My Account

Tending Body Life

For deacons, elders, and others in caring ministry and spritual leadership.

Broadcasting the worship service

by Sue Conrad

My car stereo has a cassette player that has always come in handy when I need to hear a tape of our church service. However, many of my parishioners lack access to a cassette player, and they expressed frustration that our church offered recordings only on audiotape.

I recruited two tech-savvy men from our congregation to research our recording options. Within two weeks, they brought me a straightforward, affordable plan to switch to CDs. Moreover, they developed a plan for making our recordings available on the Internet. Before I even had a chance to propose the idea to our church board, I received an anonymous donation of $2,000 to cover the cost of the equipment upgrades. The church board excitedly approved this innovation, and within weeks we were recording our worship services on CD and podcasting our sermons on the Internet.

While such technological changes require research, having a parishioner happy to take on the challenge allowed us to quickly begin making our services available online. The bulk of research time was spent exploring various websites that offer podcasting for sermons. We found that www.sermon.net offered the best value and service.

Providing online audio means having a digital recording of the services, so we needed to purchase a CD recorder for approximately $500. Once the first recording was made, it took just an hour to sign up at sermon.net and put the sermon online.

Each week, it takes twenty to thirty minutes to upload the new sermon to sermon.net. The process is fairly simple for anyone with computer knowledge. One of our members created a stepby-step instruction sheet for those who do the upload each week. We have encountered few glitches, even among new volunteers.

People very quickly began to not only use our CDs but also access our sermons on the Internet. We are pleasantly surprised with how much activity our sermons are attracting online, with twenty-five to thirty hits for each week’s sermon on average. Because our church has been using this technology for only about six months, we consider this a success, and the cost is minimal—only $10 per month for our congregation of 190 members. (The cost of podcasting varies depending on the specific online services purchased and the size of the congregation.)

We decided to make only our sermons available online because we did not feel comfortable allowing our congregational sharing time to be broadcast so widely. However, interested persons can still listen to the entire worship service on CD or cassette. It is also understood that any sermon preached by our own pastors will be uploaded unless the pastor specifically requests that it not be. When we have a guest preacher, we always ask for the speaker’s permission before making the sermon available via podcast.

Currently, our sermons are available online only as audio recordings that can be downloaded. Sermon.net also offers live streaming of audio via the Internet. To offer live streaming, a church needs to have an Internet connection on a computer in the sound room. A sound technician must be available to set up the computer and troubleshoot any problems.

We have been pleasantly surprised with the variety of persons listening to our sermons via the Internet. Recently two families moved abroad to serve with Mennonite Central Committee. Both of them have been able to listen to our sermons each week and have said how valuable this connection has been. We also know of students away at college and families on vacation who have listened to the sermons. Recently I received an e-mail from another pastor many miles away who had tuned into a sermon I preached. His e-mail was a surprise, full of good insights and helpful feedback on my sermon.

We have been pleasantly surprised with the variety of persons listening to our sermons via the Internet.

Because we have a link on our church’s website to sermon.net, nonparishioners can also listen to a sermon if they would like to get a sampling of our preaching prior to attending. In this way, podcasting can be a type of outreach.

In just a few short months, our congregation has moved into the 21st century!

Sue Conrad is associate pastor at East Chestnut Street Mennonite Church in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and is on the editorial committee for Leader magazine.