- Starting price
- Free
- Free tier
- Yes
- Platforms
- Web - Apple Podcasts - Spotify - YouTube - Life.Church app - RSS
- Developer
- Life.Church
- Launched
- 2016
- Updated
- Aug 5, 2026
The verdict
A ten-year, 196-episode archive of monthly leadership coaching that costs nothing, carries no advertising, and links a free leader guide from every episode, produced by Life.Church as part of a policy of giving its tools away. Take it if you lead a team - church, business or nonprofit - and want short framework-driven coaching you can run through a staff meeting. Skip it if you want Bible teaching, weekly volume, transcripts or a searchable archive, because monthly cadence and an unindexed back catalogue are the real costs here.
Try The Craig Groeschel Leadership Podcast ↗Opens craiggroeschel.com
There is no app. The listing that points here describes a "Christian Career App", and the Craig Groeschel Leadership Podcast is not one: it is an audio and video show with a home page at craiggroeschel.com/leadershippodcast, a second home at life.church/leadershippodcast where the episode guides live, and distribution through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, the Life.Church app and RSS. Nothing is installed, which is why this is filed as a website and why the rating above is editorial - there is no App Store product to aggregate.
What exists is a tight archive. Apple Podcasts lists 196 episodes, gives Years Active as 2015 - 2026, labels the frequency "Updated Monthly", files the show under Management rather than Religion and Spirituality, and shows 4.9 from 10,698 listener ratings under the copyright line "2019 Life.Church". The January 2026 episode is titled "5 Most Challenging Lessons I Learned in Leadership | 10-Year Anniversary Edition", which puts the first episode - "Six Types of Leaders" - in January 2016 and makes Apple's 2015 the outlier. Recent instalments run "What's Really Behind Overnight Success | Live from the Global Leadership Summit" on 2 July 2026 at 41 minutes and "Stop Losing Your Best Team Members" on 4 June at 18 minutes.
Craig Groeschel is the founder and senior pastor of Life.Church, which began in January 1996 as Life Covenant Church with 40 people in a two-car garage in Oklahoma City, is affiliated with the Evangelical Covenant Church, and by 2025 was operating 46 physical locations with weekly attendance reported at 85,000. That matters here in one specific way: Life.Church built YouVersion and gives it away, runs Church Online Platform for free, and publishes a 35,000-item resource library at no charge. The podcast sits inside that policy rather than in front of a product.
The result is the rarest thing in church-leadership media: a free show with no funnel. Every episode description on Apple ends with a link to a free leader guide, and there are no sponsor reads in those descriptions, no membership, no course catalogue, no conference ticket, and no ad-free tier to upsell because there are no ads. The trade-off is volume and findability, and both are real.
✓ The good
- Genuinely free with nothing behind it - no account, no email wall, no membership, no paid archive, and no sponsor reads in the episode descriptions Apple publishes.
- Every episode links a free leader guide - the July 2026 Global Leadership Summit and June 2026 Jon Acuff descriptions each point to a "free leader guide" at life.church/leadershippodcast, so the show ships a discussion artefact rather than just audio.
- Episodes are short and structured - Apple shows recent runtimes of 18, 28, 41 and 50 minutes, built around numbered frameworks ("Six Types of Leaders", "5 Most Challenging Lessons I Learned in Leadership") that survive being summarised to a team.
- It is filed under Management, and earns it - the subject matter is time, teams, hiring, retention, procrastination and organisational structure rather than sermon craft, so it transfers to a business or nonprofit without translation.
- Distribution is wide for a church-produced show - Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, the Life.Church app and RSS, so any client works and the video version is available for team viewing.
- The archive sits inside a free library rather than a store - Open Network calls itself "Free ministry tools - resources, training, community and apps" with more than 35,000 free church resources, and its FAQ states "There are no dues, no tithes, no percentages, no training fees."
- The host has a long operating record to draw on - thirty years running one organisation from 40 people in a garage to 46 locations, a different kind of authority from a show that sources its expertise from guests.
