ReSermon Institute - Blog

Dear Church: Please stop hosting porn

10/17/2018

By Christopher Mann
For ReSermon.com

I am not aware of a church that intentionally hosts pornography.

I am aware of many churches who have changed their URL from www.OldChurchDomain.com to the new and improved www.CoolerChurchDomain.com, and then let OldChurchDomain.com lapse into the open market of URLs, where anybody can buy it. Usually, business-minded folks will scoop up these kinds of URLs because they're betting that among the 1,000 or so discarded URLs they buy, there are a sufficient number of former owners who just forgot to renew these domains, and they're willing to pay the (legal) scalping fees of $3,000, $5,000, $10,000 or more to get those URLs back. It may sound slimy, but they're playing by the rules, and its all legal.

But there are many wicked businesses who buy these discarded domains for keeps and push massive amounts of porn. So for years to come, these sites are hosting and hooking new generations of porn addicts. If we're upset with factories polluting cities with toxic "brown fields" after decades of use, we're also upset with the short-sighted churches empowering pornographers to leave brown fields on the internet.

Action

When you change your website to CoolerChurchDomain.com, please keep the old domain. Do everybody a favor and just keep eternally paying the $10 annual fee required to retain legal possession of OldChurchDomain.com. Think of it as taking your entire community out to Starbucks for a year.
Place a redirect on that old domain so that it redirects traffic to CoolerChurchDomain.com. That way, you get the ongoing benefit from your old name's traffic forever.

ReSermon Institute Announces New Seminar

10/15/2018

Media: Contact Christopher Mann at (m/t) 260.508.3136 or Institute@ReSermon.com.

Institute will teach pastors, staff and volunteers how to repurpose sermon content into blogs, books and more for deeper ministry impact.

Fort Wayne—ReSermon Institute announced a new seminar to teach pastors how to repurpose sermon content into other media like podcasts, editorials, social media posts, books and more. The seminar is open to pastors, staff and volunteers involved in helping their respective ministries serve the greater northern Indiana and Ohio communities.

What: ReSermon Institute, “Repurposing Sermon Content into the Public Square.”
Presenter: Christopher Mann, Founder, ReSermon.com.
Where: St Joe Community Church, 2900 North Anthony Blvd., Fort Wayne.
When: Friday, November 9, 2018, 11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.
For whom: Pastors, staff and volunteers.
How much: $15 for lunch courtesy of Chick-Fil-A and complimentary ReSermon resources.
For more information and registration: http://www.resermon.com/resermon-institute.html.

Greg Byman, Senior Pastor, St Joe Community Church.

“I am extremely grateful to ReSermon for helping us multiply the impact of our weekly worship. As a pastor who only uses outlines to preach, ReSermon creates the transcript for me, which makes it much easier to expand the reach of my message in many forms and places. People are accessing our audio files weekly, and we are already hearing that first-time worship guests have listened to sermons before deciding to attend. St Joe Community Church is excited to host Fort Wayne’s first ReSermon Institute on November 9th!” – Greg Byman, Senior Pastor, St Joe Community Church.

About ReSermon.com
ReSermon repurposes sermon or lecture content into the public square. ReSermon is not a social media platform or dot-com automation service. Rather, we are writers, editors, publicists and other creatives who help pastors extend and leverage their preached Word of God into a diversity of online and print formats for maximum optimal ministry impact. ReSermon.com turns a sermon, lecture, radio show, or the like into podcasts, vlogcasts, blog posts, social media posts, editorials, books and more. In 2018, ReSermon.com begins sponsoring periodic ReSermon Institute seminars that focus on aspects of sermon repurposing. To sign up for the ReSermon.com newsletter or learn more about an Institute near you, see below.

Transcription and sharing: A low-cost strategy for how a small church or a church plant can reach into a community.

6/7/2017

By Christopher Mann for ReSermon.com

In the age of online media, small churches and big churches alike face the same challenge -- producing excellent, engaging sermon content. If you are a small church or church plant and you're producing solid material hosted on a online platform, consider this low-cost strategy for engaging your community.

Sunday

Preach.
Just keep doing what you're doing. See, you're already off to a good start.

Monday

Transcribe the sermon.

