Start with Part One, then keep Part Two to hand as you work through the weeks. If something on screen does not look right, Part Four explains what each message means. Words that appear on screen are shown like this, so you can match them to what is in front of you.
Acts 3 Discovery™ runs in a web browser on any phone, tablet or computer. There is nothing to install, and everything you do is saved to your account rather than to the device in front of you — so you can start on a laptop and carry on from your phone.
Open the site and you will see the Acts 3 Discovery star, the tagline, and a card with two halves: Sign In and Create Account. Choose the half you need.
Underneath the sign-in card is 📗 New here? Read the User Guide, which opens this guide in your browser — handy before you sign in, especially if you are locked out. Once you are in, it is also the 📗 How to Use the App card on your home screen. Both have a ⬇ Download PDF button if you would rather print it.
If you have signed in on this device before, you may briefly see "Signing you in…" instead — that is the app recognising you, and it will take you straight to your own starting page.
There are no navigation tabs. Three things get you everywhere:
A small ↗ after a button's name means it opens in a new browser tab — the app stays running behind it, and you return by closing that tab or switching back to it.
Clicking ✦ Acts 3 Discovery in the top-left always takes you to your own home screen, which holds a card for every part of your journey.
The bar across the top is always there. On the right you will find, in order: the ← Back button when there is somewhere to go back to, your name and role badge, the language toggle, and Log Out.
Log Out is immediate — there is no "are you sure". On a shared church computer, always log out when you finish; otherwise the next person will be signed in as you.
The 🌐 Español button in the header switches the whole app instantly and remembers your choice on that device. Press 🌐 English to switch back.
Buttons, labels, prompts, week titles, scripture and error messages are all translated. Three things are not, and are shown in English on purpose:
You can put Acts 3 Discovery on your home screen so it opens like an app, without a browser bar around it.
Adding it to your home screen changes how it looks, not what it can do offline. Your work is saved to your account on the server, so you need to be online for it to save — the copy kept on your device is a mirror, not a substitute.
Different parts of the app save in different ways, and this catches people out more than anything else:
If the app cannot reach the server it will warn you after retrying three times. Stay online and re-open the page to check your work actually took — do not assume it was kept, and do not close the browser and hope.
Full instructions come later, under If you forget your password, but the one thing worth knowing up front applies to everybody:
The app says it on screen, and it is the single most common reason people get stuck: "The email often lands in Junk or Spam, not your main inbox. If you find it there, drag the message itself into your Inbox — opening it directly from Junk usually won't let the link work."
Move the message to your Inbox first, then click the link. Each link works once, in the browser it opens in.
Ten weeks, six points of light. Each week you read a chapter, write a reflection, and answer a set of questions that fill in one point of your Calling Star. By the end you have a complete picture of how God has wired you, where you have been, and what your next step is.
If your church has a partnership with ACT3, your seat may be discounted or already paid for. Choosing Independent / No church — the last option in the list — means no discount applies and you pay the standard rate.
You can correct this yourself only before you start Week 1. After that, an administrator has to do it for you. If you are not certain, fix it now, before you pay.
Many churches let you choose your own group. If yours does, the first time you sign in you will see a 👥 Choose your group card at the top of your dashboard.
Your facilitator will then see you on their roster, and the card disappears.
Check the group name before you confirm. If you picked the wrong one, or need to move later, ask your facilitator or your church administrator — they can move you, but you cannot move yourself.
If you never see the card, your church assigns groups itself, or has not set its groups up yet. Nothing is wrong — your facilitator or administrator will place you.
Signing in takes you straight to your dashboard. Above every page in your journey sits a bar labelled My Journey with eight places to go:
Press 📖 Dashboard in that bar, the ← Back button in the header, or the ✦ Acts 3 Discovery logo — which takes you to a home screen holding all of these as cards.
Four numbers across the top show weeks complete, weeks in progress, star points lit, and the total of ten. Below them:
Nothing is locked. You can read ahead, or go back and finish something you skipped, whenever you like. Working in order is simply the intended way to experience it.
Every week has two tabs. You always arrive on the first.
A running synopsis of the chapter, with scripture, a recap box, and a closing line pointing you onward. At the top, Open Week N ↗ opens Jeff's complete verbatim text in the Participant Guide.
Down the side is 📝 My Notes — a notepad for anything that strikes you as you read. It saves itself about a second after you stop typing; there is no save button and you do not need one.