✗ Watch out
- Monthly cadence means the archive is small for its age - 196 episodes across ten years, against 828 in twelve years for the Carey Nieuwhof podcast, roughly a quarter of the back catalogue to search.
- The published cadence and the release pattern do not match - Apple labels the show "Updated Monthly" and craiggroeschel.com says "New episodes are released monthly", yet June 2026 carries two, on 4 June and 18 June.
- The length promise does not match the episodes - craiggroeschel.com promises "empowering insights in about 30 minutes or less" while the two most recent episodes Apple lists run 50 and 41 minutes.
- No transcripts are published or promised - Apple's listing shows no transcript tab, and neither the show page nor the episode descriptions offer one, which for a ten-year framework-heavy archive is the biggest usability gap.
- There is no episode index on the official show page - craiggroeschel.com/leadershippodcast lists platforms rather than episodes, so finding the episode on staff retention from four years ago means guessing at a search engine.
- The free library around it is licensed tightly - Open Network resources are for "internal use and not for resale or commercial distribution", message videos "must not be edited and must be played in their entirety" absent written approval, and Life.Church may terminate use it considers "inconsistent with Life.Church's message".
Best for
- Team leads and managers who want short framework-driven coaching
- Church staff running a monthly leadership development rhythm
- Christian business and nonprofit leaders outside church world
- Anyone who wants leadership content with no upsell attached
Avoid if
- You want Bible teaching, exposition or sermons
- You want weekly episodes and a deep back catalogue
- You need transcripts or a searchable archive
- You want long-form guest interviews as the main format
What The Craig Groeschel Leadership Podcast is
It is a monthly leadership coaching show, in audio and video, hosted by the founder and senior pastor of Life.Church and published since January 2016. Most episodes are Groeschel alone teaching one numbered framework - types of leaders, lessons learned, reasons good people quit - and some are guest conversations, such as the June 2026 episode with the productivity author Jon Acuff. Apple files it under Management, accurately: the recurring subjects are time, team, structure, hiring, retention and personal discipline rather than theology or preaching.
Around it there is no business. Life.Church funds the show and publishes the leader guides free, and the same organisation gives away YouVersion, Church Online Platform and a 35,000-item resource library. What is sold is books, at retail, by their publishers. For a listener that means an on-air recommendation does not route anywhere with a price on it.
A megachurch pays for it, so you do not
The reason this podcast has no funnel is that Life.Church treats free distribution as its strategy rather than its marketing. YouVersion is given away outright; youversion.church offers churches a profile, Bible Plans and Events with sermon outlines, Scripture links, announcements and online giving described as "100% free with Events", across over 2,500 Bible versions in over 1,700 languages. The scale of that giveaway is reported two ways: youversion.church says the app is "Installed on over 500 million devices worldwide" beside a live counter reading "487,659,303 App Installs & Counting", while the milestone Life.Church publicised is one billion, recorded as reached in November 2025 - a counter sitting at less than half the announced total, which we report rather than reconcile. Church Online Platform, run since 2011, prints "Pricing 100% Free" and commits to "all of its features, with ongoing support and upgrades for the life of the tool", reporting 38,428 churches joined. Open Network gives away 35,000-plus resources with no dues, tithes, percentages or training fees.
That pattern is why the podcast behaves as it does. A show at the front of a course business has to convert; this one has nowhere to convert you to, so the episode ends with a worksheet instead of a checkout. The counterweight is that free-because-underwritten is also unaccountable to listener demand: twelve episodes a year, no transcripts and no episode index are decisions nobody is paying to overturn.
The leader guide is the actual deliverable
The audio is the smaller half of what ships. Each episode description on Apple ends with a link to a free leader guide hosted on life.church, one URL per episode - the July 2026 Global Leadership Summit and June 2026 Jon Acuff episodes both carry theirs - and the show is also listed among the free training resources inside Open Network. The design intent is legible: listen, then run the framework through a staff meeting.
That is a different product from an interview podcast. A 50-minute conversation gives you ideas; an 18-minute framework with a printable guide gives you an agenda. If you manage people and have a development slot to fill, the guide is the reason to choose this show over a longer, richer, weekly one - and it is free, which is not true of most curriculum built for the same job.