Tuesday

Post both the audio file and the transcription to your blog.
Share through Facebook, Twitter, Linked IN, etc., the availability of this week's sermon and the transcript. Be sure to lead the post with an engaging, pithy excerpt and include a link to the blog post.
Intentionally and overtly encourage your membership to (a) like it (b) comment on it and (c) share it into their social media communities.

Wednesday through Sunday

Monitor the growth likes and shares and be ready to respond to comments for deeper discussions.
If your church does this weekly, then your searching ranking will go higher in Google and Bing search: algorithms ("algo" for short) reward your church with higher search rankings, because you're becoming a regular producer of original content. You're not just commenting, sharing and liking, but you're an original producer of content, and the algos recognize you as a regular producer, thereby graduating you into a higher priority queue.
You condition greater portions of both your non-church community and your church community into the habit of consuming and distributing your sermon content.

Questions to consider

What impact do you think might this have on your church’s personal attendance and financial growth in 2017?
Compared to other outreach strategies, how does the cost/benefit analysis compare?

For further reading

There are other benefits to transcription, and you can read about them by clicking on the “Transcription” tab on ReSermon blog, or just clicking here.

Sermon to Book: Do my Sermons have Book Potential?

2/1/2017

By Christopher Mann for ReSermon.com

There is a growing school of thought that self-publishing is the modern era’s “big league” and that traditional publishing like Simon & Schuster of the world are dinosaurs awaiting their extinction. This thinking has some valid points, but I’m not fully convinced, believing that many--not all--publishers are reinventing themselves to adapt to technology.

For now, traditional publishing and self-publishing are successfully competing in the marketplace, and pastors who want to engage the public square have to make choices that align with their personal values coupled with ever-changing technological and logistical innovation.

Books vary greatly in length and this should encourage pastors. While the contemporary book market likes to publish 6”x9” trade paperbacks at 250 words per page, meaning that a 75,000 word manuscript will format into about 300 pages, it is important to note that many excellent books throughout history have pierced the heart with both fewer page and greater page counts.

Small: CS Lewis's book, A Grief Observed, is about 16,000 words long and many printings of this classic book have it printed around 90 pages. If you were to condense sermons into a book like this, think about 8 - 16 sermons.
Medium: Andy Stanley's book, Communicating For a Change, is about 81,000 words long over 180 pages. If you were to condense sermons into a book like this, think about 40-80 sermons.
Large: Dr. James Dobson's book, Bringing up Boys, is about 152,000 words over 242 pages. If you were to condense sermons into a book like this, think about 75-150 sermons.
Huge: Wayne Grudem’s Politics According to the Bible is about 330,000 words over 588 pages. If you were to condense sermons into a book like this, think about 150-300 sermons.

Of course, the latter three books represent a different kind of genre in which heavy research, vetting, and peer reviews are more appropriate and required than a self-reflective work like Lewis’ A Grief Observed.

Can your sermons be rolled up into a book?

ReSermon can help you navigate and many other challenges in the course of repurposing your preached Word into the public square.

Let's book some time on the phone

Or, let's chat now...

Sermon to Book: Why and How

1/4/2017

By Christopher Mann for ReSermon.com

Why roll sermons into a book? Pastor-authors are more historically inclined to turning sermons into books for a number of good reasons.

Durability. The codex gradually edged out the use of parchment scrolls by the fourth century because the codex was so much more durable, compared to newspapers and other temporal publications of the day, which typically came with no hard protective cover. The paper-based book format has proved an enduring medium time and again for the past fifteen centuries and will continue to do so even in the internet age.

Refinement. Another benefit of rolling sermons into a book is the editorial refinement process required to publish a long document. Granted, in the age of self-publishing, where writers can more easily and economically access publishing platforms with little or no external assistance from editors, graphic designers, and the like, we are seeing more books published every year that do not go through this refinement process. Grammar snobs, style snobs, graphic snobs, marketing snobs and book snobs in general turn their noses up at these works and while I sympathize with these snobs a little, I am generally more forgiving of this author category; for many first-time and novice authors, sometimes not only is self-publishing one’s only option, but a great great option.

There are certainly advantages and disadvantages to skipping this refinement process but generally speaking, successful books that have an enduring, persevering message are the product of a broad refinement workflow which involves a team of editors and designers and marketers who collaboratively help the author achieve a more enduring final product.

