The job of a pastor is demanding. It requires you to be a great deal of things to many people all at the same time: counselor, friend, teacher, mentor, and more.
In the past, pastors were considered the preeminent “information experts” in their community. But these days, with all the information available at our fingertips, it’s more important than ever to keep yourself on top of your game. The best way to do that? With apps!
So we’ve compiled a list of some of the best apps for pastors out there that will help you keep up with your responsibilities and stay ahead of the game!
Best Apps For Pastors
You’re likely swimming in a sea of apps.
According to one study, the average person …
Has 60-90 apps
Uses 30 apps per month
Opens 10 apps every day
In the United States, the average app user spends two hours and 15 minutes per day on apps. If you’re doing the math, that works out to nearly one month per year spent on an app.
Here’s what you need to know:
People are using apps to manage their life (maybe you?).
From banking, mobile giving, and connecting with family and friends on social media, apps are a way of life for many people.
In this post, we’re going to help you navigate more than 4 million apps available for iOS and Android devices, and point out some other helpful tools in the following categories:
Time management
Sermon preparation
Finances
Health
Personal
Let’s get started!
Time management
Pastor, here’s one reality you face in your work:
Your schedule is unpredictable.
During a regular workweek, you’ll have predictable tasks to accomplish—preparing your sermon, leading your staff, board, or session, and administrative stuff. Based on a couple of studies, there’s a good chance your average workweek consists of 50 hours of work.
But let’s be honest:
How many of your workweeks are “normal?”
From hospital visitations, weddings, and counseling, your weekly schedule can explode with unplanned tasks. Needless to say, it’s challenging to keep track of your priorities.
Thankfully, there are a ton of apps you can use to help you stay on track. Here are a few of my favorites:
- Google Calendar
Google Calendar is one of the best tools you can use to manage your schedule.
It seamlessly sync’s with Gmail, and you can easily add meetings, as well as reservations for restaurants, flights, or hotels.
Google Calendar also has a clean and bright interface that’s easy to navigate, which is an added bonus.
- RescueTime
To manage your time, you need to know how you’re spending your time.
Like the vast majority of people in the United States, you probably spend a lot of time on your mobile phone, computer, or tablet. This isn’t a judgment, just an observation.
To help you see how you spend your time online, check out RescueTime. RescueTime will review your computer and mobile devices and let you know how you’re spending time online.
After you have an accurate picture of how you spend time online, you’ll be able to adjust your digital habits. If you have a difficult time making changes, then take a look at the next app.
- SelfControl
“Look, a squirrel!”
Even though I live in Tennessee, I haven’t seen a squirrel in months. But, like you, I do have to fight countless distractions online.
Before you resolve to only use a pen and paper and “dumb phone” to take control of your digital habits, consider using an app to disable your ability to browse … anything.
Enter SelfControl.
With SelfControl, you can disable access to select websites or deny your access to everything for a set period of time.
Need to focus on a task? Then use SelfControl to disable your access to everything or your favorite websites (ESPN, anyone?).
- Unroll.Me
Do you want to hear something depressing?
Probably not, but here you go anyway:
The average employee spends 28 percent of their workweek on email, which is equivalent to 11 hours per week.
In your inbox, you have a variety of messages from your staff, volunteers, church members, family, friends, and subscriptions.
Before you burn relational bridges by not responding to someone’s email, use Unroll.Me to clean up your inbox and take control of the number of emails you receive.
You can thank me later.
- Project management
Do you keep track of your “to-do’s” with Sticky Notes? Or, do you use a variety of tools to manage your workweek?
Instead of using paper or several calendars, consider using cloud-based project management software to stay on top of things.
Here’s a list of several options to choose from:
Basecamp
Asana
Trello
Todoist
Notion
To manage your projects and tasks, consider using one of these tools.
For me, I find it best to manage my tasks with the same project management tool the company I work for uses. At Tithe.ly, we currently use Asana to manage our projects and tasks.
Sermon preparation
Preaching every week is exhaustive.
