What are the advantages of closed captioning your sermon content?

You immediately expand your ministry reach to the deaf and hearing alike.

By Christopher Mann
for ReSermon.com

Captioning your video sermon is one of the easiest, low-hanging-fruit ways of immediately expanding your ministry reach. By captioning your videos, which demographics do you pick up? 

In one sense, you pick up some specific profiles. In another sense, you pick up everybody. 

Deaf: You signal to the community that you are a deaf-friendly church. There are not many, and your church will distinguish itself among a mission population whose children have endured much higher rates of sexual molestation than their hearing counterparts; they can’t report on their abusers, and their abusers often get away. Too often, the deaf/HOH is a community that doesn’t want to be found. 

Hard of hearing: the elderly, war veterans and iPod veterans like closed captioning. Consider querying your congregation for how often they turn on captions when watching movies from Redbox or Netflix.

ESL: People trying to learn English rely heavily on closed captioning. 

EVERYBODY ELSE: Your sermon content more searchable by all the demographics above. This helps your SEO - your website's Search Engine Optimization. This means that search engines like Google, Bing and others can now help searchers find your sermon content. Closed Captioning not only helps the deaf, hard of hearing and people trying to learn English, it helps everybody else in the world who is searching for the terms and phrases included in your captioned sermon content. Captioning your video helps them find you!

ReSermon.com repurposes your sermon into the public square of the deaf, the hard of hearing, those learning English as a second language, and the rest of us simply searching for trustworthy counsel from God’s preached Word.

For more information, visit the “Learn” tab and scroll down to "Sermon to Closed Captions/subtitles.” ​