Gospel Living Reviews

by A Frustrated Parents

I don’t like the “Circles” feature for the youth groups. As a parent, I can see the youth group posts but only if I go looking for them. I have turned on notifications but still don’t receive notifications for those groups (presumably because I am not actually part of that group). The boys and the leaders can comment in that group, but parents cannot. I find this disturbing for many reasons: 1) Our young men groups have no guidelines for posting, so the other boys are posting about topics and activities that I would rather my boys weren’t involved in (specifically, gaming). The boys are using it more as a chat group rather than as a tool to coordinate church activities. 2) Because I don’t receive notifications of posts, I am in the dark about what is going on in the group unless I remember to check, so it’s difficult for me to do damage control. 3) Not giving parents permission to post in the youth circles sends the message that parents don’t have a voice.
There is a huge disconnect in the church when it comes to youth programs. The youth leaders are supposed to be supporting the parents, not replacing them. “Circles” is compounding that problem. It is undermining my authority as a parent, allowing youth leaders to go around the parents rather than through the parents to get to the youth.

by Daruggz

While I love GospelLiving, and feel it is a blessing to have, as a Primary President it is frustrating. Witt Covid, we would love to have our teachers utilize GospelLiving to communicate with the children in their classes by creating a circle group for each class. It would be cheaper than sending mail, and easier to give and follow on dimple assignments to still help the kids participate to some extent in lessons.
Also, as we begin activity days again, we have 2 groups of boys and girls. It would be nice to be able to have a circle group for each set of leaders and their assigned kids and parents since both classes will be doing different activities based on the kids in their classes goals and needs. Please make the circles portion of GospelLiving customizable so we can better communicate with parents, leaders, and the kids we serve.

by LayneLoo

Signing into my sons account gives this message: Ooops sign in failed due to unknown reason. Please try again. I’ve tried again for several days. I’ve deleted GospelLiving and reloaded it. I’ve called tech support and there is nothing wrong with this account. I can log into the church website and family search. But not GospelLiving . Hoping to log in soon especially since the quorum is using this as it’s only form of communication. It’s been a time consuming frustration to figure this out.

He doesn’t have a phone. So when I log out of my account and try to log into his (which fails every time) and then try to log into mine again I get the same message. Please allow us to choose different profiles within GospelLiving so we don’t have to log in/out constantly. Especially since logging in is problematic

by Billy Bobo Jo

Love the gospel living app but Circles is lacking. I love the idea of Circles, but it is missing the depth and versatility that other forums allow. Circles does not notify me of any conversations in my children’s circles. I can go in and view what’s happening if I remember to do so. Parents also aren’t allowed to comment or ask a question. That really puts a limit on communication. I’m a Primary Activity leader and continue to use GroupMe so that parents get notified of reminders for activities etc and can comment. Youth leaders post in both Circles and the GroupMe app so that parents can see what’s happening. If as parents we are aware of what’s happening in our child’s Primary Activity group or Youth group, we can help them to get the message, attend the activity, follow through with the assignment etc. Please consider making improvements to Circles capabilities so it can be a useful communication tool for children, youth, parents and leaders. ;)

by YW Prez

I was most excited about the circles part of GospelLiving. Finally a way to contact my other leaders and my young women without using texting!! However, it would be really great if we could have a little flexibility with the circles and who is in them. My oldest class circle includes my adult 1st counselor, 2nd counselor, and secretary. I’m pretty sure they don’t want to get a notification whenever I send a message to my class and someone responds. It would be nice also to have the ability to create custom circles and choose who you want in them from your ward (or even stake). Being able to send a message to just a couple of girls or only one would be helpful too. Thanks for what you’ve brought us so far. I hope we can see changes like these in the near future.

by Brentito

The curated Discover section is truly great! There are tons of great quotes and videos and thought-provoking content there. I hope everyone using GospelLiving takes advantage of it.

The Circles feature is a mess, though. Replies to a post are sent to everyone by default. This should change. The default should be reply to the original poster only. Make replies to all take an extra step or two. I don't want to get notified of all the messages saying "Me too" or "Thanks" automatically.