The Life.Church ecosystem, and its licence
Open Network is the library the guides live in, and it is worth understanding before you build on it. It is free without dues or fees, browsable without an account, and spans messages, worship music, kids and youth curriculum, graphics, Bible studies and leadership training. But it is download-only: the FAQ says "Resources are only available for direct download" and "We are not able to mail or send it to you in another format", and some series are withheld where licensed footage is involved.
The licence is permissive about use and firm about redistribution. Churches may create derivative works from the additional resources and reproduce them "for your internal use and not for resale or commercial distribution"; message videos may go on a church's own website but not public platforms, and "must not be edited and must be played in their entirety" without written approval. Churches may not use the Life.Church logo or imply affiliation, and Life.Church reserves termination where use "is or may be inconsistent with Life.Church's message". Free is not the same as open-licensed.
The tradition, stated plainly
Life.Church is an evangelical, multi-site congregation affiliated with the Evangelical Covenant Church and headquartered in Edmond, Oklahoma. It became multi-site in 2001 after merging with MetroChurch and launched an internet campus in 2006 - the practical background to a church that ships software.
That context frames the podcast without dominating it. Leadership problems here are problems of team, capacity, structure and personal discipline, in language a manager at any organisation would recognise, and the theological content is light by design - Apple's Management classification is not a miscategorisation. A listener from a liturgical, confessional or intentionally small-congregation tradition will find little to argue with doctrinally, and may find the implicit model - large, multi-site, growth-capable - simply irrelevant rather than objectionable.
Pricing
The podcast
Free
All 196 episodes Apple lists, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, the Life.Church app or any RSS client, with no account, no trial window and no paywalled back catalogue. Funded by Life.Church rather than advertising - the episode descriptions Apple publishes carry no sponsor reads, only a link to a free leader guide. There is no paid version of this show to buy.
Leader guides and the Open Network library
Free
Every episode description links a free leader guide at life.church/leadershippodcast, and the wider Life.Church Open Network publishes more than 35,000 free church resources including messages, worship, kids and youth curriculum, graphics and leadership training. The FAQ states the network "is completely free. There are no dues, no tithes, no percentages, no training fees." Resources are download-only and licensed for internal, non-commercial use.
Groeschel's books
Not published on his own site
The one thing in this orbit that costs money is the books, sold by retail publishers rather than by Life.Church. craiggroeschel.com lists Books alongside the podcast and marks Heal Your Hurting Mind "Available Now" without printing a price, and takes speaking inquiries for 2027 events. No book price is published on his own site, so a reader has to go to a retailer to find one.
Free means free, and unusually literally. All 196 episodes Apple lists are available with no account, no trial and no locked archive, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, the Life.Church app or RSS, and the leader guide attached to each episode is free as well - hosted on life.church rather than gated behind an email capture.
There is no paid tier of any kind. No membership, no course library, no conference ticket, no premium ad-free feed, and no advertising to remove, since the episode descriptions Apple publishes carry sponsor reads for nothing. The funding source is Life.Church, reported at 85,000 weekly attendance across 46 locations, and its stated policy of giving its tools away.
The Carey Nieuwhof podcast makes the contrast concrete. That show is also free to listen to, and its ladder is published: a $0 Academy account, $17 a month for a starter kit, $57 a month or $497 a year for all-access, and $597 for a conference ticket. Twelve monthly payments at $57 come to $684, so the annual plan saves $187 - arithmetic on that vendor's own printed figures. Nothing equivalent exists here, because there is nothing to price.
Life.Church sells nothing here; Groeschel sells books, through publishers. craiggroeschel.com lists Books and marks Heal Your Hurting Mind "Available Now" without a price, and it accepts speaking inquiries for 2027. The only money in this orbit moves through retailers and event budgets - which is worth weighing when you judge an on-air recommendation, without mistaking it for a guarantee of maintenance.