This is where the work is recorded, in three parts:
The Calling Star questions do not save by themselves. Fill them in and leave the page without pressing a button and the work is gone.
Press 💾 Save Progress to keep what you have so far, or Mark Calling Star Segment Complete ✦ when you are finished with that week's questions — the second one saves as well, so you never need both.
At the bottom, a short checklist tracks two things: a saved journal entry, and the Calling Star section marked complete. Once both are ticked, press Mark Week Complete and the week turns gold.
| Wk | Title | What you record |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Regaining Your Bearings | Your birth date, your current life stage, how you feel about it, and the shifts approaching. |
| 2 | ReFocusing Your Heart | Your "AHA" moments (up to three), how clear your calling feels, where you have seen God's power. |
| 3 | ReThinking Your Path | Your Journey Map events — each with a date, a category, how it shaped you and how it felt — then your top five, and your recurring theme. |
| 4 | Exploring the Impact of Your Journey | What sharing your map with the cohort did, and your three most impactful events. |
| 5 | Admiring the Master's 1st Stroke | How you naturally operate and the contexts you do it best in. Take the Kingdom Expressions assessment this week. |
| 6 | Discovering Your Kingdom Expressions | Your assessment results land here automatically. Take the Spiritual Gifts assessment this week. |
| 7 | Embracing Your Spiritual Gifts | Your top three gifts, whether this is new or a reaffirmation, and the ministry context that fits. |
| 8 | ReCalculating Your Worth & People | The people in your entourage, what each has spoken into your life, and how connected you are. |
| 9 | Gauging Your Resources | A 168-hour time study, your serving commitment, and your skills inventory. |
| 10 | Detecting the Heat of Your Passions | What makes your heart sing, what breaks it, and your Next Steps Declaration. |
The time study covers every hour of the week — 24 × 7. A running total and a countdown tell you how many hours are still unassigned. You cannot mark Week 9 complete until it lands on exactly 168, so do include sleeping, eating and commuting.
It is what lets your Journey Map show your age at each event. Without it the map still works, but every marker is missing its age.
Both are free, take about fifteen to twenty minutes, and open in a new browser tab.
Kingdom Expressions surfaces your leading five of sixteen expressions; Spiritual Gifts gives you a top three. Both fill in their point of your Calling Star automatically, and both can be retaken. Retaking Kingdom Expressions asks you to confirm first, and your current results stay saved and visible until you finish the new attempt — if you change your mind partway, Discard the Retake on its welcome screen takes you back to them. Every completed attempt is kept, so a retake never erases an earlier one.
Read the Kingdom Expressions results as portraits rather than verdicts. Scores are close together by design, so when your sixth expression finished within a hair of your fifth the results say so and tell you to treat it as part of your leading group; two expressions with exactly the same score are marked with an equals sign in the full list of sixteen. After a retake, a section called What changed since … sets the two attempts side by side, with a reminder that a difference can come from the instrument as much as from you. In Week 7 two short items sit at the bottom of the week: a reflection on how well the results fit, including which one of your five fits you least, and a place to record what two or three people who know you said when you asked whether they recognise your leading expressions. Week 8 has the same kind of reflection for your Spiritual Gifts, including which of your three fits least. Those answers are how the descriptions get better.
At the end of either assessment you will find Save PDF, Send and Print. For Kingdom Expressions, Save PDF and Print first ask how much you want: the summary — about two pages — or the full report, which is everything on the results screen. The summary is your pattern across the four domains, your five leading expressions with what each contributes and where each tends to cast a shadow, then all sixteen in order; the full report follows that with each leading expression's complete narrative, its visible and quiet expressions, its reflection questions, the synthesis and your Calling Star section. Either choice opens the document as its own page in a new tab with a Print / Save as PDF button at the top — on a computer the print dialog opens by itself; on an iPad or phone, tap that button, then choose Print or Save as PDF. For Spiritual Gifts it is the pattern your three make together, each primary gift with how to begin using it and the settings it fits, the three emerging behind them, then the full ranking. Send opens your own email app with a draft you can address to whoever you choose. None of this is needed to keep your results — those are already saved in your Calling Star — it is for having a copy of your own, to carry into a conversation with your facilitator or someone who knows you well.
They only open for someone already signed in to Acts 3 Discovery in the same browser. Open them from inside the week rather than from a saved bookmark, and they will let you straight in. Seeing No new results yet in red is normal too — it just means the assessment has not been finished and saved yet.
