Preaching through podcasts
It is a widely held misunderstanding that churches are boring, backward and irrelevant to today’s society. Hymns are out of date, the message two thousand years old, and most people who go to church are either old and decrepit or young and blinded to reality. From my own experience, that view is in many cases a incomplete impression of the vitality and vision of many churches, and fails to take into account the dynamic communities that have sprung up, it would seem, almost unnoticed by many.
The days are gone when non-Christians will willingly wander into a church seeking answers. Today’s passers-by are more web-savvy, more technology-aware, and if we want people to take notice of our churches they have to be at least equal to other businesses and organisations in terms of public image. Churches need to be investing in technology, because quite frankly they cannot afford not to.
One of the emerging mediums of communication that has become very popular in recent times is the podcast. This is effectively an audio broadcast, typically saved as an MP3, enclosed and presented in an RSS feed. This means that subscribers can download and listen to the latest content as soon as you publish it. With a few pointers and some useful tools it is not beyond the reach of churches to take part in this engaging form of communication.
Why would a church need a podcast? The most obvious application is the weekly sermons that already go on at every church, and since most churches use PA systems these days it is not a huge leap of technology to record the sermon and put it online. By including the notices too you can quickly create a useful weekly resource for your church’s community, whether they physically attend the services or not - handy for those unable to come to church due to disability or fragility.
You could take it much further, of course, with a little imagination and creativity. You could record and publish interviews and discussions, or have a separate podcast specially for your youth group.
Step 1 - Recording
Most computers have a microphone or line-in socket, and using tools like the free Audacity audio editor you can record straight from that input. Quality may vary, but your final podcast doesn’t necessarily have to be CD quality for it to be effective anyway, and the smaller the file size the faster it will download, so don’t worry too much about that.
If you want to get your weekly sermon onto your computer, the simplest way is to record it onto a tape during the service, then plug the tape deck into the computer’s line-in afterwards and record it from the tape to the computer. The quality might deteriorate a little, so if you can invest in a digital alternative to recording onto tape, such as a small MP3 recorder, that would certainly help matters.
Step 2 - Editing
We all slip up every now and then, so don’t be afraid of editing out long pauses where the speaker dropped his notes. Audacity provides ample tools for cutting and pasting audio around. You can also include music clips to add a little professionalism to the audio, but make sure they are free to use so that you don’t break copyright laws. A short intro jingle can really add a great feel to the podcast, and if the same tune is used each time it will add consistency to your podcast series.
Step 3 - Saving
Save your audio as an MP3. For speech the quality doesn’t need to be as high as for music, so feel free to stick to mono 16KHz, which should give you a small file size without sacrificing too much audio quality. Make sure you include ID3 tag info too - that’s information that would normally describe a song (i.e. title, artist, album, etc.) - to reflect the content of your podcast. For instance, if Revd Joe Bloggs was preaching at St Bob’s Church on The Importance Of Forgiveness, you might enter information like this:
title: The Importance Of Forgiveness
artist: Revd Joe Bloggs
album: St Bob’s Church podcasts
Step 4 - Uploading
If you already have a web site then you’ll also already have web space, which you can use to host your podcasts. If not, there are some hosting companies around who may be able to help - contact Matthew Dawkins for a quote or search on Google. Then it’s just a matter of including a link to that MP3 file from an RSS feed. If you use a system like WordPress or any good content management system you’ll probably find that functionality is already present, in which case all you need to do is drop the link in and the system will do the rest. There are of course sites around that will help you create your own RSS feeds manually, again just search Google and you’ll find all you need.
Step 5 - Advertising
Once your podcast is online, you’ll need to tell the world that it’s there. You can easily include a link in your church notice sheet, post a link on your web site, or for more coverage you can also submit your RSS feed link to iTunes so that people can find you there too.
A word of warning
Hosting audio on your web site can drastically increase your bandwidth, so if you plan on publishing a lot of podcasts and anticipate them being popular you might want to check that your web host is prepared for that, and that you have a hosting package that can cope with that level of traffic. In most cases you should be fine, but just watch out that you don’t exceed your bandwidth limits and get a hefty fine from your hosting company…
Matthew