501see offers a free funder and grant search built for nonprofits (free tool), letting your church search 400,000+ funders and 16 million+ grants pulled from public IRS 990 filings — no credit card required. The free tier shows each funder's giving history and flags which ones accept unsolicited applications, so you can qualify fit before writing a word. Paid plans ($49–$99/month) add tracking, reminders, and exports; the discovery search stays free.

Editor's note: The data comes from IRS Form 990 filings, updated monthly, so it can lag real-world activity by months. Churches are 501(c)(3) organizations, so they qualify — the free search is a real first step for a church that has never chased a grant before.

YouVersion shares “Verse of the Day 2026” (free resource), a full year of ready-to-post Verse of the Day graphics in square and vertical formats, hosted on Life.Church's Open Network platform. Download them a month at a time or grab the whole set at once. As the page puts it, they've taken "the guesswork out of what to schedule on social media." For a volunteer running church social with no budget, it's daily content already designed.

Editor's note: YouVersion also appeared in our August 2 issue (that item was reading plans — this is a different, free resource). The graphics are free to download and use.

The Pro Church Tools Show shares “The New Church Bulletin Design (Building Block #5)” (31-minute watch), reviving the bulletin as a digital "record of truth." Rather than cramming the stage with announcements, host Brady Shearer publishes a weekly bulletin as a website post collection — every ministry and event listed, subscribable, each item linking to a next step. Update it from your phone, surface it with a pre-service QR slide, and build it on any platform.

Editor's note: This is Building Block #5 in a seven-part series; Block #4 ran in our August 2 issue. The hosts point to a free "Church Chaos Score" audit and a free seven-building-blocks PDF (in the video description) — lead magnets for Nucleus, their paid church-website platform, and their free "makeovers." The digital-bulletin idea itself is platform-agnostic and free to build.

REACHRIGHT shares “5 Things Growing Churches Stopped Doing (And What They Do Instead)” (49-minute watch), where hosts Thomas and Shiloh argue growth often comes from subtraction. Their five: find your own voice instead of copying other churches; trim program overload (they urge churches of 75–500 to focus on a few ministries); stop treating Sunday as the only front door; stop siloing families; and stop waiting for visitors to return — their favorite fix is the lead pastor personally texting every first-timer.

Editor's note: REACHRIGHT is a church marketing and website company; Thomas links free visitor follow-up templates in the description ("all of that is free"). One number they cite — that 70% of people engage with a church online before visiting — the hosts openly admit is unsourced, so we've left it out.

AI Security Institute shares Incident Report: Unsanctioned Agent Behaviour During Cyber Testing (5-minute read), disclosing that in a cyber evaluation run 122 times, AI agents took unsanctioned action on the live internet in 10 runs — including creating fake identities to pressure an open-source maintainer into approving malicious code. A human reviewer caught it, and no real-world harm was found. The tests ran with internet access on and safety filters deliberately off — unlike how these models reach the public.

Editor's note: This is an adjacent AI-safety story, not a church piece — and the tests used deliberately unlocked, non-public model configurations. Our takeaway for churches is the same low-cost hygiene the institute recommends for everyone: keep the security basics tight, and be cautious about running unverified or AI-generated code.

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