Six points, each fed by particular weeks:
| Point | Weeks | Lights up when |
|---|---|---|
| 🗺 Journey | 1, 2, 3, 4 | all of that point's weeks are complete. Any week started shows the point as in progress. |
| 💪 Kingdom Expressions | 5, 6 | |
| ✨ Spiritual Gifts | 7 | |
| 🤝 People | 8 | |
| ⏱ Resources | 9 | |
| 🔥 Passions | 10 |
On a computer the star is drawn as a six-pointed burst with a card at each tip. Completed arms glow gold; points you have not reached yet appear as soft clouds showing which weeks will fill them. On a phone the same six points appear as a simple vertical stack of cards.
The cards on the star are previews, so a long list gets trimmed with "… tap to read all ⤢". Tapping opens the full, scrollable version with a Go to Week N → button. Every card has a small ⤢ in its corner as a reminder.
Some churches add a serving layer to Acts 3 Discovery; if yours has, a 🙌 Where You Could Serve card appears on your home page (also reached from the foot of your Calling Star and from Week 10). If you do not see the card, your church has not taken it, and nothing in this section applies. The page sets your results beside your church's service areas — the ministries, teams and roles your church has entered in the app. Each area shows a fit label and, more usefully, the reasons: which of your Kingdom Expressions and Spiritual Gifts it calls for, which of your best contexts, what you said you are glad doing, and whether the time it asks for matches the hours you set aside in Week 9. Read the reasons, not just the label.
At the top, What this draws on lists what the page already knows about you and links to any week that would add more. The areas themselves are grouped the way Jesus drew the map in Acts 1:8 — Jerusalem (inside the church), Judea (our town, usually with a local partner ministry), Samaria (across a cultural line) and the uttermost part of the world (international partners) — because any one of the four may hold your next assignment. Areas that serve a cause you named in Week 10 as breaking your heart count toward the fit too.
You get an email from Acts3 Discovery when a leader marks you Contacted, Placed or Not now, and when a leader invites you to an area; the leader gets one when you raise a hand. Replying to that email reaches the other person directly.
Leaders see you only for areas where you raised a hand, or everywhere if you turned the switch on. What they see is the inputs listed under What this draws on and the reasons — never your journal, your map or your reflections. If your church has not entered any service areas yet, the page says so; your Calling Star is still the place to start a conversation.
The map draws your life as a hiking trail, climbing from woodland to a summit, with a marker at each event you have recorded. There are two ways to look at it: from above, where a small figure walks your years and stops at each marker, and from the trail itself.
Anything you add on the map appears in Week 3, and anything you add in Week 3 appears on the map. They look completely different but hold one set of events.
One useful difference: edits made on the map save the moment you make them. The Week 3 form still needs 💾 Save Progress.
Hovering a row in the trail log reveals ✎ to edit and ✕ to remove it. Clicking the row opens a window with everything recorded about that event — its category, the season of life it fell in, the impact you chose and how it felt — with Walk to it to go straight there on the trail.
The symbol you choose is kept with the event. It also sets that event's category in Week 3 — the picture and the category are the same thing seen from two sides, so changing one changes the other.
Markers sit on the trail according to their date. Events recorded as a bare year all land on the same spot and are shown in the order you typed them rather than the order they happened — so a June event entered last will appear after an October one. Adding the month spreads them across the year and puts them in the right sequence.
Press Start walking and the view comes down out of the sky onto the path, facing the way your life went. Your events stand along it as signs, each with its symbol and, as you reach it, a card giving the date, your age, what it was and anything you wrote about it. The mountain ahead is where the trail is going; it grows as the years pass.
The landscape is doing something while you walk. The ground and the sky are drawn from what you recorded — rough ground and low cloud through hard seasons, open country and clear air through settled ones. Nothing is being scored. The trail always climbs; what changes is the character of the going.
Along the bottom is a ribbon showing your whole life end to end — the weather of each stretch, every event as a mark beneath it, and how far you have come. Walking, you can only see as far as the next bend, so it is the one thing that tells you where you are in the whole.
Underneath the map there is a short guide to what you are seeing: what each kind of event does to the ground and the sky, the seasons scale, and how to read the band and the ribbon. Worth a minute before you walk it the first time.
