With all of the wonderful technology available to us today, it's easy to get so caught up in videos and visual effects that we forget about the power of audio. While videotaping sermons and making them available as streaming video, on demand video downloads or even selling them through your Web store is a wonderful idea, don't forget about the potential for podcasts and CDs.
Whether in conjunction with video and DVDs or on their own, podcasts of your sermons should be a regular part of your Web offerings. Even if you decide not to go with video and DVDs, recording your sermons requires the simplest technology, and audio files are small and much more easily uploaded and downloaded than video files.
There are times and places that audio files are much more appropriate, as well. Busy people who don't have time to sit down and watch a videotape of a whole sermon will listen to it instead while driving, especially during a long commute, while on a train or bus, while jogging or walking, at the gym, while doing laundry and many other times during their day. Audio sermons are great for multi-taskers!
Community Outreach for House Bound Members
You can also feature live streaming audio during your actual sermons, for parishioners who are ill at home or in the hospital. They can sit and listen to your sermon much as people once sat by their radios for live broadcasts. You don't need to limit your audio recordings to sermons, either. Since they are so easily made and virtually cost-free, consider having volunteers read bible passages, or portions of books, record church meetings, telephone interviews with missionaries and more.
These are all items that will not only let people catch up on what's going on in your church, but can provide a measure of solace for home-bound parishioners, so that they can feel as though they are actually there at the church. Consider using them as outreach, for retirement communities and convalescent homes, where your flock might be possessed of willing hearts but failing bodies.
Never underestimate the power of the spoken word. With today's technology, it can be used to reach out to the whole world, easily and inexpensively!
For more information on this and other topics, get your copy of "The iChurch Method Volume 1: How to Advance Your Ministry Online." or The iChurch Method Volume 2: Changing the World When You Login or even sign up for the iChurch Method Online School.