Books are easier on a pastor’s calendar than weekly editorials. Some pastor-authors will bristle at this, and understandably so. It's not that there really is any more or less work enrolling your sermons into a book rather than weekly editorials or blog posts, but due dates for manuscript are a lot more fungible with a book manuscript than a weekly editorial. In addition, there is an added concern for timeliness that a weekly writer must keep in mind.

Ideally, pastors should roll up their sermons into weekly essays, editorials and blog posts and then roll those publications into a larger book. But if a pastor is in a season of life where he is responsible for weddings, funerals, counseling, preaching and the church’s business oversight, and spending time with family, then the fungible schedule of manuscript revision is better. Rolling sermons into the classic codex format is the church’s historically time-honored, missionally-tested and financially sustaining mode of gospel propagation and cultural salienation.

But who will read your book?
The paradox: Who is going to read your book? Self-publishers like Westbow Press or Xulon Press and others are very eager to take your $5,000 and give you a simple case of books for you to market but who's going to buy that sample case? Do you have a following?

Self-publishers offer marketing help but they offer precious little in the way of marketing.
They offer the website but the manpower required up to keep that website updated is mostly up to the author.
They offer press releases but they depend on the author to generate the content and take the follow up calls.

Traditionally, publishers want to see an excellent manuscript but also some measure of evidence that there is a market for your book. Sometimes, that is a simple smell test. if your manuscript made the publisher cry or laugh or feel righteous indignation or otherwise marvel, then he will reasonably conclude that with the right marketing, your manuscript will be a success in the marketplace, and he cares less about how many people follow you now.

The case for blogging first, booking second
Ideally, however, publishers want to see both an excellent manuscript and evidence of a following, and herein lies the case for blogging and editorializing as a ramp-up toward book production. If you present a so-so manuscript but your blog demonstrates 5,000, 10,000, 25,000 unique visitors per month, the publisher might conclude that your manuscript can be edited into a better version. in this case, you might decide to skip the self-publishing route and go for the big league.

How can ReSermon help? ReSermon can repurpose your sermons into blog posts and then roll your sermons into books as well.

Let's Schedule a phone call

Or let's chat now!

Sermon to Editorial: How to Publish in Your Newspaper

12/7/2016

By Christopher Mann for ReSermon.com

What is an “op-ed” and why would a media outlet publish yours?

The word, “Op-Ed” Is shorthand for the combination of opinion and editorial. Traditionally, publishers recognize that while they can print what they want, they also have to sell newspapers, and there is a high business value of publishing a diversity of opinions for a diversity of eyeballs to drive higher advertising rates and more profit.

Editorial diversity is both good for business and good for the community and this has positive implications for the pastor-author who preaches every Sunday and arguably impacts more frequently and more profoundly than other teaching sources in a given week.

The big idea here is that the newspaper serves as something of a hub for the culture’s thought leaders. We go to these public squares in order to learn not only about what happened yesterday, but why it happened, and who made it happen, and when did it happened, and if it was bad, how we could not let it happen again, and if it was good, how can we encourage it to happen again, and then, at the big view, the larger meaning of what happened.

What role does ReSermon play?

ReSermon.com taps experienced Christian journalists who have built a career crafting quality content for finicky editors. We want to make your sermon content a regular feature on the editorial page and we do this by repurposing a sermon into an editorial draft that a pastor-author reviews, edits to taste and then approves for distribution. ReSermon then places that editorial in the pastor-author’s preferred queue of targeted media for optimized sermon impact.

Sermon to Social Media is about Gold Digging

11/2/2016

By Christopher Mann for ReSermon.com

Repurposing sermon content into social media may sound simple and, in one sense, it is. Many churches tweet out sermon excerpts with hashtags and other conventions, and it works well.

But there are literally thousands (tens of thousands?) of social media platforms and more are coming out of San Francisco every week, and while your church need not obsess with being an early adopter of these platforms (many go out of business before their founders are old enough to legally toast each other), it’s amazing how new platforms are created in order to leverage a previously unconsidered communication method, which can be somehow leveraged to propagate the ultimate message--the gospel.