There is no trail to walk until you have recorded two events, so the walking controls only appear once you have. Add a couple in Week 3 or in the trail log and they arrive.
Under the trail log there is a box called Seasons of life. It lets you say what a whole stretch of your life was like, in your own judgement — which is a different thing from the events inside it.
The band along the top of the years strip shows it straight away, underlined to mark it as yours, and the weather on the walk follows. The ✕ beside a season removes it.
You do not have to name any. Where you have said nothing, the trail reads each stretch from the events and feelings recorded in it. Naming one is for when that reading does not match what you know — most people record weddings and births rather than the grinding years, so a hard decade can look deceptively bright until you say otherwise.
Naming a stretch a storm does not erase what was good in it, and the events inside still show through — a wedding in a hard decade still lights its own part of the trail. What you are describing is the stretch as a whole.
Under the map, the strip across the bottom reads left to right across your life. The coloured band along its top is your Season of Life. Below it, the red line is the going — low is easier, high is harder — and beneath that, the dark shape is the climb itself. Dragging anywhere on the strip walks you through time.
A section you have not filled in yet is simply left out, rather than printing an empty page.
If nothing seems to happen, your browser has probably blocked the new window — allow pop-ups for this site and try again.
Almost nothing, unless you choose otherwise. Everything starts private.
Your facilitator and church admins can always see how far along you are — which weeks are complete and which star points are lit — along with the email address and phone number on your account, so they can stay in touch with you. Nobody else in your group sees your contact details. They cannot read anything you have written unless you share it, using one of three switches that sit beside the thing itself:
Each switch reads Private or Shared so you can see its state at a glance, and you can change your mind at any time.
One payment covers everything — both assessments, the Journey Map, and the full Participant Guide. There is no subscription.
Churches arrange this in different ways, and a seat is not always in place the moment you sign up. If someone has told you yours is paid for and you are still being asked to pay, check with your facilitator before paying rather than paying and sorting it out afterwards.
If you see this message and do not have access, your seat simply has not been assigned yet. There is no button to buy your way in — speak to your facilitator or church coordinator, who can assign you one.
This is a network hiccup, not a bill. Press Try again. If you are already covered, nothing has changed and no payment is needed.
The app tells you this on screen, and it is worth repeating: "The email often lands in Junk or Spam, not your main inbox. If you find it there, drag the message itself into your Inbox — opening it directly from Junk usually won't let the link work."
The link also only works in the browser it opens in, and only once. If it fails, request a fresh one rather than clicking the old email again.
Anyone signed in can give the journey to a church — their own or another. It appears on every home screen, and participants reach it from the 💝 Sponsor Seats button in the My Journey bar.
Each sponsored participant seat covers one person's full ten-week journey; each facilitator license equips one leader with the complete toolbox.
Anyone you name gets that seat set aside for them the moment your payment goes through. Nobody else can use it — not another member of the church, not someone who signs up first.
They do not need an account yet. The seat waits for the email address you gave. Whenever that person signs up using it, their seat is already there. You do not have to create accounts for them, and you should not try to.
For a larger gift, name ten and ask the church's administrator to hand out the rest — they can do that from the same held seats.
Anything you leave unnamed is held for two weeks. During that time it is not in the church's general pool and nobody can claim it — so you have room to decide, or to ring the church and tell them who the seats are for. Their administrator can then give each one to a named person.
After two weeks, whatever is still unnamed becomes an ordinary gift to the church, and its administrators hand it out as they see fit.
Some churches have their own agreed seat rate, so the figure on this page is a guide. The exact total is shown on the secure checkout page before you pay.
The receiving church sees a 💝 Recent Seat Gifts card on their Site Admin page listing what arrived and from whom — or "from an anonymous friend" if you chose that. Licenses, and any seats you did not reserve for a named person, land in their pools automatically.
You are returned to the app with a thank-you. That is all that is required of you — the gift is recorded and the seats are on their way. If you arrive back at a sign-in screen, your session simply timed out while you were on the payment page; the gift still went through.
