For UK Churches there is a PayPal giving fund, where there are no charges on any online donations made to your church. Donors can also opt to Gift Aid what they give which will give their gifts a 25% boost from the government.
You’ll need a Church PayPal account – which has been verified as a Charity account (which reduces fees on normal transactions too). That took a while – for us largely because the Letter of Authorisation you have to download, print and sign needs to be on headed paper to be accepted!
If you have a church PayPal account – then start enrolling here – it will take you to the verification pages if needed as part of sign up.
Sometimes we need to get a message out to the church quickly…
All across the world many churches are having to communicate quickly to their people that they can’t meet because of the current Covid-19 crisis. We sent out an email yesterday to let our people know we are still meeting and today I’m getting SMS with people asking!
When the message needs to get out and be read by people I have learnt over years, email is not very reliable. People just don’t read them (apart from you!), because they don’t check them or the subject line wasn’t compelling enough. But people do immediately check their phone when it pings with an SMS or push notification.
The Church Admin plugin allows you to do both easily…
SMS
Firstly set up an account with www.bulksms.com – there are loads of companies that provide a bulks sms service, but when I first added SMS messaging they were the cheapest worldwide provider and I think still are pretty competitive.
Add some credits onto the account – https://www2.bulksms.com/home/commerce/
Set your sender id to your mobile number https://www2.bulksms.com/home/change_sender_id/
Then get your username and password combination added to your Church Admin plugin installation
Church Admin > Communication > SMS Setup
You need to put your country code into 44 for UK, 1 for the US etc – a list is at https://countrycode.org/
Then you will be able to send SMS messagesto your congregation. Each SMS costs a credit from your account.
Push Notifications
Is another efficient way of communicating with the congregation in an emergency for subscribers to the app.
Push notifications are like SMS messages that are received by iOS and Android devices. They are free – included in your app subscription. Just write your message and everyone that has the app will get it!
The app is free for your congregation to install on their phones and a low monthly/annual subscription for the church itself. Please head over to the App menu item on your Church Admin or www.churchadminplugin.com/app to subscribe.
It’s 6pm in the UK as I write this – if you want to get crisis communication ready do it now (before 11pm GMT) and I’ll get you activated tonight so you can let people know the Our Church app download links tomorrow morning and start communicating in a crisis well.
Stay safe! And look after the vulnerable in your communities – remembering 2 Tim 1:7 “For you have not been given a spirit of fear, but of power,love and a sound mind.”
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.
Big vision, ordinary people filled with a might God
Andy Moyle 29th September 2018 8:41 am
The mission of God
Andy Moyle 22nd July 2018 8:39 am
Drawing people in
Janet Moyle 16th October 2016 1:09 pm
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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?
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