Jeffrey Daniel Frey’s Blog

Posted this for a friend who was out of town and normally does them:

Direct download: Weekend_Preview_Podcast_20070511.mp3

WEEKEND PREVIEW: May 11 - May 13, 2007

This is the Vineyard Church Weekend Preview Podcast for Friday, May 11th - Sunday May 13th.

This Saturday is ServeFest when we go out and serve our community in practical ways with no strings attached. Join us Saturday morning at 10:00am at the church. Contact Mike Babcock at the church for more information.

This Sunday is Mother’s Day. All mom’s will receive a special gift on Sunday morning as a token of our appreciation.

Robin Broxson will be bringing the message called “Finding Meaning in Mothering,” a continuation of our series called “Finding Meaning in all the Right Places”.

Troy Warren and Casey Corum will be leading worship…really, this time, honestly.

Plan ahead to join us on Sunday, May 20th at 6:00pm for a special worship event called “Sing a New Song” with our new Women’s Choir.

Also, we are pleased to have author Brennan Manning with us for a special weekend September 21st through the 23rd. We have limited space for this event and are filling up fast.

Visit our website at thevineyardchurch.cc  and click on the Brennan Manning banner for registration, directions to the church, and more information about this and other events mentioned.

We look forward to meeting you soon.

A friend of mine is leading the podcasting initiative at the church I attend and I wanted to give those of you reading this that are into podcasting for a church or ministry some insight into he’s doing.

The Sugar Land Vineyard church has always recorded their sermons and produced them for members and missionaries who couldn’t be at an event (like a Sunday morning service) or those who want to listen to the audio at a later date.  They could have the audio on CD, shipped to them, or in some cases emailed.  Sometimes people request transcripts of sermons and those are typically mailed or emailed as well.

The decision was made to start podcasting the sermons, up went the rss feed, and the audio.  There were a lot of downloads, and as many churches do, they could have stopped there… but didn’t.

My friend is Reagan Waggonner and he is an associate pastor at the church.  He organizes all things technical as well as being the worship pastor, leads worship on Sunday morning, and preaches occasionally.  He and I talk about podcasting often and he started to brainstorm with others the ways the church could be communicating through this new media.

Also research junkies, he and his team found out what others were doing… and NOT doing.  Over the last few months, podcasts about all sorts of things have been released on multiple feeds, both public and private, and by my calculations, they have the most downloaded Vineyard Church podcasts in the United States.

If you’re a church, and are only podcasting sermons, think about tapping into some other resources and ministries for different types of podcasts that will get your message out in different ways.  Some examples that they’ve done are:

• videos to promote upcoming events
• audio recordings of young adult gatherings
• short topical podcasts for self help or devotionals
• upcoming event calendar commercials or previews

There are a lot of home groups in our church (some denominations call them small groups or cell groups).  They meet regularly in homes to build friendships and relationships and usually include a meal, discussions about topics, or sometimes just hanging out.  The podcast I like the best that the Sugar Land Vineyard is doing is what they call and “after the sermon” podcast.  These are shorter than the sermon and sometimes used by our home groups to continue the discussion that was started by the speaker in our corporate meeting time on a Sunday morning.  The after the sermon podcast is done by the speaker of the sermon and can be used to:

• include things that the speaker didn’t have time to talk about
• answer questions that he or she was asked about the sermon or clarifications
• ask questions of others or pose discussion topics for home groups
• reflect on whether he or she thought that the sermon went well or communicated what was trying to be said.

If you are podcasting sermons, and looking for the next thing, think beyond the sermon and try having your speaker do a short podcast after the sermon.  For more information on the Sugar Land Vineyard, goto http://slvineyard.org.

Got a question this week about podcast hosting specifically for churches and sermons.  This was my response:

Podcasting is all about niche markets, and church or sermon podcasts are definitely one of those.  More than educational institutions want to get their classes out to people, more than TV shows want to drive people to websites and snag more viewers, churches want to get their messages out to their congregation, possible visitors, and ultimately the world.

If you’re a church, and want to do this, what are the options?  There are plenty of podcasting hosting services out there (see this post), but what about those services claiming to be church or sermon podcasting services.  I did a quick check of the services out there, and it turns out that there are benefits to going with a service that is specifically for sermons.

Websites with transcripts, categorized searches, mailing lists, and other tools that specifically help a church or religious organization communicate more effectively are just some of the features that these sermon niche hosting services have.  I also like the feature, if you’re not a podcast savvy place, of the hosting service doing it all for you.  Just get the sermon to them somehow (even snail mailing a tape will do), and they set up your podcast, the rss feed, the transcript, and even links to the scriptures used in the sermon.

Looking at the different services out there, I’d have to say that the top five are probably:

• AltarCast: http://www.altarcast.com/
• SermonCast: http://www.sermoncast.com/
• podpoint: http://podpoint.net/
• PraiseCast: http://www.praisecast.com/podcasts.shtml
• PulpitPodcast: http://www.pulpitpodcast.com/

Though I haven’t done an in depth study of all the sermon podcast services out there, I did quickly compare storage, pricing, and features.  These stood out from rest, relatively in the order I list them.  AltarCast and SermonCast would be my first picks to get a demo of, some client references, and a sandbox to see which one I wanted to do.  If you’ve had any experiences with these, please email me and I’ll write some updated posts on this in the future.

In my opinon, if you are looking to do sermon podcasting, sign up with a sermon specific podcast hosting service.*

*caveat – if you have multiple podcasts at your church, and would like to distribute the administration of these podcasts out to different departments or individuals, the services above are really strictly for sermon casting.  I recommend libsynpro for a multi-podcast organization: http://libsynpro.com, though the price may be prohibitive for a church.  I personally run most all of my podcasts and client’s podcasts through libsyn’s less expensive one podcast offering (http://libsyn.org).