You’ve spent hours praying and studying the Scriptures, time understanding the Biblical text and how it relates to your congregation. Then you preached your heart out! Maybe people responded to the Gospel, committed to do what the Scriptures called them to in the power of the Spirit. There is also an audience out there, on the internet, searching for sermons on the very text you just preached. Some of your congregation may want to share it on social media too.

So it is well worth putting what you just preached on the internet on your church website, so it can have an impact across the world.

Record your preaching

There are a couple of ways to make an mp3 out of your preaching.

Mp3 recorder

There are quite a few mp3 recorders on the market now. You want one with a built in mic for smaller gatherings and a line in socket for plugging into a mixer output. I like the Tascam DR-05 which is currently £75.95 on amazon.co.uk and $109.99 on amazon.com. What’s nice about the Tascam other than the cheap price is it’s high quality and that it takes mic in or line in and can take a 4GB SD card.

Laptop and software

Our sound desk has a USB output which we connect to our projection laptop. We use “Free Audio Recorder” downloaded from www.freeaudiorecorder.net. It’s so simple to use! It has a big red button to start recording and a big black stop button to stop!

If you want you can delve into some options on the Tascam and Free Audio Recorder. Some of the options affect the quality of recording and the size of the file to download. A 30min sermon can typically be 60MB which with big data packages on cellphones and broadband and wifi on the internet is less of a worry than it was when I first started and was trying to get the file size down to 6MB! Sampling frequency makes a big difference to quality and file size of an mp3 recording. You want sampling frequency to be at least double the highest sound frequency. CD quality is 44kHz for music, for speech 24kHz is fine.

We tend to record the whole service and then quickly edit using another free program called Audacity. From that program we can compress the file slightly to make it not so big!

Upload it in Church Admin

On the media section of my WordPress Church Admin plugin there are two buttons for getting your sermon online.
Upload or add external MP3 File – allows you to upload the sermon file in your browser. But your hosting company may set the max size quite low – there’s a message at the top of the form that tells you how big. My host only allows 8MB, which is far too small.
The second button Add Already Uploaded Files allows you to add an already uploaded file into Church admin for display.

If you have to upload your mp3s separately then you will need to use an FTP program like Filezilla for Windows or Mac. I’ll produce a tutorial for that pretty soon.

Which ever way you use to upload the mp3, or even if you use an external mp3 hosting service like Soundcloud, the form for giving the details is similar

File Title is the title of your sermon
File subtitle is for iTunes Podcast and is a phrase that encapsulates what your sermon is about
Description is where you can write a paragraph about your sermon.
Scripture Passages – put the bible references here separated by commas – Psalm 16:1-11, John 3:16
Logged in only means only logged in users will see the sermon.
Sermon Series – you can choose an already defined sermon series or create a new one – I like having an image for a series so create it before uploading a sermon.
Speaker – this uses autocomplete for home grown preachers and you can have more than one separated by commas.

Click save file to add it in!

The result

If you’ve not started recording your sermons yet, why not start by buying the Tascam DR-05 on amazon.co.uk or amazon.com

How do you record your sermons?