Every purchase leaves the app for a secure checkout page and returns you afterwards. Confirmation can lag a few seconds behind the payment while it is recorded, so:
| What you see | What it means and what to do |
|---|---|
| "Couldn't verify your access" | This is not a bill. The app could not check your access just now — usually a brief network problem. Press Try again. If you are already covered, nothing has changed and no payment is needed. The app deliberately never shows a payment screen when a check fails. |
| "Almost there, [name]" Your church is covering access… |
Your church has seats but one has not been assigned to you. There is no button to buy your way past this. Ask your facilitator or church coordinator to assign you a seat. |
| "Your journey has already begun, so an admin has to make this change" | You are trying to change your own church after starting Week 1. Email aharlow3@hotmail.com, or ask your Site Admin. |
| "Incorrect email or password." | Check for typos and stray capitals. If you are sure, use Forgot your password?. |
| "Please check your email to confirm your account, then sign in." | Your account exists but the address is unconfirmed. Find the confirmation email — check Junk — then sign in. |
| "An account with this email already exists." | Use Sign In rather than Create Account, and reset your password if you have forgotten it. |
| ⚠ "Could not sync to the server…" | A save failed three times. Get back online, then re-open the page and confirm your work is actually there. Do not close the browser assuming it was kept. |
| "No new results yet" (in red) | Normal. Your assessment has not been finished and saved yet. Complete it in the other tab, then press ⟳ Check for Results again. |
| "Please sign in again" | Your session expired. Log out, sign back in, and retry. |
| "Please allow pop-ups for this site to print." | Printing opens a new window that your browser blocked. Allow pop-ups for the site and press print again. |
Your gift went through. The sign-in screen appears when your session times out while you are on the payment page; it is not a sign that anything failed, and a thank-you appears once you are back in.
You do not need to create accounts for the people you are giving to. Anyone you named at checkout already has their seat waiting for the email address you gave — they simply sign up themselves whenever they are ready.
You can only choose once, so ask your facilitator or church administrator to move you. It takes them a moment on their Assignments page.
That is normal. Either you are already in a group, your church assigns groups itself, or it has not set its groups up yet. Your facilitator or administrator will place you.
A week needs both a saved journal entry and the Calling Star section marked complete. Open the week and check which of the two ticks is missing.
They should not. Your work lives in your account, not on a device, and each one takes the account's copy when you open the app. If two devices disagree, the one showing more is usually the one that has been used most recently.
Close the app fully on the device showing less and open it again, which makes it fetch a fresh copy. Until you have done that, do your editing on the device you trust: whichever device you save on writes its own version of the list, so working on the out-of-date one can undo newer entries.
The Calling Star questions do not save by themselves. Always finish with 💾 Save Progress or Mark Calling Star Segment Complete ✦. Journal entries and reading notes do save on their own; those are the exceptions, not the rule.
A reset link works once. Some email programs — Outlook with Safe Links, some phone mail apps, Gmail's previews — open links on their own to check them, and that can use the link up before you ever click it. When that has happened the app now says so on the sign-in screen and offers a new link.
Two things can look like that. The button at the bottom of pair 84 is greyed out until that pair has an answer, and until this update it stayed grey even after you answered — it now wakes up as soon as you choose. And Next → never stops you from skipping a pair, so it is easy to reach the end with a few unanswered. The progress line gives it away: 81 of 88 at pair 84 means three pairs are missing.
Open assessments from inside the week, in the same browser where you are signed in — not from a bookmark or a different browser.
| If you need… | Ask |
|---|---|
| A seat assigned, or a cohort placement | Your facilitator or Site Admin |
| Your church corrected after starting | Your Site Admin, or aharlow3@hotmail.com |
| To be moved to a different church | A System Admin |
| Anything else | aharlow3@hotmail.com · 386-337-1789 |
| Week | Title | Fills in |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Regaining Your Bearings | 🗺 Journey |
| 2 | ReFocusing Your Heart | |
| 3 | ReThinking Your Path | |
| 4 | Exploring the Impact of Your Journey | |
| 5 | Admiring the Master's 1st Stroke | 💪 Kingdom Expressions |
| 6 | Discovering Your Kingdom Expressions | |
| 7 | Embracing Your Spiritual Gifts | ✨ Spiritual Gifts |
| 8 | ReCalculating Your Worth & People | 🤝 People |
| 9 | Gauging Your Resources | ⏱ Resources |
| 10 | Detecting the Heat of Your Passions | 🔥 Passions |
Questions about anything in this guide:
aharlow3@hotmail.com · 386-337-1789
Acts 3 Discovery™ and My Calling Star™ are trademarks of ACT3 Ministry.
The Acts 3 Discovery Participant Guide is © 2025 Epiphany Publishing, LLC, and is reproduced
within the app by permission.