For churches
Help for the hurting, long after the funeral.
Your church is already the place people come when life falls in. The hard part has never been willingness — it is that the connection thins somewhere around week six, right before the year gets hardest. This keeps it open, every day for a year, in your church’s name.
$20 a family. Nothing charged until you invite one.
Where the connection quietly breaks
You have a list of families who lost someone this year. You think about them. You mean to call. Sunday comes, then a board meeting, then somebody else is in hospital.
Meanwhile the family reaches month five, where it is quietest and hardest, and their honest report is that the church was wonderful for a fortnight.
That is not a failure of love. Twelve months of daily pastoral contact per bereaved family is not something any staff of any size can actually do. The willingness was never the bottleneck.
So the question is not whether your church cares. It is whether the caring can still be felt in month eight.
What extending it looks like
A daily reminder that somebody is still standing with them
Your church stays present
The invitation names your church, and so does the year that follows. When month eight arrives and nobody else has called, the person who is still there is you.
Daily contact, for the whole year
365 days of KJV-anchored encouragement by email and text, written in twelve movements that follow how grief actually moves — including month three, which blindsides people.
Sound theology, not platitudes
Nothing says everything happens for a reason. There is room for anger at God, because Job had it and was not rebuked for it. You will never have to apologise for something we sent.
Nothing for you to run
Add a family and you are done. No rota, no volunteer to recruit, no reminders in your calendar, no content for anyone on staff to write.
“Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.”
Galatians 6:2, King James Version
Where it fits in what you already do
Most churches use it in one of three places: the week after the funeral, when the casseroles stop and the house goes quiet; as something the care team or deacons add for every bereaved family as a matter of course; or for the people already on your heart — the widow from two years ago, the father who stopped coming.
That last one is worth saying out loud. Grief is one of the most common reasons people quietly leave a church, and it is rarely because anything was said. It is because nothing was, for long enough that they assumed they had been forgotten.
Adding a family takes about a minute: their name, their email, who they lost.
The loneliest part of grief is rarely the funeral. It is the long middle, where nothing is happening and nothing is better.
Written by a pastor who needed it
The Judah Project is named for a two-month-old boy. His father is a pastor who had preached plenty of funerals before he had to bury his own son, and who found out from the inside how thin most grief material is when you actually need it.
Every day of this year was written with that in view. You are not handing your families a devotional written by somebody who has only read about this.
What it costs
$20 per family, for the full year. That is the whole model.
$20
per family, once — covering all 365 days
- 365 days of email and text for that family
- The invitation sent in your church’s name
- A dashboard showing who accepted and who has not
- Keep a card on file; you are charged when you invite a family
- No minimum, no contract, nothing to spend in advance
Nothing is charged when you open the account. The $20 is taken at the moment you invite a family, because what you are paying for is the invitation reaching them — which happens whether or not they answer.
If cost is the obstacle for a family in your congregation, tell us. We have never let the price be the reason somebody walks a year alone, and monthly supporters exist precisely to cover it.
One thing to know before you start
You add a family; we invite them; they decide. Nothing is ever sent to somebody who has not personally said yes. That is partly the law and mostly the point — the last thing a grieving family needs is another thing arriving that they did not ask for.
We also never text a phone number you give us, not even to ask them to opt in. If they want texts, they enter their own number themselves.
Questions before you start? Write to hello@judahproject.com and a person will answer.