The JESUS Film Project

What The JESUS Film Project is

The JESUS Film Project app is a free streaming and download app published by Cru's JESUS Film Project ministry. Its core content is the 1979 film JESUS — a 128-minute dramatization of the Gospel of Luke produced by John Heyman and originally distributed by Warner Bros. — together with a growing library of companion shorts (Magdalena, Rivka, Walking with Jesus, the Falashas story, and a series of newer culturally-specific films aimed at women, children, and unreached people groups).

What sets the app apart is not the catalog's breadth but its depth in a single dimension: language. The flagship film has been dubbed into more than 2,000 languages and counting, a translation effort that has been running continuously since 1979 and is widely cited as the most ambitious media-translation project in history. The app is the front door to that catalog. Pick a language, pick a film, stream or download.

Why missionaries and diaspora pastors use The JESUS Film Project app

The single biggest practical difference between this app and every other Christian video app is the language depth. Most apps proudly advertise that they support twenty or thirty languages. The JESUS Film Project app supports more than two thousand — including hundreds of languages with under a million speakers, where no commercial streamer has any business case to translate anything. That is the entire point. The film was conceived from the beginning as a tool for cross-cultural evangelism, and the app is the modern face of that effort.

In practice this means a pastor in Kazakhstan can hand a Tajik refugee a phone with the JESUS film in Tajik, Persian, or Uzbek and have it actually work. A diaspora church in Houston can show Magdalena in Amharic to a women's group. A field worker in Papua New Guinea can pull a version dubbed in a language with fewer than fifty thousand speakers. This is not a feature any other app on the market can match — not The Chosen, not Pure Flix, not anything. The Bible app comes closest with its audio catalog, but for video evangelism the JESUS Film Project app is alone in its lane.

2,000+ language film streaming: the differentiator that has no peer

Open the app, tap the language selector, and you are looking at a list that scrolls past every language you have ever heard of and into hundreds you have not. Major world languages are there — Mandarin, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, Bengali, Russian, Portuguese, French, Swahili — each typically with multiple regional dubs. Then come the long-tail entries: Quechua variants, Hausa, Yoruba, Fulani dialects, Cherokee, Navajo, Hmong, Karen, dozens of Indonesian and Filipino languages, indigenous languages of the Andes and the Amazon, scores of African languages that have full Bible translations but no other commercial media. The catalog passed the 2,000-language mark, and Cru continues to fund new dubs.

This sounds like a small thing. In practice it is transformative for the way cross-cultural ministry actually works. When the gospel arrives in a heart language rather than a trade language, the response is materially different — and the JESUS Film Project has cited millions of recorded conversion responses across the film's history, with viewing estimates running into the billions globally. Whether you take those numbers at full weight or with a grain of salt, the underlying point stands: this app is the only place on a phone where a particular village in northern Nigeria or a particular highland valley in Peru can hear the Luke narrative spoken in the language children learn from their mothers.

Companion shorts library: Magdalena, Rivka, Falashas, and the cultural-specifics

The catalog is bigger than the 1979 film. The companion library includes Magdalena: Released from Shame — a feature-length film telling the gospel from Mary Magdalene's perspective, designed for women's ministry contexts and now itself translated into more than two hundred languages — along with Rivka (a contemporary drama bridging into the gospel story), Walking with Jesus, The Story of Jesus for Children (a child-targeted edit), and a steady stream of newer shorts targeted at specific unreached people groups. The Falashas film, telling the story of Ethiopian Jewish believers, is among the more historically interesting entries; recent additions include culturally-specific dramas built for South Asian, Central Asian, and East African audiences.

For a U.S. viewer used to The Chosen, the production values across the shorts vary widely. The newer culturally-specific films often look excellent and are built with native casts; older shorts share the late-70s look of the flagship. But the same language-depth logic applies — Magdalena alone in 200+ languages outpaces almost any other piece of Christian media in translation reach. For ministries targeting women, children, or specific unreached groups, the shorts library is the reason to keep the app installed.

Mission and evangelism use case: built for showings, not bingeing

The app is engineered around an evangelism workflow rather than a consumer-streaming workflow, and once you notice it you cannot un-notice it. Offline download is front and center, because the assumption is that the film will be shown somewhere without reliable connectivity. Language selection is the first decision, because the assumption is that you are looking for a specific dub. The interface includes share flows, response prompts, and ties back to follow-up resources from JESUS Film Project for the showing leader to send to interested viewers. Decision-recording tools are quietly built in — Cru tracks the millions of recorded responses across the film's history through exactly this kind of feedback loop.

For an individual viewer just curious about the film, this is invisible — you tap, you watch, the experience is fine. For a field worker, a church planter, or a campus ministry student running a showing in a dorm common room, the workflow is the point. There is no other Christian video app in the App Store that is this deliberately built around the showing-and-conversation use case, and that lineage shows up everywhere from the icon set to the help content.

Pricing

Where The JESUS Film Project falls behind

No modern Jesus drama. The flagship film is from 1979. The cinematography, pacing, and acting are period-correct for the late seventies and have not been remastered into modern-feeling production. Viewers coming from The Chosen will feel the gap immediately, and there is no equivalent multi-season prestige content in the catalog.

No Bible text, no study tools, no original-language helps. This is a video player, not a study app. If you want to read along in Luke, follow a verse cross-reference, or pull up a commentary, you are doing that in a different app on a different tab.

Discovery is utilitarian rather than delightful. There is no algorithmic recommendation feed, no editor's picks, no "watch next" UX of the kind that consumer-streaming apps spend millions on. You arrive knowing what you want, or you scroll. For the target user that is the right tradeoff; for casual browsers it can feel sparse.

Casting and second-screen polish lag (yet). Chromecast and AirPlay both work in current builds, but the experience is not at the level a Netflix or Disney+ user expects. For a phone-to-projector showing on a missions trip this is fine; for a living-room movie night it is noticeably more friction than the consumer-grade apps.

Some companion shorts have shallower language coverage than the main film. The flagship JESUS film is the deepest catalog; Magdalena reaches 200+ languages; newer culturally-specific shorts may only exist in their target language plus English. If you want a specific short in a non-major language, check before assuming it is there.

The JESUS Film app vs. The Chosen app vs. Pure Flix

These three apps look like they belong in the same category — Christian video streaming — but they are actually three different products solving three different problems. The JESUS Film Project app is a translation and distribution tool wrapped around one specific film and its companions, optimized for cross-cultural and offline use. The Chosen app is a prestige-drama streamer built around Dallas Jenkins's multi-season series and its growing studio universe, optimized for the modern binge experience. Pure Flix is a general Christian-and-family video subscription service in the Netflix mold, with thousands of titles spanning Christian films, family movies, and original series.

Different strengths. The JESUS Film app is unmatched on language depth and free-distribution scale — there is literally nothing else in the App Store that streams a feature-length Jesus drama in 2,000+ languages. The Chosen app is better at modern storytelling, production values, and emotional engagement with a Western audience; it is what you reach for if you want someone moved by a contemporary Jesus drama, and the bulk of its catalog is free in its own way (ad-supported with optional Pay-It-Forward giving). Pure Flix is broader — thousands of titles, family-friendly programming, originals — but charges a monthly subscription and stays mostly in the English market.

A reasonable household keeps two of these installed and not all three. If you do cross-cultural ministry or speak a heart language other than English, JESUS Film is non-negotiable. If you want modern Jesus drama for personal or small-group use, The Chosen app is the default. If you want a Christian Netflix for family movie nights, Pure Flix is the subscription that delivers. The JESUS Film app is the one whose role no other app can fill.

Alternatives to The JESUS Film Project