It’s spiritually demanding.
It’s mentally challenging.
It’s emotionally taxing.
It’s physically difficult.
Despite the difficulties, preaching is one of the most rewarding privileges of your position.
To maximize your sermon preparation time, there are a variety tools you can use.
- Evernote
When preaching, there will be times when you have to “wing it” or share something impromptu. But for the most part, you’ll have to prepare your heart, mind, and soul every Sunday.
To get yourself ready, you have to be able to capture your thoughts and notes. This is where a good note-taking app comes into place.
Here’s what Church Fuel had to say:
Evernote is your personal filing system, your online notebook, your digital brain. It’s a desktop and mobile app that helps you take notes, organize files, keep up with task lists, and archive documents. Use it for productivity and decluttering.
As a pastor, you can use all the help you can get keeping track of important files. Your sermons, conference notes, saved article links to read later (thanks to the Evernote web clipper browser extension for Chrome), meeting notes, and more are all stored in one place.
- Logos Bible Software
Logos is an in-depth Bible study tool that helps you dig deep into the Word of God for personal study, preparing sermons, creating curriculum, counseling on specific issues, and everything else pastors consult the Bible for. There are free and paid versions that allow you to keep your notes in one digital Bible, consult commentaries, easily compare translations, do original language exegesis, and more. - Sermonary
Sermonary is a sermon editor, where you can work block-by-block to develop your message, your way. This is a huge step up from Microsoft Word or Google Docs.
Once your message is done, switch to Podium mode and preach from your favorite tablet and device. There’s a built-in clock overlay, too.
Sermonary comes with a library of free and paid commentaries, sermon illustrations, sermon series, and more.
It’s a tool that will help you write your sermons with more impact in less time.
For a list of additional apps, tools, and websites for pastors, check out this resource from Church Fuel: The New Pastor’s Toolbox.
Finances
Personal finances are a big issue for many pastors (possibly you?).
According to one study by LifeWay, more than half of the pastors polled said they were concerned about their financial situation. In fact, according to the same survey, many pastors cited finances as a reason for leaving vocational ministry.
To help you manage the money you earn, and to save a few dollars along the way, here are two tools you should use.
- Mint
Mint is a free, web-based financial management system.
With Mint, you can:
Budget
Sync your accounts
Track your expenses
Set financial goals
Get alerts
Receive custom tips
The best part of all?
It’s free.
- Expensify
As a pastor, it’s essential to keep a record of your expenses.
One way you can easily track your spending is Expensify.
Whether you’re traveling or just out to lunch, Expensify makes it easy to scan your receipts and process business expenses.
- Tithe.ly
Talking about money, you can easily donate money to your church with Tithe.ly’s Church App.
To process a donation, your church will have to sign up for a free account first, and then use our free mobile giving app or have our team create a custom church app.
Health
Pastor, make sure you hear this:
The demands of your workweek will take their toll on you.
Sure, you can get by for weeks, months, or maybe a few years without taking care of yourself. But after neglecting your well-being for too long, you’ll end up facing a short-term health problem or burnout.
When it comes to maintaining your well-being, there’s a lot that can be said about two essential things: Your sleeping and eating habits. These two habits are easy to neglect, but they’re necessary for you to maintain a healthy, vibrant lifestyle and ministry.
To keep track of your health, here are two apps for you to consider.
- Sleep Cycle
How well are you sleeping?
Do you get plenty of hours of rest?
What about the quality of your sleep? Are you interrupted often? Do you frequently snore?
With the Sleep Cycle alarm clock, you can analyze your sleep patterns to see how well you’re resting. It also uses a sleep cycle alarm to wake you up gradually, which can make you feel more refreshed.
At a minimum, it’s a good idea to see how well you’re sleeping.
- MyFitnessPal
MyFitnessPal is a free app you can use to track what you eat.
With this app, you can track the foods you eat, the number of calories you consume, your exercise, and even the nitty-gritty details of your, like the ingredients in your food.
