Now that iTunes Australia is here and a podcasting service has been launched by SydneyAnglicans.net, podcasting is likely to take off in Sydney churches. But will that just mean audio sermons distributed via RSS, or something more?
Whilst making audio and text available from Sunday’s Bible talk is helpful, I think that church web-sites should be about developing community. One way of doing that, is to extend the impact of the Sunday Bible talk.
Podcasting is one mechanism for extending the impact of the Sunday Bible talk. Obviously, pushing the weekly talk to someone’s iPod or PC allows for further reflection on the talk. But, I think podcasting presents further opportunities. The idea in my mind, is a weekly cycle of three podcasts (although the third may be less regular):
- a couple of days before Sunday, the Bible passage for the coming Sunday is distributed as a podcast. Whilst audio of the Bible is available through BibleGateway, it’s in a streaming format – I’m not aware of any podcast software dealing with streamed content (i.e. recording it for later listening). An alternative is to record someone in your Church reading the passages for a series in advance.
- after Sunday, the Bible talk would be published.
- the third element is discussion. An irregular panel discussion of the current series. May answer questions submitted via a site. This third element is probably the most labour intensive, although if done every 3 weeks (for example) would certainly be a valuable resource.
The release of the iPod with video functionality and increasing usage of broadband, also make the distribution of Bible talks as video possible. Although, I’m not sure if visual actually adds significantly to the presentation to warrant the effort. (if doing video, subtitles really should be done as well – a significant effort)
Do you have any thoughts as to how churches should be podcasting, beyond pushing out the weekly MP3?
The ESV has an RSS service that you can throw a verse reference at and it returns the text of the verse as an RSS feed, with an mp3 of the verse. At the moment it’s only the NT that has the audio, but I believe they’re working on that.
The 3 things you’ve got there could be done ‘fairly’ simply. It would just need the church’s leadership to get behind it, because it would require some investment of resources (people & money)
Other things that could be done is music. Not copyright stuff, but if the church has people in it who write music, bands, etc. they could include songs from that in their podcast.
I think a variety of things would be good, rather than the standard weekly show that seems to be the podcast standard at the moment.