new episodes into the page dynamically, making it easy for the staff of the church to focus on interaction with the audience.
Lutheran Theological Seminary, Saskatoon
Before the pandemic, Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon developed the LIFT courses to equip lay people to do ministry. With a shortage of clergy in Canada, it often necessary for lay people to perform tasks such as plan and lead worship, preach, and even provide pastoral care. At the time the course was originally developed, Zoom was not commonly used and therefore the original curriculum design was for in-person sessions based on PDF’s and a few videos. The material was expansive: 22 courses in all. Lutheran Theological Seminary received a grant to convert the course to an online model and contracted CHURCHx to both covert the existing course and host it. CHURCHx took the role of managing the Instructional Designers, Graphic Designers, and other experts. Beyond just “copy-pasting,” this effort enhanced and expanded the original curriculum, making it more accessible and pedagogically effective.
Dr. Natalie Wigg-Stevenson
Dr. Wigg-Stevenson is Associate Professor of Contextual Education and Theology at Emmanuel College, where she directs the MDiv and Contextual Education Programs. She used CHURCHx to create an orientation course from incoming M.Div. students as well as a course on Learning Design for educators in church settings.
Pathways Theological
Pathways Theological, a United Church of Christ affiliated provider of online education, decided to move all their course offerings to CHURCHx after using a commercial off-the-shelf learning management system. CHURCHx was able to offer more versatility and the ability to offer more sophisticated course design.
TUCC
TUCC, the parent organization of CHURCHx, uses CHURCHx to host courses on a variety of topics related to Church Development including ”Social Enterprise for Faith Communities,” ”How to Disband Gracefully,” ”Turning Your Church Building into a Community Asset” and more. Key to their success has been the ability of CHURCHx to host on-you-own pace, asynchronous courses with rich content including text, graphics, videos, are more.
General Council Office of The United Church of Canada
CHURCHx is the exclusive provider of online education services for the United Church of Canada’s national ofices. This includes training programmes for staff only (not available to the public), onboarding for volunteers of national committees, and the committees themselves. The General Council’s Annual Meeting was held on CHURCHx as well as the General Council Executive Committee. CHURCHx has worked closely with the General Council Office to support their programming with custom feature development and bespoke integrations with their existing information systems such as Microsoft Office and Zoom.
United in Learning
The Education Arm of the United Church of Canada, United in Learning has developed dozens of courses, networks, events, and even multi-year certification programmes on CHURCHx. Few, if any, denominational bodies have such an extensive catalog of online education offerings, and CHURCHx is proud to be the exclusive partner for hosting this content. Staff of United in Learning are fully equipped to create and manage their content, while CHURCHx staff provide technical support and maintain and develop the technical infrastructure that makes online learning possible.
Broadview Magazine
Broadview is an independent Canadian magazine that offers award-winning coverage of spirituality, justice, and ethical living. It serves a thoughtful audience of progressive Christians and those who share similar core values. The magazine features high-caliber journalism, providing readers with hope amid the challenges of our world and inspiring action. They have chosen CHURCHx as their partner for providing rich online experiences.
Dr. Stephanie Arel
Dr. Stephanie N. Arel is a theologian and trauma specialist whose work bridges theology, psychology, and trauma studies. With a Ph.D. from Boston University and a certificate in trauma modalities from the New York Institute for the Psychotherapies, she explores the impact of trauma and shame on Christian formation, emphasizing empathy and healing. Dr. Arel is the author of Affect Theory, Shame, and Christian Formation and co-editor of Post-Traumatic Public Theology. She has lectured at Fordham University and served as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Boston University, contributing to projects on sex differences in religion. Dr. Arel also consults organizations on self-care practices for those working with traumatic content and leads the Trauma Informed Pastoral Support network on CHURCHx, fostering resources for pastoral caregivers.
Contagious Hope
Imagine a bridge between belief and action. Contagious Hope is building a network to connect Christians with opportunies to express their faith in action. CHURCHx is providing the project with an innovative searchable database of events which can be accessed publically without a CHURCHx login.
Ministry Forum
The Ministry Forum, hosted by Knox College at the University of Toronto, is an inclusive online platform dedicated to supporting current and aspiring Christian ministry leaders. It offers a diverse communityincluding students, alumni, pastors, psychotherapists, and chaplainsa space to engage in deep reflection, authentic living, and courageous leadership. Through curated resources, thought-provoking discussions, and opportunities for personal connection, the Ministry Forum aims to empower individuals to thrive in their ministry contexts.
Become a Partner
Unlike commercial, generic online teaching platforms, CHURCHx was built from the ground-up as a non-profit social enterprise to resource diverse church institutions. Versatility was engineered into our project from day-one, so we can support virtually any learning methodology you can ask for (including registration/ticketing for in-person events, one-off webinars, multi-course programmes of study, perpetual learning communities, and more).
What’s more, we have developed custom solutions to integrate into other data systems. So, if you want to track learner completion of mandatory training, for example, we have a solution for that. If you want to automatically invite learners to join your newsletter, we do that, too. We are dedicated to supporting institution and independent scholars with the best technology for online teaching available.
More than just another Learning Management System, CHURCHx can be your solution to sell almost anything online. Your offerings appear in your own customized catalog, but also appear alongside other partners as our vast learning community benefits from the critical mass of interested learners.
- Webinars, asynchronous, hybrid, in-person courses
- Forums, Wikis, Databases, files of all types
- Integrates with Zoom, MSTeams, GoogleDrive and more
- Publishable event calendar system searchable by date, event type, and location
- Multiple Partners with diverse content
- Critical mass of curious learners
- A single login and account to access offerings from multiple institutions
- Human tech support provided by phone and email
- Self-help tutorials
- Innovative technology to improve ease-of-access for less technically adept students
- Accessibility and multi-langugage support
More than another white label teaching website, CHURCHx is an entire ecosystem of networks, courses, partners, and people build on the most capable church communications network in the world. Whether you want to gather people around a common concern or project, provide interactive self-paced learning, or host webinars for thousands of participants, CHURCHx is built for you.
To learn more about hosting your courses on CHURCHx, schedule a meeting.