Sunday, April 1, 2007

Publishing Sermons

I have spent much of the last couple of years experimening with inexpensive tools that can be used to publish my sermons. Let me review three tools I have looked at during that time:
  1. www.sermoncentral.com
    I started two or three years ago posting my sermons here - it took a great deal of work to post a new message and then each message has to be approved by the site administrator. If they choose to not approve a message, there is no indication what rule or policy has been violated so that the message can be edited, if appropriate.

    The biggest advantage of Sermon Central is the availability of a large database of sermons - free after contributing 40 sermons. Sermons posted on SermonCentral are also searchable from LOGOS Bible Software. I fear sermons published here are often used by those looking for sermons they may want to preach as their own.
  2. www.blogger.com
    By using a blog to post my sermons, it is easy to allow my parishioners access to my public site. If I had to retype every sermon, this could be a tiresome task. But there is an easier way. http://docs.google.com can import MS Word, Oo.com, or StarOffice files. Once imported, the same program can also publish to www.blogger.com. Other programs can post to the Blogger and to other blogging sites as well. I like The Journal - http://www.davidrm.com/thejournal/ for this purpose.

    This is my prefered method of posting my sermons.
  3. www.Bible-Explorer.com
    Bible Explorer is a free Bible search tool. It also has an active set of community of offerings - which can be used for posting sermons. Sermons have to be cut and pasted into the internal word processor and made available to the entire Bible Explorer community.

    Bible Explorer is the least well known of the these three tools. But it has the potential of being made available to large number of people who are looking for Bible reference material - rather than just previously delivered sermons.

I expect that there are other useful tools for publishing sermons - I would be interested in finding other ways to distribute my sermons.

Blessings,

Pastor Patrick

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