Sermon Formats Poll Results

February 26, 2008 by

2008_02_26sermonformatspoll.jpgThere’s lots of different ways to make your sermons available. In a few years, you’ll probably just be able to stream them live to a chip in your members’ head while they sleep; for now, however, we wanted to know which technologies you currently use to distribute your sermons.

The most common way to share your sermons is an audio download. 30% of you are rocking this method. Digital is fun as costs are cheap and files are portable. I guess the next step is to revisit your payment plans for sermon audio.

Just a few less of you, 29% to be exact, offer your sermons on CD. It’d be interesting to hear if the rise of digital audio has brought CD sales down at all in your church.

The next best thing, and rounding out the audio portion of our poll, is the cassette tape. Wowzers. 10% of you make cassettes of your messages available. Hey, if folks need it, more power to you. The last cassette I can remember buying myself is Ace of Base.

Video doesn’t seem to be catching on quite as strongly as audio. 9% of you offer DVDs of messages, and 8% of you offer a video download of sermons. There’s other options here, too — video podcasts and streaming video come to mind. A lot of folks these days just don’t have time to sit and watch a whole video.

4% of you offer a text download, and 4% offer a paper copy. It’s nice to see that reading isn’t totally dead yet.

The final 6% offer a resounding, “Be there or be square.” If folks miss out, you don’t subsidize their absence, you make them hear it from a friend.

So let us know in the comments, what did we forget? How do you share your church audio? And while you’re at it, answer this week’s question, in which way does your church most often use the Internet for ministry?

Post By:

Joshua Cody


Josh Cody served as our associate editor for several years before moving on to bigger things. Like Texas. These days he lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife, and you can find him online or on Twitter when he's not wrestling code.
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2 Responses to “Sermon Formats Poll Results”

  • brad
    February 26, 2008

    Hey, I think Ace of Base was my last cassette purchase too!
    This survey is particularly interesting as we try and come to terms with what our audience wants and needs, and what we can do to sustainably meet the demand. We tried video a while ago (VHS), but there was no interest. And we’ve offered CDs, but really no-one has taken us up on that either. So online audio it is, then!


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  • Josh N
    February 27, 2008

    currently we’re offering mp3’s primarily, but our old sound guy still records to cassette which are piled, and we have sermons archived for the last 50 years somewhere, and to be honest, it is somewhat beneficial for those times your file corrupts, or audio recording guy sleeps in, etc etc. but digital is definably the way to go, for quality, and quick and easy editing,(ie – “Oops, i shouldnt have said that… the bloggers are going to have my head..” moments) :P


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