The church I go to is small. It's a new church still, and will grow more in the future. But that's no reason not to record the sermons and get them out onto the internet. Domain name registration is cheap - we just paid about AU$40 for the next two years. And hosting can be cheap too if you're lucky. But recording sermons? That sounds complicated, right?

Traditionally, churches recorded sermons on tape decks, hooked up to the sound desk. While people were getting prayed for at the end of the service, a team of people would be frantically making copies of the tapes, so that as many interested people as possible could leave church that day able to listen to the message again. And that's really important for getting a message to hit home. But tape decks are old technology. These days people want them on CDs, or in MP3 format. The technology-savvy people will want them in a podcast, so that they have a copy of the sermon sync'd onto their MP3 player without them having to do a thing.

If you have a sound desk, one easy option is to hook up one of the outputs into the mic jack of a computer. But most people don't want to take a laptop into church, and many churches don't have the luxury of having a computer available to do the recording. We don't even have our own building, and so a different solution was required for us.

And the answer is simply an MP3 player. Many models have a recording function as well, to turn them into a dictaphone. Our preachers click the record button just before they start, and they click the stop button at the end. Later, the MP3 that results gets uploaded to a site, and I make minor alterations to the XML file that contains the RSS feed information, pointing it to the latest file. More on RSS in another post I think.

So if you're not recording your sermons because you don't want to use a tape deck, then consider just using a dictaphone-style MP3 player. You could probably record it from anywhere in the church, but we find that giving the preacher control helps make sure that it starts and stops at the right time. But your mileage may vary. Just don't let the size of your church stop you making sermon recordings that take up so much less space than a cassette tape.