Here’s what I love about this app:
It has over 6 million foods in its database.
In other words, when you want to eat out or snag a new food from your grocery store, there’s a good chance the food you want to eat has already been added to their database. Having access to so many foods makes it easy to track your diet.
Know what else?
MyFitNessPal is perfect to keep track of your health goals, too.
Personal
There are two things it’s difficult to do on the fly:
Keep track of your online passwords
Write error-free messages
Let’s take a look at two apps to make these tasks easier.
- LastPass
LastPass is a secure password manager you can easily use to keep track of your passwords and login information for a ton of accounts. Think about it.
According to a study conducted by LastPass, the average employee who uses their services manages 191 passwords. You read that right: 191 passwords.
You may not have to manage this many passwords, but there’s a good chance you keep track of more than 20.
Pro tip: It’s best to write down your login information for LastPass. If you forget it, then it’s tough to get access to your account. This may or may not have happened to me.
- Grammarly
Grammarly is a free writing app you can use to check your spelling nearly everywhere. Think about it as Microsoft’s spell check on steroids, and it works in Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, and more.
The free account is fantastic, but consider opting for the premium account. Grammarly Premium will scan your writing for common grammar mistakes, repetitive words, and technical English stuff we won’t get into now.
What apps and websites do you use?
There are a ton of apps available, and I could have shared many more.
What apps have you found helpful in the following areas:
Time management
Sermon preparation
Finances
Health
Personal
Let us know in the comments below what you like to use.
tools for pastors
In a world full of smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops, we have the opportunity to utilize many tools for the glory of God. There are so many great tools and apps for pastors that it may seem a little overwhelming, but I hope to break them down into some helpful categories and give you some thoughts on each one.
SERMON PREPARATION
Google Docs are great because they sync across your devices and they are very useful for collaborative projects. So if you have a sermon planning team and want to be able to work on a document at the same time, Google Docs offer you what you need. Multiple people can edit the same document at the same time. You can also work offline on Google Docs if you use the Google Chrome web browser. As soon as you get Internet connection back again, your document will be synced. You can also use Google Docs to write your sermon.
Evernote is a powerful note-taking application that allows you to organize notebooks or notebook stacks around topics that are important to you. It also has tagging capabilities so you can organize your notes in an even deeper way. As far as sermon preparation goes, you can make a stack of notebooks for each series you will preach in 2016 and add notes for each series as you come up with ideas and research. If you’re just getting started with Evernote or want to take it to the next level, check out my article on the essential notebooks every pastor needs. I give away two great templates for Evernote in that article as well. The Evernote Web Clipper is a great tool to take things off the web and put them straight into your Evernote. If I read a good blog post, I clip it and put it in my research stack -> articles notebook.
Pages is my alternative to Microsoft Word. I have a MacBook Pro and Pages came with it. I love this word processor for all my writing except for books (I use a great Word template from Redeeming Press). I love Pages because it’s less clunky than Word. It feels substantially more minimal.
BibleHub is a powerful, free Bible study site. It’s great to look at the original language of a passage, and they even have a substantial library of online commentaries. It’s not the most aesthetically pleasing, but it’s very functional.
BibleGateway is my go-to Bible study site for looking up passages outside of my main text. I also go here to grab the text to copy and paste into my sermon slides.
TinyPDF is what I upload my completed preaching notes to. I preach from an iPad Mini and this app is a great tool to hold and display my preaching notes. It has a lot of capabilities that I don’t use, but it does a great job. I’ve never had an issue with it while preaching. They recently updated the app and changed the way you go to the next page. It used to be that you swiped horizontally like you would with a book, but now it’s vertical which I’m not sure I like. Nonetheless, it works great, but I may look for another solution.
TEAM MANAGEMENT
Zoom Video Conferencing is what Joe and I use to record the Rookie Preacher Podcast. Most times it’s high quality, but there have been a few times when we’ve had issues with recorded sound quality. Regardless, if you work in an environment where your fellow staff members are not all in one place, this is a great tool to host meetings. You could also use this to host meetings between yourself and other ministry leaders, or really anyone.
