​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. ​

“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.
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“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. 

​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? ​

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

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.