Also, a feature marking all posts as "read" needs to be implemented ASAP. I've had to turn off badge notifications because they don't go away, even after I've scrolled through all the posts in a circle.

by Lynzrox

I have been looking forward to GospelLiving as a parent and leader of youth! This is such a great way for communication and keeping track of our goals! There are a few things that still need work. It is linked with the Gospel Tools app, & if ward clerks do not update callings, our leaders or class presidencies won’t be added to the appropriate circles. It would be great if administrators like the Bishop or YW president had the ability to add the necessary people to groups. This goes the same for household circles. I have older sons who want to help their little brothers with their goals, but are not on our circle. We’d love to be able to add them and even grandparents to our household group!

by LLR*

The potential of GospelLiving is huge but right now the flexibility is lacking. When adding to the calendar it doesn’t automatically put in the date that you clicked to add an event. Say I went to June 17th to add a calendar event. I click the + sign to add a calendar item, then put in the event. Then I have to scroll from March to find the date I need instead of it automatically generating to the date I actually clicked on.
Also the circles are great but the admintrators should have the ability to delete, change or add people to it.
We are excited to start implementing the use of GospelLiving more and more and are hoping that there will be fixes along the way.

by HufflepuffJurassic

This is a truly amazing app. I was so excited when they first announced it! A couple of suggestions:
-Maybe in discover there could be a search bar, like so you can find music you just search up “music” instead of scrolling and maybe not even finding what you want
- for the calendar thingy, can there be a “every day” option or a “select the days” option? Because I want to put my Youth activities so I don’t forget and we have them every week, so I think it’d be a great add on

Those are the two biggest things. There is more but since GospelLiving just launched I don’t want to be that one very picky person

by Cal From Missouri

Very spiritual app already, but Ive had some ideas about improvement, like what if you could keep an online journal on GospelLiving . Entries could be marked in the 4 categories and visited later or even brought back by GospelLiving (like memory feature of facebook) for you to view your spiritual progression. What if you could “freind” people, and post spiritual experiences/temple visits/Etc. for them to see. This way you could lift others up across multiple wards. What if you could keep track of scripture reading/prayer goals on GospelLiving . What if GospelLiving gave you a scripture of the day from your highlighted versus in the Gospel Library app.

by Tehei08

There is so much potential with the addition of the “goals” tab. I love how it’s set up, and have enjoyed setting my goals, and GospelLiving has made it easy to follow through with them. However, it still is buggy. I mark off goals and they come back as unmarked, or I go to edit them and it just goes back to the previous screen. As someone who enjoys the satisfaction of marking things off, it can be a little discouraging when I can’t do that properly.

Lastly, making “circles” available on the web would be great for those youth who don’t have phones. As a leader, it’s been difficult for me to really promote that portion of GospelLiving because it would exclude those who don’t have their own phones.

Otherwise, it’s really becoming an awesome app. Keep it up!

by Cam RM

I think that GospelLiving is very useful and an awesome resource for church members. However, the “household” circle (at least for those people I know) does not seem to work correctly. As far as I know, household circles do not include actual household members, but rather just the single user on GospelLiving . Therefore if we send something, we are only messaging ourselves. In my personal household group I am shown as an administrator, but I have no power to add anyone else to my group. I don’t know if this has to do with the fact that I’m 18+ and living with my parents, but it does seem like a bug.

In content and design, though, this is a great app. I enjoy browsing the discover tab, and especially like the church music playlists that GospelLiving shares.

by DrSolstice

I really love GospelLiving. The information available is wonderful. The Circles tab could be amazing if only a few things are worked on. First and foremost, the notifications need improvement. I could go a day or two without knowing someone sent a message if I’m not checking it constantly. When I send something, I need people to notice it has been sent. Also, if we could build some of our own circles, that would be great. My wife is the seminary teacher and it would be great if she had a circle for her students. We also have youth from other units that need to be included for communication purposes. Let’s work out a few kinks and make GospelLiving incredible!!!

by DUVCHOCOLATE

I love GospelLiving. I just wish that the goal setting in GospelLiving was a little bit different. When you set a goal, you can only write it down as your goal, and under that, write a little bit about that goal. With the new program, goal setting has become very important. So I just wish that it was easier to set goals. Some things that you can’t do that I really wish you were able to do are being able to mark a goal as done. I also wish that you could write down steps you have to accomplish in order to complete this goal. Other than that, I think that this is a great app!

by Follow The Prophet

I’ve been looking forward to using this for a long time. Overall it looks great and I’m excite for most features. I’m a little disappointed in the Goals section. You can create goals, but they are just statements you view in the My Life section. You can create reminders, but the repeat options are limited. And that’s it for goals. No date, no repeat, no way to mark complete, no sub-goals or steps to reach, no way to measure progress. Since Goals are such a central part of the new Youth program, I was expecting quite a bit more development in this area. I was hoping to use GospelLiving as my central command center for managing my goals, but can’t do that... yet. I hope this functionality comes soon!!

by Lndaisy

I am giving it 5 stars, but I hope someone in development will still read this review and take my plea into consideration. I use GospelLiving daily to meet goals and write in my journal. Sometimes it takes forever to even pop up on my phone. The checklists often freeze and don’t register my taps. So I have to go into settings and choose “show completed” and that usually works better. But I prefer for have completed tasks disappear. I thought it was my phone, but I just got a new one and it still struggles. So much. So much so that I want to see if I can access GospelLiving from my computer.