Google Hangouts went through an overhaul somewhat recently. It offers a great way to connect with your team through video conferencing and offers some powerful tools within the video conference that may be helpful for your virtual meetings. You may find that Google Hangouts can be utilized for a Video Blog solution where people can join you live, and then it automatically gets uploaded to YouTube.
Dropbox is a powerful file sharing solution for your team. Dropbox is a cloud solution for personal and shared folders and files. They have recently done an upgrade that allows you to see who else is looking at a document along with you, and when you make an edit, it updates it for everyone.
PRODUCTIVITY
Early Morning Alarm (you should have one of these on your phone already). Wayne Cordova, a.k.a. Geek Pastor, says that the number one productivity boost you can do is to get up early. I can attest to this. Running two blogs, both with podcasts, and with two books in the pipeline, I wouldn’t be able to do a fraction of what I do without waking up early in the morning before everyone else wakes up.
Task Manager – I use Evernote for its simplicity, but many people recommend other apps for task management. Many people recommend Todoist. My weekly productivity template is actually one of the templates I give away for free when you subscribe to RookiePreacher.com.
Pomodoro Challenge Timer takes the Pomodoro technique and gives you a challenge-based app that will help you get more done. Don’t know what the Pomodoro technique is? Read this. For the quick explanation, you’ll focus on one thing for 25 minutes without doing ANYTHING else. I just installed this app and am excited to see what it does for my productivity.
IFTTT is a very powerful automation tool. If This Then That has a lot of pre-made recipes of actions or you can make your own. I haven’t tapped into the depth that many people have, but I use this primarily for automation of my Twitter account. I have identified a number of bloggers who always produce great content. So I automated a recipe that says if they post something it is added to my buffer account that schedules a tweet. More on Buffer below. I also have a recipe that whenever someone uses the #sermonprep on Twitter, they are added to a Twitter list called Preachers. You can subscribe to that list to connect with other preachers.
SOCIAL MEDIA
HootSuite is a powerful social media management tool. I use this to manage all of the social media accounts for The Crossing. If you have multiple social media accounts to keep track of, give Hootsuite a try.
Buffer is my favorite social media management tool. I use this to manage my personal Twitter account and Facebook page. What I love about Buffer is that it will maximize your scheduling of posts in light of when your followers are most active. A new upgrade they just did now allows their Chrome browser extension to identify pictures within blog posts when you go to share them so you can add the picture to your Tweet, which increases engagement. It doesn’t allow as many accounts as Hootsuite under the free version, but I think it offers more power than Hootsuite.
Canva is a great graphic design tool for people who aren’t graphic design savvy — like me. I use this to create quote graphics from Sunday sermons, Scripture quotes, and all the blog graphics on my blog posts on here and my personal blog. If you like to make engaging slides for your sermons, there is a setting for that as well.
PERSONAL GROWTH
Kindle App is available on every device you have and allows you to read great books wherever you are. I have an actual Kindle, but also use the app on my iPad, smartphone and laptop. There’s a great way also to utilize your highlights and add them to Evernote for later use. See this article on how to do so.
Podcast Republic is my podcasting app of choice. I have a Samsung Galaxy so, in other words, I don’t have an iPhone. If you are an iPhone user, you should have the Podcast app on your device already. Podcast Republic gives you access to the entire iTunes library and allows you to subscribe to podcasts, see the show notes and much more.
Digg Reader is the way I keep up with all the blogs I follow. It is an RSS reader where you can upload blog feeds to. You can read and share blog posts without ever having to leave the Digg Reader. I also have an IFTTT recipe setup to where anytime I “digg” a post, it adds that post to my Buffer account.
YouVersion is my Bible reading app of choice along with millions of others. It offers a great number of reading plans. You can connect with friends on the app and see what they are reading as well.
One Final Thought:
Tools are only tools — it’s what you do with them that counts.
Conclusion
Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.
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