Where The Craig Groeschel Leadership Podcast falls behind
No transcripts, anywhere, at any price. Apple's listing shows no transcript tab and neither craiggroeschel.com nor the Life.Church episode pages promise one. For a show whose whole value is numbered frameworks - six types of leaders, five lessons, three questions - a searchable text layer would be the highest-value addition, and third-party transcript sites exist only because the publisher does not provide them.
Twelve episodes a year is thin for the category. A listener with a specific problem this week - a resignation, a budget cut, a staff conflict - has a far better chance of finding a relevant episode in an 828-episode weekly archive than in a 196-episode monthly one.
The official show page publishes no episodes. craiggroeschel.com/leadershippodcast lists listening platforms and a value proposition; it does not name a single episode, offer a search box, or index the archive by topic. The episodes and the leader guides live on a different domain, life.church, which the show page does not surface as a browsable archive either. Two homes, no index.
Its own numbers contradict each other in two places. The show page promises insights "in about 30 minutes or less" while the two most recent episodes run 50 and 41 minutes, and both the show page and Apple say monthly while June 2026 shipped two. Neither is serious alone; together they suggest copy nobody has revisited, the same signal as a "2019 Life.Church" line on a 2026 feed.
Free is not open. The Open Network licence permits internal, non-commercial use and derivative works from the additional resources, but forbids resale or commercial distribution, forbids editing message videos or posting them to public platforms, forbids logo use or implied affiliation, and reserves termination at Life.Church's discretion over reputational concerns. Churches planning a curriculum on top of these materials should read the terms, not the marketing.
Craig Groeschel vs. Carey Nieuwhof vs. the Life.Church ecosystem
These are the two free church-leadership podcasts everyone in the category actually listens to, and they are opposite businesses. The Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast is weekly, interview-led, 828 episodes across twelve years, ad-supported, and the front door to a published ladder: a $0 Academy account, $17 a month, $57 a month or $497 a year, and a $597 conference ticket. The Craig Groeschel Leadership Podcast is monthly, teaching-led, 196 episodes across ten years, unadvertised, and underwritten by a 46-location church that gives its software away.
For a listener the difference is not price - both feeds cost nothing - it is how to read what you hear. On Nieuwhof, a recommendation, a trends report or a free hub does double duty: it is useful and it is a lead magnet. On Groeschel, the episode ends and the only thing waiting is a worksheet. The cost of the cleaner incentive is volume and searchability; the cost of the bigger archive is that every exit has a price on it.
The third comparison is not a podcast. If what you want from Life.Church is tooling rather than coaching, the same organisation gives away YouVersion, Church Online Platform with 38,428 churches joined since 2011, and 35,000-plus Open Network resources. Those solve concrete operational problems - a Bible app for your congregation, an online service, next term's kids curriculum - which the podcast does not attempt. Read it as the leadership-development slot in that suite, not its centre.
The bottom line
Ten years, 196 episodes, no advertising, no membership, no conference, and a free leader guide on every episode - as an unencumbered leadership resource this is close to best in class, and the numbered-framework format plus the printable guide makes it usable in a staff meeting rather than merely inspiring. The costs are structural: monthly cadence, no transcripts, no episode index on its own show page, and stale claims about length and frequency that its own feed contradicts. If you want volume and long-form interviews, Carey Nieuwhof has four times the archive and a price list to go with it. If you want a short monthly coaching session paid for by somebody else, this is the one.
Alternatives to The Craig Groeschel Leadership Podcast
The Carey Nieuwhof Leadership PodcastThe direct competitor and the opposite business model: weekly, interview-led, 828 episodes since 2014, ad-supported, and the top of a funnel ending at a $57-a-month membership and a $597 conference. Four times the archive, with incentives to price in.
YouVersion Bible AppThe other thing Life.Church built and gave away, and the reason this podcast has no funnel. Free Bible reading, plans and church Events with sermon outlines and giving, in 2,500-plus versions. Tooling rather than teaching.
The Gospel CoalitionFree articles, podcasts and courses from a broadly Reformed perspective, with no membership ladder attached. More explicitly theological and less management-flavoured - the better choice if you want doctrine rather than frameworks.