I also wish there was a way to set a goal for 6 days a week, or 3 days a week, and have them show up on the days I want. Like a goal to exercise. I don’t want it on Sundays, but it has to be, and if I don’t mark it done, it shows my progress is lacking. So instead, my goal is to exercise or meditate 30 minutes a day. Which is fine. But there are other goals I really don’t want to work on every single day. I do have some weekly goals, and that works well.

I want to say that as I’ve consistently used GospelLiving daily, I have seen so much personal growth and I love it! I don’t know if there’s a way to back up my journal or access it online or export it, but I sure hope there is. It has been a long, long time since I have written in my journal daily, but thanks to GospelLiving I am going on 5 months of daily journal entries!

by Zach09871234

Here’s the thing. Everyone ought to download and set up this application, and then set a few goals for themselves. Just like all other social media applications, it’s power comes in the amount of people on GospelLiving . Right now, there aren’t a TON of people using it, but it has an incredible potential! You can set goals and share them with people. You can write down impressions then set a reminder for when you want to follow through. Think social media but clean and wholesome. GospelLiving isn’t perfect yet, but the more people use it, the better it will get as more feedback gets through.

by TuckerHG

I love GospelLiving . It’s so much easier to communicate with my quorum. I love the reading and how accessible it is. I also love the inspiration and goals tabs.
Here are some ideas though:
-The links in are dark blue and with the black background sometimes it’s hard to see what they say. This might because my phone is on dark mode however.
-When you click on scriptures it would be awesome if it linked you to the Gospel Library app if you have it rather then the church website because then I can link it to my scripture reading and marking in there. Or maybe pop up in a tab to the side like it does in the gospel library app rather than reroute to another page.
-my friends and I were super excited for GospelLiving because we wanted to make a group chat to send uplifting and spiritual thoughts. We have one on GroupMe but it would be cool if we could make a circle on the Gospel Living app. I haven’t found a way to do this.

by TM- KC

GospelLiving is amazing. Ever since the face to face devotional, I have been so excited to finally get to use it. There are various features, all which help a bunch. First, the discover tab. It has a lot of great content and many inspirational messages which are very uplifting. Next, the Today page. This tab is also very neat. You can add your church schedule to your calendar and never miss a meeting. Also, you can link others on it so they never will also. This will be so useful for all of the activities and meetings that people have to go to. The next tab is the My Life tab. In it, you can add impressions and goals. This will be helpful in the new Youth Program where people will set goals and complete them. The next tab is my favorite one: Circles. This tab acts as a group chat for all of the classes that you are in. Wether it be a Sunday School class or Priests Quorum, you can chat with them about upcoming things and also in many other ways. The last tab is the My Profile tab. This is where you can log into your account and see additional info. Overall GospelLiving is great and I am really excited to finally be able to use it.

by Tyton O. Daley

I don’t want my review to make GospelLiving’s rating go down at all, but I would like to see a bit more flexibility in the Circles tab. I think it’s really cool that it’s already put me in the group chats within my ward, and some other ones like priests quorum, and all of the young men. But there are times when it’s more convenient to just message a couple of people, rather than the entirety of the youth in the ward. Being able to choose one or a few people in a circle at your own expense would be a great addition to GospelLiving .

GospelLiving is really amazing though, there’s a Discover tab that is very fun to explore, with a lot of spiritual things to pull ideas from. I love this Scripture of the day thing going on too, I’ve loved it for the past few days since I’ve gotten GospelLiving and will continue to, I have yet to put the calendar to use, but it looks promising and I’m excited to put it to use. The goals and impressions tab is a bit disappointing. The goals are only one-liners, and when you tap them you can view your description of the goal. They’re pretty brief. Impressions are as expected though, they appear similar to a journal entry. Overall I’m very happy with GospelLiving so far and am looking forward to seeing it grow with features and users as more people join the church, and more church members get GospelLiving . Thanks for all of your work so far! :)

by Sjrosos

Gospel Living app is trying to be three different applications at once and doing it poorly. It’s a content feed of lightweight, rushed, and under-thought content. It’s a weak goal setting app and it’s a weak messaging app. Non of these tools are better than existing tools out there. I don’t understand why the business side of the church feels like they need to always build their own proprietary tools, especially when there are tools already out there that people are using. What problem is GospelLiving solving for members that other apps aren’t already solving? GospelLiving doesn’t answer that question and won’t be successful until it does.

