We have been creating WordPress content for almost 7 years now – initially through our Theme-Based website “Mint Themes” and now also through this website (Mint Plugins). We built quite a few WordPress Themes for Churches aimed at making it simple for a Church to get their website online. Thousands of churches have successfully built their websites with our Church Themes.

We just released our first new Church Theme in 2 years – with good reason for the long delay. We have done a ton of hours of coding to make sure it is the absolute best theme experience for both the site owner and the site user. We think you will truly love the experience of using it. If you’d like to check it out, head over to the “Growing Church Theme Bundle” page.

Old Weaknesses become New Strengths.

With any product, there are inherent weaknesses. The goal of a good Theme Creator is to learn from those weaknesses and make better products. For example, the Church Themes we’d previously built were designed prior to the mass-usage of “Smart Phones” and therefore, the need for responsive design. This made it so that, while we could make those Themes work on smaller, mobile-sized screens, they were never really as good as they could/should have been on mobile.

Also, some of the functionality of the Themes was not as portable as it could have been – simply because plugins for churches were not being built yet. What does that mean? Well, put simply, it means that if you changed your theme, your sermons, events, photos and videos went with it. If you wanted a new layout, the functionality was “tied” to the theme – and you’d have to manually re-create each sermon.

Our sermon manager was also very basic. This was good because it was easy to use. However it was also bad in that there was no way to “group” sermons together. Often sermons come in a “series” and having a way to do this became one of our most requested features.

Another highly-requested feature was the ability to have “Recurring” or “Repeating” events. Churches usually run week-to-week. They might have the same events every week at the same time and the same place. For example, Sunday morning services are usually always the same every week. Churches found that posting the Sunday service as an event became very repetitious and sent us requests to allow events to “recur” – thus only needing to be set up once.

The New Strengths:

Portability

This new theme bundle has been completely built form the ground up to use plugins for functionality. This way, if you decide to use a different theme at some point in the future, your sermons and events can go with it without any issues. This way, you aren’t ever “trapped” at all and are free to do whatever you wish with your website.

Responsivity

The Growing Church Theme Bundle is completely responsive – even though it allows for complete customizability. You are free to completely re-arrange the page with a few clicks – but it will always be responsive. This is something that has been programmed intuitionally and from-the-start. Because we built the layouts to work with our MP Stacks page building plugin, you get both responsive-ness and customizability. It will always look good on any device!

Sermon Manager

The new sermon manager is powered by the “Church Theme Content” plugin which is built by ChurchThemes.com. Because of this, if you use any of their themes, you can easily switch to this new theme – or vice versa. This is a part of our portability mentioned above. But we’ve gone a few steps further than that and made it compatible with MP Stacks as well – meaning you have total control over how those sermons get displayed in a grid. You can allow for filtering using Isotopes, change the number of Sermons per row, sizes, and more! It is something that took months for us to get right – and we feel like it is finally at a place where it will be really valuable to churches who post sermons often. We’ve gotten great feedback from churches who are loving the sermon manager system in the Growing Church Theme Bundle so we feel like we’re on the right track with it! To be honest, we’re really excited to see how it can transform your sermon-section to be really user friendly for your website’s users.

Recurring Events.

Adding recurring event functionality to our themes became a priority after getting so many requests from customers for it. However, it was also one of the most difficult things we’ve had to code. Because time is infinite, it was difficult to decipher how to make events repeat forever without crashing computers. Eventually, after a few months of coding and testing, we came up with a solution that allows events to recur forever without slowing down the system at all.

We added this recurring functionality to our events plugin and also to our MP Stacks + EventGrid plugin – which is what powers the event grid in the theme. Again, because this functionality is in a plugin and not tied to the theme, it allows your events to be “portable” and used with any other theme in the future.