Our Story

For nearly two decades, we've equipped churches with media that reflects the power of their Message. We believe in the power of story. Here's ours.

Igniter launches with mini movies on DVD

In 2003, Rob Thomas released the first volume of Igniter Videos under the company name Vertical Sky Productions. It contained five short videos specifically created to help illustrate and engage during any church service. By 2005, we had dropped Vertical Sky and fully embraced the name Igniter Media.

Rob Thomas at a Youth Specialties NYWC conference.

WorshipHouse Media launches

When we started out, there weren't many people creating ready-made content for churches, but by 2005, we had enough friends in the field that we decided to create WorshipHouse Media—a distribution platform (the iTunes of Church Media) for church media creators, and a one-stop, downloadable shop for churches looking for media.

Our videos have over

30 Million

views on YouTube alone. And that's not even the primary way people see our content—an estimated 2.2 million people see our content every week via the thousands of churches we serve.

September 2007

Collide magazine goes to print

In 2007, we started Collide magazine, which ran for 20 issues over the course of the next 3+ years. It spoke to the growing tribe of church staff and volunteers who saw the value that media, communications, and technology could bring to their churches.

Thumb through some of our favorite covers.

Between Igniter & Lightstock, our media has been used in thousands of churches and presented to even broader audiences on outlets like The Oprah Winfrey Show, Late Night with Conan O'Brien, and the cover of National Geographic magazine.

The Echo Conference begins

Under the name Echo, we hosted a conference for church-focused artists, geeks, and storytellers. Echo's tenure (2008-2013) hit during a critical time when a creative class of servants was emerging in the church world, who were trying to get their churches up to speed in the rapidly changing worlds of technology, social media/communications, and event production.

Thumb through some of our favorite covers.

In March 2011, we handed over the keys of our WorshipHouse brand to Salem Media Group, who still run it to this day.

February 2012

Igniter acquires Graceway Media

In early 2012, Igniter acquired Graceway Media—originally founded in 2006 by Jon & Josh Bailey as PowerPoint Sermons. Graceway was one of the only unlimited church media subscriptions in the church world at the time.

A fun video welcoming Graceway under the Igniter umbrella. Back then, our parent company was called RT Creative Group. From 2017 until 2020, our parent company was just Igniter Media. Starting in 2020, it's been The Igniter Company.

When a team member hits five years of employment at Igniter, we immortalize them in the form of a bobblehead doppelganger. A bobbleganger, if you will. 

2015

The New Digs

In 2014, we purchased a building in Richardson, Texas, and spent the rest year of the renovating and planning our move that happened in early 2015.

An early picture of our front lobby. We actually spent most of 2020 remodeling again, so that we could better steward our huge space under the brand Igniter Place.

In March 2018, we combined the Igniter and Graceway libraries, websites, and audiences into one under the Igniter Media brand, becoming the first unlimited subscription site to offer a full range of church media products from multiple producers.

Lightstock joins Igniter

Just a few weeks before the start of the global pandemic, we acquired Lightstock, the leading source for faith-based stock media—another great church-focused brand started by the Bailey brothers.

Lightstock + Igniter

We've loved watching churches respond to a broken and lost world —and we've loved providing free content of various forms to over 10,000 churches during the course of the pandemic.

There's no denying it's been a really weird year. 

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But it's in tough times that God's provision, faithfulness, and often His direction gets clearer. We're grateful for what He's led us through the past 17 years, for where He has us today, and for the things He has put on our heart—ready-made media or not—for tomorrow.