I received a call from FaithLife, yesterday, notifying customers that the eligibility requirements for a FaithLife Church Group subscription have been changed. They are now limiting access to legally recognized churches only.
Back in June of this year, when we purchased our subscription, it was open to all church groups regardless of legal status. As of today, this is no longer the case. Indeed, the sales page on FaithLife has been updated with this new restriction.
For DC to maintain our FaithLifeTV & Logos Moblie Ed subscription, we would have to reorganize as a legally recognized church. Though not impossible, it’s not something we can do quickly. It’s also not something we’ve even contemplated, until today.
Background
Over the past two months, I’ve been in contact with multiple levels of FaithLife sales asking for guidance on how to expand the reach of our group. Based on their lack of direction I came to understand that FaithLife’s church subscription was a “pilot” sales program for the company. Their approach was to make the subscription available to see where it would lead. They were discovering things as they went along and, unfortunately, this has led to the new legal restrictions on access.
The good news is that hundreds of us on DivineCouncil.org were able to view some of the best Biblical courses in the world for almost five months. The bad news is that Faithife is now limiting access to legally recognized churches only.
Since DC is not currently a legally recognized church, please reach out to your local church to extend your access.
In the meantime, I’ll be in contact with FaithLife to see if there’s another option for small groups (and the ever-growing number of believers who have no affiliation with a formal church).
Update: After a day of thinking and discussing this with others the impetus behind this new policy became clear: the storage and streaming costs make it cost-prohibitive for FaithLife to handle organizations with members scattered around the world. In our case, we had almost 100 people from China, Korea, and Japan subscribe in the past month! Fantastic, from our point-of-view, as part of our aim is to penetrate the 10/40 window with the best Biblical materials in the world. However, if your business model or pricing structure does not account for such streaming costs, it could become impossible to break even while delivering hundreds of gigabytes of video courses.
I speculate that FaithLife’s new policy of “Legally recognized churches only” is their way of saying “Local Only”. Therefore, even if DC had met every criterion of a legally recognized church our subscription would still have been terminated due to streaming costs.
For the latest updates and discussion on this see this thread on our private forum.
