You may have guessed it by now if you frequent this site or any of my other sites, that I make a podcast, and write articles online both as a hobby, and as part of my ministry. In fact, as a missionary on the field in South America, I find taking advantage of social media, and modern methods of communication to be a MUST for anyone in ministry, therefore it baffles me when I talk to other pastors when I’m back in Canada or the USA, who don’t seem to get the value of doing this. Granted, many do, and I listen to several podcasts and feel connected and benefit spiritually without having to be a part of different churches, but I can keep being edified even though I’m not there.
So that leads to my first in a list of reasons why YOU should jump on the band wagon if you haven’t already.
1) It connects people to your messages without having to be there in attendance
When I first lived abroad in the Netherlands a few years ago, I would keep listening to three specific podcasts I had started to listen to when I discovered the medium. One of them was my home base in North Carolina, and week after week I could keep being caught up on the things being preached from the pulpit while I was living far away. Even though I wasn’t there, I could still feel a part of the family. Maybe you’ve got young people in your church who’ve grown up and gone away to college and would love to keep listening to your fresh new content (i.e. “sermons”/messages) while they live away from home. This would be an ideal way to do so.
2) It expands your influence with the Gospel
A few years ago I helped two different pastors set up podcast feeds on free sites (such as Podbean.com, where I host the Fire On Your Head podcast), and then neither one of them ever added any new content to their feeds. One deleted it over time because he didn’t see the point of having one and putting the effort into it, and the other, best I can tell just never got around to following up on it. However, when I last checked his feed, one of the two messages I had placed there had received over 350 hits. Just from sitting there waiting to be found. No effort whatsoever had ever been put into advertising it for him.
I was in attendance for this very message, and just from sitting on the internet, to date, he’s quadrupled how many people could potentially have listened to it, instead of limiting it to just those who were in attendance that particular morning. Can you imagine how many people could have kept the Sermon on The Mount to themselves if nobody afterward had ‘recorded’ it for our posterity all these millenia later?
While I lived in the Netherlands, we put on an annual ‘conference’ for a few weeks we called ‘summer schools.’ One morning I got to preach for 90 minutes. There had to have only been maybe 30 people in the room on this occasion, but since everything was recorded I made sure to get the mp3 of my teaching, and put it on my podcast, and over the last three years it’s gotten thousands of hits and plays. 1 I’d say, that’s a lot more of a great return on my investment.
3) It takes your sermons and messages places you can’t go
One of my most popular podcast episodes2 receives nearly 75-100 unique new hits pert week—all over the eastern coast of China. Why this particular episode and no other one is spreading like wildfire in that area is beyond me, but in heaven maybe I’ll get to find out what impact it may have been able to have on people in that land who speak and understand English, since, at this time, I’ve never been to Asia yet.
A friend of mine who travels and ministers with author and speaker Tommy Tenney, tells me that the reason Tenney writes so many books and takes them with him, is because people can remember bits and pieces from a sermon that impacted them, but they can take a book and it can last longer, because people can keep going back to it. The internet is our generation’s printing press—with the help of podcasting, people now CAN take your sermons with you everywhere and anywhere they want.
4) They have “staying power”
Like I mentioned in the previous reason, the internet is our generation’s printing press. I’m thoroughly convinced that if the Apostle Paul were alive today, he’d use the internet and every available means of technology to spread the Gospel. When he was in prison writing his letters to various other disciples and churches, do you really think he knew or had the foresight that his letters would be kept for thousands of years and canonized into Scripture for believers to study and become theologians out of for all these years later?
You never know yourself what can happen with a message of yours through this medium. Don’t pass it up!
5) It’s easy to do
That’s IF you already are recording your messages. If you have the ability to record sermons and other audio files using a portable recorder or through your church sound system, you can create a podcast of your sermons as well as any other audio content of your choosing. You can be creative here, and the sky’s the limit. Since podcasting still is a blossoming medium, there are no limitations as to just what a podcast is or what you can do with it. You can go as far as setting up an iTunes feed and have visitors subscribe to your church website’s audio content through it on their Mac or Windows computer to listen on an iPod. This is recommended since iTunes boasts the largest free podcast directory and none of their competitors come close. All you need is to already have an account for purchasing music. Submitting a feed is FREE.
Reason 6: Eric Gilmour Started One
OK, I said this was a list of 5 reasons, but if you want to see a good use for one, check Eric’s out at http://agonypress.podbean.com. If you have a chance, listen to this interview I did with him a number of months back, discussing how this aspect of his online ministry was started years ago from just making mp3s to pump himself up with on his walkman, that wound up reaching people all over the world.
Also note; not everybody needs to buy a microphone and make dynamic content like I do, and do the editing and making it sound the way I do or market it the way I do. But if you record your sermons, don’t stop at just putting them on your website. Podcast them! My generation is plugged into online media, and spends more time on the internet than we do in front of the TV. I’ve heard statistics such as that today’s teenager spends an average of 30 hours plugged into hot media–their computers, iPhones or mp3 players and other forms of such technology.
Do you really want to be behind the wave and miss out on reaching this generation? Jesus went to where the sinners and tax collectors were, he didn’t just keep plugging away at what always had been done, and wait 15 years like many of the people I talk to are doing. In fact, if you don’t even have a website for your church or see the point in having one, I might be wasting my time trying to help you reach out and reach this current generation living in the digital age. Reaching out to today’s lost includes Facebook, Twitter, and other media they are on, but that’s for another post.
Pastor, start a podcast!
- Click here to view the page on my feed, click here to download the file directly [↩]
- This one here. Your guess is as good as mine as to what makes “Googling Your Tongues” so popular in China [↩]
