ReSermon Blog - ReSermon Institute

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.

Close Caption your sermons for the deaf and hard of hearing

7/6/2016

By Christopher Mann for ReSermon.com

The deaf and hard of hearing relate to the hearing world in a diversity of ways, but in recent years, closed captioning has become so technologically easier and economically affordable, that in 2015 the FCC mandated closed captioning for commercial broadcasting.

This requirement does not, for the most part, apply to churches, but on the other hand, after a church invests tens of thousands of dollars into video and audio equipment in order to broadcast sermon content into YouTube, Vimeo and iTunes for the hope of winning souls and changing lives, why feint at spending a few hundred dollars per month to make sermons accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing, too?

Ungratefully Deaf: Tinnitus plagues young and old alike, even in the church.

In the 20th century, mostly middle-aged and elderly folks really needed to worry about hearing loss--mostly factory guys and war veterans. Then, Baby Boomers partied pretty hard with the Grateful Dead and ended up Ungratefully Deaf. Today, mega-decibel environments are nearly ubiquitous, from millennials with their “iPod-itus” to even the church, which is increasingly marked by loud bands pushing volume to 95 decibels and more -- clearly in the hearing-damage level.

Hearing loss used to be a concern for the old, but the popularity of closed captioning for the middle-aged and even young people is manifested in how popular captioning is for Netflix and YouTube today. Captioning should be part of a church’s video sermon regular workflow.

ReSermon will prepare your sermon archives into closed caption files to serve the deaf and hard of hearing.

An example of a closed caption sermon prepared by ReSermon.com.
This is Clinton Faupel, founder of RemedyLive.FM ministry in Fort Wayne, preaching on January 31, 2016 at Pathway Community Church in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Sermon_01.31.16 from Pathway Community Church on Vimeo.

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.

What is the public square, and why should pastors be there?

4/29/2016

Christopher Mann

“Public square” is a metaphor for the places where the community’s dialogue takes place. Historically, that meant the physical community centers like town halls, literal public squares and the like, but also included forums like community newspapers, restaurants, bars, theaters, town meetings, and the like.

Today, that also includes radio and TV stations, websites, and more. Too often, however, the public pats the pastor on the head and admonishes him to stay in the church, because that is where his expertise and relevance supposedly begins and ends.

ReSermon is a group of experienced Christian media professionals who help pastors return to and/or serve the public square, which is desperate for biblical, life-preserving salt. Big decisions are being made, and pastors are missing from the discussion table.

Can’t Christian laymen be that salt?

Answer: “Yes/and.” Pastors have the forward-thinking, intentional and missional mindset, trained and equipped with a formal education, that welcomes Jesus Christ into a public discussion.

Do all pastors have this mentality, education, inclination? No, no, and no; I’m under no illusion that this description fits all or maybe even most pastors; ReSermon exists in large part because pastors are not showing up to the public square (or otherwise minimize that calling). The pastoral absence from the public square significantly explains its decay, and ReSermon wants to help fix this.

The public square needs the visual presence of the pastor to attend non-profit board meetings, panel discussions, city council meetings and community discussions, and encourage Christian laity to do the same. In doing this, the pastor demonstrates the importance of Christian laymen serving similarly and infusing into these communities their own unique biblical salting-effect.

“My people die from a lack of knowledge,” God said through the prophet Hosea (Hosea 6:8). ReSermon is helping today’s prophets reintroduce biblical salt to a culture decaying from its ignorance of Him.

Christopher Mann is the founder of ReSermon.com.