ReSermon Blog - ReSermon Institute

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.

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.

How sermon transcription impacts your pastoral counseling

6/1/2016

By Christopher Mann for ReSermon.com

.John and Susan share with Pastor Steve one morning after church that they need counseling. Steve wants to schedule a meeting with them later that week but he wants them to dive into some material he already preached upon this year and last.

Or, he tries to remember, was it in the year before?

No matter, because Steve’s sermons are transcribed and published at his church blog.

“Look up ‘marriage’ and ‘Cassie’ in the search windows of the church blog,” Steve says, “because the messages I want you to review include some stories I shared about me and Cassie and some of the challenges we went through.”

This has a few big benefits:

The marriage “counseling” begins today, not Thursday. John and Susan don’t have to wait until Thursday to get started on their marriage counseling appointment. In fact, they’ve been given explicit homework. Why let them focus on more fighting Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday when they can be applying that time toward growth?
John and Susan are “doing” the counseling. They are actively working on their problem, rather than just passively waiting for the professional to fix this for them.

Because Steve’s sermon archive is transcribed and published, John and Susan might find the breakthrough they need, transforming Thursday’s meeting from less of a counseling appointment to more of a celebration appointment.

How sermon transcription helps your staff

5/4/2016

by Christopher Mann for ReSermon.com

Roger is working on material for Wednesday night’s youth ministry and wants to know how Pastor Steve would handle a sensitive subject. Steve, however, is knee-deep preparing for a funeral and won’t be available until much later in the week.

No problem, because Roger can just go to the church’s website where Steve’s transcribed sermon archives have been posted and tagged for easy reference. Not only is Steve’s archived sermons a huge help to Roger, but sunday school teachers, committee members, and ministry leaders now have access to Steve’s teaching.

Sermon transcription has a few other key benefits for your staff and colleagues. If these leaders are presently treating the pastor or his assistant as their de facto librarians, sermon transcription now makes this a thing of the past, or at least greatly reduces the burden.

Transcription makes your entire sermon archive available for optimum access for your staff and church leadership.

Empower seekers: Make sermons discoverable.

4/30/2016

by Christopher Mann
Founder, ReSermon.com

You have a great website, tricked out with all the latest stuff and your sermons are available as an audio or video file. A few weeks after posting, however, you see that this sermon only garnered a few dozen views, and you’re absolutely sure that you live in a city with much more than a few dozen people.

After the thousands of dollars invested in video equipment, editing software, soundboards and more, you’re scratching your head and wondering if this is worth it.

The problem may be that your sermon is not discoverable. Search engines like Google or Bing cannot search through your audio and video files and tell Sally Searcher what sermon contains material on her keywords like love, hope, resurrection and so on. (At least, they cannot yet; they’re working on this.)

Your sermon needs to become discoverable to search engines and that starts with transcription.

Turn your transcription into its own blog post.

After having your sermon transcribed, post it as a distinct blog post at your church website’s blog and announce the sermon’s availability through social media (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.).

Then, create a closed caption file.

Transcription is a critical step, but you might not be done. If you make your sermon available via video, then you need to close caption that video file.

“But wait, Google now produces automated captioning for videos posted to YouTube.”

Yes, but have you bothered to actually turn on the captioning for one of your sermons on YouTube? Machine transcription is improving, but still far from where it needs to be, and far from what you actually preached; brace for when Google thinks you cussed during your sermon.

Google’s captioning is better than nothing and plays a helpful role in making more content accessible to a lot of people dependent on captioning (more on that later), but the captioning is so poor that Google blushes too.

It gets a little wonky here, but this is important. Search algorithm only indexes manual captioning, not it's own machine captioning.

That means if you preach on the resurrection, for example, Sally Searcher who is looking for “resurrection” will not find your sermon if you let Google do its machine captioning. Sally will find your sermon, however, if you have uploaded a manual transcription, because Google's indexing formula intentionally values more highly the accuracy of manual transcription over the dubious accuracy of its own machine transcription.

Recap

Get your sermon library transcribed.
Post those transcripts as individual blog posts at your church’s blog.
Convert transcripts into closed caption files and upload to whatever platform you use (usually, Vimeo or YouTube).
Watch your views and missional impact increase.

Sermon transcription for personal and professional growth

4/6/2016

By Christopher Mann for ReSermon.com

Have you ever read your own preached sermon? Chances are good that you would be surprised. How many times are you interrupting yourself? How many times are you pausing with “um” or “uh” or interrupting your point with “Now, listen” or other go-to phrases. Sermon transcription can play a helpful role in your homiletic improvement and missional effectiveness.

"A Beautiful Promise" Part 3. Based on Romans 8:28

8/24/2015

“When you're walking through season of adversity, God is at work. No matter what the adversity, God will finish the work.”

A Beautiful Promise: Part 3
by Pastor Ron Williams
Pathway Community Church, Fort Wayne, Ind.
Transcribed and closed captioned by ReSermon

Spurgeon would have loved ReSermon

6/21/2015

Charles Spurgeon's 63 volumes of sermons stand as the largest set of books by a single author in the history of Christianity.
— John Piper (@JohnPiper) June 13, 2015

If your sermon lasts 30 minutes, you're preaching about 5,000 words per Sunday. That's a great start, but Spurgeon would have appreciated help toward a wonderful finish--taking that sermon into his public square.

"That was really good. You should write that down."

8/6/2014

By Chris Mann

The case for leveraging your spoken content into greater, repurposed value in the public square.

If you have been teaching long enough, you've heard that line. And, they're probably right; you should write that down, but who has the time?

An average speaker will speaking at around 100-200 words per minute and at the end of an hour, he might utter around 6,000 words. The question becomes, how do you capture that value and leverage it? Should that value be contained to the walls of a worship center, classroom or lecture hall, or could it be repurposed into greater venues like blog entries (typically 300-500 words each), social media posts (15-100 words each), editorial articles (800-1500 words each) or full length books (150,000 words+)?