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.
About two years ago, June 2011, I came to my wife and told her I had an idea about a book I wanted to write. It was a book on how churches could better understand and utilize technology. Fast forward to May 2013 and next week I am headed to Dubai, U.A.E. to speak at a conference on The iChurch Method and how it can help ministries advance online. I am very excited and look forward to helping this international audience learn the benefits of The iChurch Method. The conference is May 15 - 19, 2013. 
As we gear up for 2013, we here at The iChurch Method look forward to some great advancements, new book releases and some innovative ways to help you advance your churches online. We just wanted to give you a preview of some of the things coming in 2013.
Over the last month I have been updating some of the social media pages for the ministries I work with. The main updates I have been making are to facebook timeline, setting up instagram accounts and Pinterest accounts. These three networks have a common theme going on that I have noticed over the last year, they are becoming much more visual. The Visual Social Network era is here.
Facebook Timeline is a great example of a visual representation of our facebook experience. Prior to the launch of timeline, the facebook profile page was considered the most under utilized part of the social network. Profile pages and Fan pages were simply plain representations of the user but not very interactive or visual. Now Facebook didn’t want to go to the extreme of letting the entire page become customizable and load slow like myspace, but they knew they had to turn the profile page into more of a visual representation of the person and a destination that people will spend time at, mainly for advertising purposes. And as we can all see, Facebook timeline has taken social media by storm.
Next up is Pinterest, pinterest has rapidly risen to become the 3rd largest social network in the world. Having a large user base with women, Pinterest is a visual social network that has a mobile and desktop presence. It’s based on pictures and videos and allows you to comment, pin, create boards and repin photos and videos. This visual multimedia social network shows the evolution of the visual aspects of social networking and the focus they have.
As 2012 comes to an end, we here at The iChurch Method would like to thank you for all your support. It’s been a banner inaugural year. It’s awe inspiring to think that at this time last year, The iChurch Method was just a small blog that was waiting to be launched into the public with the release of the flagship book, The iChurch Method Vol 1: How to Advance Your Ministry Online. With that being stated, let’s look at some of the key accomplishments in 2012.
The focus of The iChurch Method was to educate and inform churches how to better use technology and advance their ministry online. What I didn’t foresee was the academic environments that The iChurch Method could be utilized in. I didn’t foresee Christian Universities using The iChurch Method in their curriculums to help educate their students on how technology can be (and is being) used in ministry.
Here are two great universities that have utilized The iChurch in their curriculums. 
A major ministry I work with has been on tv for years and has millions of viewers. As we were coming up with our web strategy, we knew it was important to allow people to watch the television broadcasts on the ministry website. We figured since millions people were watching it on tv, there would thousands watching from our website. Well we were right and we were wrong.
We were right in that there are thousands of people watching the website broadcast, we were wrong in thinking that it would be from our “traditional” website. The largest viewers of our broadcasts online are from the mobile website. After we setup our traditional website, we started working on a mobile website just because that was something that we thought the people might want. We had no idea how much they wanted it, and how much they would use it. And the main thing they do on the mobile website is watch live services and archived tv broadcasts.
Depending on what technology specialist, journalist or blogger you are listening to or reading at a particular moment, they may or may not agree on the importance of content. Some people say that content is king, some say that the delivery method is king, some say that interaction is king. With the focus of the church being to take the gospel to the masses, content is king. The message is the same, the packaging may be different, the delivery method may be different, but the gospel never changes, thus content still rules.
Today we have numerous ways to get the message out, websites, social media, mobile devices, mobile apps, sms, multimedia and many many others. Back in the day it was word of mouth, then came the printing press, next was radio, then television and so on. No matter the delivery method, the gospel has remained the same, thus it’s not the method but the content. Focus on the content and the delivery method won’t matter, the method will evolve and change anyway.
