The Easiest And Cheapest Way To Get Your Sermons Online (That you’ve never heard of.)
One thing almost every church wants to do is provide a way for their sermons to be viewed and downloaded online. This actually isn’t as easy as it sounds.
- If you have a church Wordpress theme, you may have some kind of sermon management built in, but then you are hosting your audio on your web host and they probably won’t like that.
- You could opt for an expensive service like Sermon Audio.
- You could use Soundcloud. Which isn’t cheap either.
- You could hack your own solution using Amazon S3. It’s cheap, but not easy.
But I think there is a better way for most churches: Airtable.
If you are unfamiliar, Airtable is an online database app. If Microsoft Access and Google Sheets had a genius child, it would be Airtable. It’s an incredibly powerful app that is easy to learn and even easier to use. It has iOS, Android, Mac and Windows apps. It has drag and drop file uploading. It has a fantastic API so web developers can easily use anything you put in it. You’ll probably hear a lot about it on this blog.
Basically Free
The best part — it’s basically free. Right now, the fee tier includes 1,200 records and 2GB of attachment space. What that means is that you could host nearly 70 30MB sermon files before you pay a penny. When you do have more than 70 sermons, it’s only $12 a month for 5GB. That’s a price that’s hard to beat.
Easy To Use
http://sitesforchurch.s3.amazonaws.com/airtable.gif
The interface is really, really, easy to use. It’s basically a spreadsheet on steroids. You can upload files by dragging and dropping from Windows Explorer/Finder. Our church’s sound guy absolutely loves it.
Want to save some time, just copy this database.
Easy to get on your website
Not only is Airtable easy to add sermons too, it’s also really easy to get those sermons on the website. Airtable provides a shareable, read-only view of every database that you can either link to or embed on an existing page.
You have limited control over how this looks. (You can reorder and hide columns and change the background color but that’s about it.) If you can live with this, you can easily offer your website visitors a powerful, searchable way to access your sermons.
It Can Grow With You
If you decide that you want to have a sermon section on your site that is more customized — you can still use Airtable. They provide an excellent API that allows developers access to all of your bases. In fact, everything on the sites I create at Sitesfor.church and Myonepage.site is powered by airtable (including but not limited to the sermons section.)
This means you can still use Airtable for hosting/uploading and organizing your sermons but you can make them look however you want.