by Karly118

As a leader there are some features which are frustrating. Currently there’s not a way to create a circle/chat which could include nonmembers. We were hoping GospelLiving would be able to replace the mass group texts we send but it looks like that won’t be the case so far. It also includes the bishopric in all of the circles related to callings which could get overwhelming for them with the notifications they’ll be receiving.
Great potential in GospelLiving but still a long way to go before it’s efficient and fully inclusive of all who participate in the children and youth programs.

by Goldgames5

I downloaded GospelLiving to my phone & it seems great so far, so I downloaded it to the iPad that our children share and found it not to be useable at all. For the kids in Primary Activities this would be a great first step into social media, but many won’t have phones yet & a parent’s phone won’t always be accessible. For our daughter with low vision, the iPad also gives her options a smaller screen just cannot, so even as she ages she’ll likely use an iPad most often. Thank you for the work you’ve done thus far! Eagerly awaiting an iPad update!

by Lil Rey Of Sunshine

I love the idea of GospelLiving and have been excited to get it when it came out. The moment was now. I’m very happy with the turnout of its content.
Though having previously used the LDS Youth app, I enjoyed the full music playlist section to the youth app. It made it so much easier to just tap and play, here I have to scroll through a bunch of feed and manually select play. It’s not that frustrating though it feels inconvenient.
I’m aware GospelLiving has just came out and has many new modifications on their way. I plead to add a music section that will be easier to access. Thanks!

by Adnan96

I haven’t used it too much, but I would love to be able to remove people from the circles. I feel if the entire bishopric and YW presidency is on every single group they will get a lot of messages and could get confusing or overwhelming especially when they don’t really need to be in all of them. Also would love to add Adult advisors/leaders. It would be great to be able to create our own as well. I love the idea behind this though. If/when all the youth are using it I know it’ll make staying in contact with them so much more convenient.

by Sm4532

But I was mostly interested in the Group communication aspect.

I wish parents could post in their children’s circles as well as get notifications of posts in those circles if they want. Otherwise, it’s really not that great of a real-time communicator. Parents will have to manually go in to each of their child’s groups to check for messages. They aren’t going to be notified and so they won’t see posts in a timely manner and thus people aren’t going to use it to communicate as much.

Maybe it’s not meant to be that kind of a messaging platform though.

by Plaidmom

Our homes are a sanctuary from (but within) the world, and GospelLiving feels like a sanctuary from (but within) the virtual world! Enjoying the features for keeping goals, reminders, and a private way to connect with my family and those serving in callings for the classes and quorums we are all involved in. This is great to teach texting with some safeguards in a more private app. Excited to keep using it, and hope some features will come on board (like extending circles to those we are ministering, or extended family not in our household).

by Breannemeline

We have been waiting for GospelLiving since Elder Gong announced it at the Face to Face. We have several youth who do not have unlimited texts. With GospelLiving we now have a way to communicate with our YW and their families without putting undo pressure on them with our groups texts.
Thank you for adding Cirlces to this much needed app! Yay! We’re so glad it’s finally here!

Question: is there any way to customize circles so we can create personal groups that are not preselected for us?

by Lds 🙂

Lol bahaha laughing so hard Bc of all the people angry about no memes. Remember!! GospelLiving is set up and run by old people. GospelLiving was presented and memes on it were announced by old people.

Soooo their understanding of meme may be different than ours and they may just have meant quotes by that. 🤦🏻‍♀️😂😂

Anyways just when I was about to give up all hope of their fancy app. It’s all really cool and I’m excited to use it. My suggestion is more flexibility with Circles tho. They are super cool but looking a lil weird at the moment. For one, the names are really long. My Sunday School class is called Course 15, Course 16, Course 17. I think Class 15-17 would be a lot better and make sense. There’s also some duplicated chats that are kinda weird. There’s “Young Women” and “Young Women 12-18” with the exact same people. Also it would be so helpful to have ones for SYC and YCLs. These are real groups even if u don’t get set apart to it and we could really use this feature. Pls make Circles more editable and Easy Ik it’s hard! thx for making GospelLiving

by CELPOR

I’ve been anxiously awaiting this apps release! It’s full of positivity and truth. It’s packed with amazing articles, quotes, videos, and tips. I love the ability to connect with youth groups without making huge group texts that nobody feels they can reply to or depending on social media. It’s such a great place for our teens to spend some time. I haven’t gotten to check it all out yet since it just came out but so far it looks amazing!🙂 Thank you so much for GospelLiving!

by Weeflen

I’ve been waiting for an app like this for a long time. One that takes all of the principles of goal-setting, recording revelation, etc. and puts it in the context of living a Christian life. The articles in GospelLiving are inspiring. You can filter what you read about and watch based on your interests. They have many ideas on how to set goals in each aspect of your life (spiritual, intellectual, social/emotional, and educational). I am so grateful for GospelLiving!