Extending Your Sermons Beyond Sunday, Part 2
This article is the second part of the series Extending Your Sermons Beyond Sunday. Be sure to read the first article, if you haven’t already.
Nine seasons of Seinfeld sadly came to a close as Jerry, George, Kramer, and Elaine sat in a cold, lifeless prison cell as a result of their selfish ways and thoughtless inaction. A small tear ran down my cheek when I watched the last of the Lord of the Rings trilogy knowing that this was the end. The telling of such a great tale had been told only to live within my memory (oh, and the books that I tried to read and gave up on. But, whatever.). Those evenings in May of ‘99 and December of ‘03 represent the void that is present in my soul every Sunday morning after hearing good, Biblical preaching, a moment that lasts for about thirty to forty minutes and then ceases to exist outside of our memory.
But soft! The proper placement of ones and zeros on a computer or an optical disc or the reconfiguration of a piece of magnetized tape can capture the essence of Seinfeld, Middle Earth, and a 30 minute message allowing them to exist in my collection forever and ever.
Technological advancements in the last few decades and especially the last few years have changed the way we can capture, store, and distribute media. Take technology by the reins and allow the people in your congregation to relive those moments at their leisure… not a season of Seinfeld, I mean, but your series on Jesus’ prayer in Matthew 6 or your message on Psalm 23. Here are some ways you can use technology to extend the shelf life of your sermons.
Distribute your messages on CD or DVD
Chances are you’re already doing this. If you’re recording and distributing already on cassette, spend a little bit of money and purchase a CD recorder. The Tascam CC-222MKII is a great piece of equipment that allows you to record directly to CD-R and cassette at the same time on the same unit. It’s also a good option if you want to dub your cassette archives directly to compact disc.
If you are video taping your sermons on a DV camera, it’s fairly easy to produce a DVD. Or, better yet, record directly to DVD. This is a great alternative for those who would prefer to watch you preach than to just listen if they miss a Sunday because they are sick or out of town. It’s even a better alternative for those we call “shut-ins” who can’t make it to church because of failing health or other difficulties.
I’ll go into detail in a future post about starting and maintaining a CD duplication ministry. It doesn’t have to involve a lot of money if you need to get one started, so if you’re not already offering sermons on CD, put it on your to-do list. If you are already doing CD recording and duplication, read on because there isn’t much more you need to do to…
Publish your messages on the Internet
Once you have your messages in digital format (on CD or on the computer), you’re halfway there to putting them online. There are a few options which you could choose to put your sermons on the Internet.
The first is to offer it for downloading from your church web site. People like this option because they can obtain a copy of the message for free and do whatever they want with it, such as listen to it on their computer, transfer it to an portable media player, burn it to CD, or share it with friends and family.
The second option is to use a service like sermonaudio.com. For a monthly fee, you can upload and archive your messages and have a much wider potential distribution. Enter the passage of your sermon and some relevant topics and it will be searchable by millions of monthly visitors.
The third is to turn your downloadable message into a podcast. Podcasting is a means of distributing media easily to those who subscribe. Users can subscribe to your podcast feed and content is automagically downloaded to their computer when a new file (sermon, in this case) is available. If your subscribers use an iPod with iTunes, your message will be sucked down and transferred to their iPods with virtually no human intervention. It’s a relatively new technology and your tech-savvy church-goers would eat up this option like a squirrel in a Planter’s factory. Even for the non-techies, it’s relatively simple to set up and it’s much more convenient than manually downloading it each week.
Create a blog or podcast to summarize or further develop your thoughts
If you’re already podcasting your messages and the people in your congregation are automatically downloading them, record a 2-5 minute summary as a reminder or go into a little more detail about an important point. Add it to your podcast feed and your subscribers will get a little extra treat sometime during the week. Think of it as exclusive content available online just like fanboys of the television show Lost can get extra videos and information about the show on the Lost web site.
They might be listening while walking on the treadmill, in a coffee shop, on the highway driving home from work, or doing some landscaping in the yard. Wherever they are, whatever they are doing, you’re there with them teaching and communicating.
Embrace the blog revolution and take a few minutes in the middle of the week to write a little. You could use blogging to summarize or further develop your thoughts on last weekend’s message. In true blog fashion, you could even write about how that topic has affected you personally or the impact this study has made on your everyday journey. You might even be able to reach out to some of your younger people, and I know you’ve been scratching your head on how to do that for a while.
Either through blogging or podcasting, cassettes or CDs, distributing your sermons and exclusive content through the Internet are opportunities to enter into the personal space of your congregation at some random time during the week. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for details and tutorials such as how to put your messages online and how to produce a podcast.
Already blogging, podcasting, or have any ideas about using technology to distribute and enhance your messages? Share it through the comments.
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