1. Past churches

I keep up with churches and fellowships I have attended in the past. One of the first churches I found the podcast for was the church I was baptized in. Because I’m not in touch with anyone who goes there anymore, and because I live on the other side of the world, it’s been wonderful to learn what’s going on with that church (new location, new name, etc.). I also know what to expect from past pastors – it’s great to be able to access their messages and still be hearing their wisdom even living so far away. I know I can trust their words to edify.

2. Future churches

Whenever we find out that we have a move coming up, one of the first things I do is begin searching for a church. We moved three times in the space of a year – and we didn’t have time to visit many churches – we just wanted to get plugged in. Many times, I can get a sense of the atmosphere of a church and style of the pastor. If there’s a video, I can get a look at the people there and get some sense of what a worship service there is like.

3. Knowledge

If I’ve been thinking about a certain topic or Scripture, I tend to search through the Internet for sermons on it. It’s a quick way for me to gain a broad perspective of a topic in a fairly short amount of time, and I can listen to them while I’m working around the house. (For example, when I was engaged, I listened to many, many sermons about marriage)

4. Broaden my perspective

I don’t know much about denominations or different ethnic churches, and can’t go visit others churches on a regular basis without skipping my commitment to my church. But I can listen to pastors from a wide variety of traditions and get a taste of what that is like for Christians from different backgrounds. It would be wonderful if there was a wider variety available – and they were easily accessible.

5. Present church

When members are on vacation/away on business (again, for a military family this is great!), are sick, couldn’t find a pen to write down that last Scripture reference, or remember that the pastor talked about that issue that they (or a friend) are dealing with NOW six months ago, it’s nice to conveniently pull that up on the computer. No fumbling through that box of church bulletins only to find the one you want was thrown away (or, what box of church bulletins?), ordering a CD, no having to remember the checkbook, it’s free, and it’s just easy to both find and remember.

I hope this is of interest to you as think about this topic.

I’m wondering if this doesn’t ultimately come down to what are a given church’s priorities? It reminds me a bit of an ah-ha moment I had early on in our church’s visioning process. I came to a session gung-ho and ready to tell everyone how important communications were, But as things unfolded, I realized that they are important to me and that while I’m happy to be part of improving them, if we really want them to improve in a big way (e.g. offering sermons in multiple formats to meet different preferences), then a commitment needs to come from the larger community.

I found it first here:
http://cecworship.wordpress.com/2007/03/26/st-michaels-church-cec-sermons/

Personally, I wish there were better ways to track excellent audio content — and I wish someone were blogging specifically about producing multimedia content for UU sites.

http://uuminister.blogspot.com/2007/05/uu-ministers-are-giving-me-shin-splints.html

The way I found them — not through their church websites. I go to iTunes and search “Unitarian.” I get a nice list of UU churches that (I guess) upload their podcasts to Apple.

So, if you’re uploading a sermon podcast to your website, also upload it to iTunes. More audience. And it has the advantage that you don’t need to already know of the church.

So, what’s the benefit to getting your sermon out to people who may not live in your town? (Or country — I also download sermons from the Unitarian Church of Dublin.)

Well, apart from the obvious — getting our good message out there — you also stand the chance that the listener will forward others to the sermon/church. Maybe to friends/family who live in that town.

I’ve done it.

But I’m not necessarily typical – other people love podcasts of all types. And there are those who may have missed the service that week, or can’t leave home for whatever reason, so having them available for that purpose can be important, too.

If a church is podcasting and not printing text, I’m not listening. If a church is printing text and not podcasting, others aren’t reading. So having both is good from the accessibility standpoint and the personal preference standpoint.