The fundamental concept behind social media propagation is that there are nuggets of gold within your sermon that can be pulled out and dropped in small messages like Twitter and, for a longer posts, like Facebook or Google+, or a number of other platforms. If your objective is to attract readers to consume as much of your sermon as possible--if not all of it--then you want to use smaller posts like Tweets, then your strategy ought to be using social media platforms to drive viewers to your website and, ideally, as a real, physical visitor or member of your church.

Tweeting out your sermon’s gold nuggets empowers members to cast a 21st century fisherman’s net into the internet. if you don’t do this, then your church has only 20th century strategies at its disposal. That is great, and far be it from me to lower the value of real person-to-person interaction. I love real coffee, in a real cafe, with my real friends.

ReSermon helps empower your church to share the preached word by first gold digging through your sermon and then sharing those nuggets through social media in creative and diverse ways to attract souls to the full presentation of the preached Word and then to full membership in the body of Christ.

Regular sermon blogging yields regular public square salination

10/5/2016

By Christopher Mann for ReSermon.com

After transcription and closed captioning, the next step for effective sermon projection is to repurpose your sermon into blog posts.

This can be done through a number of strategies. Here is one recipe:

Church blog. If you don’t have a blog attached to your website, beginning one is usually as simple as checking a box. Almost every template-platform (Wordpress, Blogger, Weebly, etc.) has a blog feature which you can just switch on with a check box in the settings.
Content population #1. Second, populate your new blog with blog posts, and if you have transcription, that is the easiest way to start populating your blog with content.
Content population #2. Convert your weekly sermons into regular, daily content ready for an external consumption.
Content - external posting. The church can repurpose sermon content in the form of guest blog posts on external websites. Why do this? (A) this is exactly the kind of biblical salt that the public needs -- your expounded perspective on scripture’s relevance to the souls in that public square. (B) Getting published in an external publication, whether print or online, will draw attention to your church blog and, hopefully, the church itself. If the community newspaper has a website and has a number of blogs attached to that website and welcomes guest editorials, that can be a great forum for your repurposed sermon.

Now, a 30 minute sermon is going to produce about 4,000 words, and of course there is precious little market demand for a 4,000 word blog post, and that’s where ReSermon comes in. Our skilled writers (practicing and former professional journalists) will skillfully repurpose your sermon into a series of blog posts which then posts to your designated sites.

Close caption your sermon for immigrants: Your sermon is a great English tutor

9/7/2016

By Christopher Mann for ReSermon.com

An internet cafe in China.

Literacy rides on the wake of missions. In the modern era, the American church has the ability to give the world what it wants most -- to speak the language of science, commerce and the hope for a higher standard of living -- in exchange for what the world needs most -- the gospel of Jesus Christ. The world wants to learn English and missionaries have met this need my first and foremost simply teaching how to read the Bible.

Your closed captioned sermon is a critical tool for a person learning English as a Second Language (ESL). In an age when the general public is panicking about mass immigration out of the war-torn middle east, the church is entrusted the only solution -- the gospel. These migrants need to learn English and they will learn English with or without the assistance of the church. Why not closed caption your sermons and expose them to the life-changing message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ?

Closed captioning is not just a solution for the deaf and the hard of hearing. It is, arguably, a critical part of a comprehensive immigration solution.

Close caption your sermons for veterans

8/3/2016

By Christopher Mann for ReSermon.com

It was very loud in Afghanistan and Iraq, and soldiers often come back with ruptured eardrums and other hearing-related injuries. Captioning your sermon is a huge service to soldiers coming back from the battlefield.

Hearing Loss - the #1 Vet Disability

“Among post-9/11 veterans, 414,000 have come home with hearing loss and tinnitus, or ringing in the ears. The most-widespread injury for veterans has been hearing loss and other auditory complications, according to interviews and benefits data.” Kay Miller, News 21, 8-24-2013. http://backhome.news21.com/article/hearing.

“Hearing damage is the No. 1 disability in the war on terror, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs, and some experts say the true toll could take decades to become clear. Nearly 70,000 of the more than 1.3 million troops who have served in the two war zones are collecting disability for tinnitus, a potentially debilitating ringing in the ears, and more than 58,000 are on disability for hearing loss, the VA said.” Associated Press, 3-7-2008, http://www.nbcnews.com/id/23523729/ns/health-health_care/t/hearing-loss-silent-epidemic-us-troops/#.VyP9HDArKhc.