Center ChurchTim Keller's book-length theology of ministry, arguing for a gospel-centred framework rather than a set of leadership tactics. Slower and far denser than a monthly podcast, and the natural counterweight if you want the reasoning underneath the practices.
EdifiA Christian podcast directory and player rather than a show. Useful for sampling this alongside several other leadership feeds from one app before committing to a single host.Frequently asked questions
Is the Craig Groeschel Leadership Podcast free?
Yes, completely, and with no commercial layer behind it. All 196 episodes Apple lists are free with no account, no trial and no paywalled archive, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, the Life.Church app or any RSS client, and the leader guide linked from each episode is free too. No sponsor reads appear in the episode descriptions Apple publishes, and there is no membership, course or conference - Life.Church funds the show.
How many episodes are there, and how often do they come out?
Apple Podcasts lists 196 episodes and labels the frequency "Updated Monthly", with Years Active given as 2015 - 2026. The January 2026 episode is billed as a 10-Year Anniversary Edition, which points to a January 2016 start and makes Apple's 2015 the odd figure. In practice the monthly label is approximate: June 2026 carried two episodes, on 4 June and 18 June.
Do episodes come with a leader guide or a transcript?
A leader guide, yes; a transcript, no. Every episode description on Apple ends with a link to a free leader guide at life.church/leadershippodcast. Apple's listing shows no transcript tab, and neither the show page nor the episode descriptions promise transcripts.
What is the podcast rating, and is it an App Store rating?
Apple Podcasts shows 4.9 out of 5 from 10,698 listener ratings. That is a podcast rating, not an App Store app rating - two different aggregates measuring different things - so we report it here but do not publish it as this review's score. There is no iOS or Android app for the show, so the 4.5 above is our own editorial rating.
How is it different from the Carey Nieuwhof podcast?
Cadence, format and business model. Nieuwhof is weekly and interview-led with 828 episodes since 2014, carries advertising, and funnels toward a $17-to-$57-a-month Academy, a $497 annual plan and a $597 conference ticket. Groeschel is monthly and teaching-led with 196 episodes since 2016, carries no advertising in its episode descriptions, and has nothing to sell. Nieuwhof gives you four times the archive; Groeschel gives you cleaner incentives and a worksheet.
What does Life.Church give away, and what does it sell?
It gives away a great deal. YouVersion is free, with church profiles, Bible Plans and Events described as "100% free with Events" across more than 2,500 versions in over 1,700 languages. Church Online Platform prints "Pricing 100% Free" with support and upgrades "for the life of the tool" and reports 38,428 churches joined since 2011. Open Network publishes more than 35,000 free resources and states there are "no dues, no tithes, no percentages, no training fees". Life.Church sells nothing here; Groeschel's books are sold at retail by their publishers, with no price printed on craiggroeschel.com.
What tradition does the show come from?
Life.Church is an evangelical, multi-site congregation affiliated with the Evangelical Covenant Church, founded in January 1996 as Life Covenant Church in a two-car garage in Oklahoma City and reported at 46 physical locations and 85,000 weekly attendance as of 2025. The podcast itself is light on theology and heavy on management, so the content transfers readily to business and nonprofit settings, and listeners from liturgical, confessional or intentionally small-congregation traditions will find the framing organisational rather than doctrinal.
Sources & further reading
- The Craig Groeschel Leadership Podcast show page (craiggroeschel.com) ↗
- Craig Groeschel Leadership Podcast on Apple Podcasts (episode count, cadence, rating, leader guide links) ↗
- Life.Church Open Network home page (free resource library) ↗
- Life.Church Open Network FAQ (what free means, download limits) ↗
- Life.Church Open Network resource licence and terms of use ↗
- Church Online Platform pricing and adoption figures ↗
- YouVersion for churches (install counter, free church tools) ↗
- Life.Church on Wikipedia (founding, affiliation, locations, attendance) ↗
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Christian History InstituteThe quiet workhorse of popular church history publishing for forty years - and almost everything they have ever printed is sitting online for free.
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