When the subject of podcasting surfaces in ministry circles, I hear the following questions:

• Should I get an iPod?
• What is podcasting?
• Why should I podcast?
• How do I podcast?

Read on if you've been wondering the same thing.

Should I get an iPod?

This is the easiest question to answer. Get an iPod if you want to, and if you have the money. But you don't need an iPod if you're only interested in putting your sermons online as a podcast. The reason you might want an iPod is if you want to listen to podcasts while you're on the go. And even then, the iPod is only one brand among many that do essentially the same thing: play audio files (usually MP3 files). If you're content listening to audio files using your desktop or laptop computer, your Palm device, or your PocketPC, then you don't even need an MP3 player (like an iPod).

What is podcasting?

Online audio files have been around as long as the Web has existed. Nothing new there. But the term podcasting was coined in late-2004 when a few pioneers devised a method to automatically download and synchronize these online audio files with portable MP3 players like the iPod. (Think iPod + broadcast; put it together, and you get podcast.) Podcasting technology has made it easy for normal users to discover new audio content and to listen routinely to the stuff they like by subscribing to an automatic feed download.

To listen to an individual podcast, you can visit the creator's Web site and listen to the audio file directly off the Web. Or you can catch each new show as it's released by subscribing to the show's feed using software called a podcatcher or feed reader. This is software you install on your computer that watches for changes in the text files (RSS feeds—RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication") on the Web sites you specify. When a feed is updated with new content, the podcatcher downloads the feed file and searches for new audio/video content. When it finds new content, it then downloads the file, storing it in a directory on your computer.

If you have a computer connected to the Internet all the time through a broadband connection, this process happens in the background—hopefully overnight, when you're not using the computer. When you wake up in the morning, your podcast directory is full of fresh content, and you can either listen to your podcast straight off your computer, or you can synchronize the new files with your favorite portable MP3 player. Then you're ready to listen on the go.

Creating a podcast is as simple as placing an audio file (usually recorded in the MP3 audio format) on a Web server with the accompanying text file (the RSS feed) describing the audio. More specifics on that can be found below.

Why should I podcast?

Your church's mission essentially determines what kind of podcast you want to offer, and defines what you want to get out of it. If your mission statement focuses on discipleship, you may want to offer your best teaching podcasts. If your mission has a strong small-group focus, you may want to offer a series of 5-10 minute mini-teachings from your small group leaders to help your church members and potential attenders get familiar with who's leading your small groups and what your church has to offer. If your church has a commitment to missions and evangelism, you may want to only put the most evangelistic and missions-oriented sermons online. Your mission and the heartbeat of the church will help you focus what you offer online.

No matter your target audience, though, putting your sermons online in a podcast is invariably the best first step in getting your church's content out there in people's ears. It's content you are already creating every week, your sermons are already aligned with your church's core mission, and you have already crafted your presentation to your target audience. If you start here, at least, you can grow your specialized offerings later. What will change, depending on your audience, is the tone and style of your audio intros and outros.

Bottom Line
If you are interested in making disciples through regular teaching and preaching of the Word, if you believe that faith comes by hearing the Word preached faithfully, if you are interested in introducing non-attenders to your church in a non-threatening way, then you should seriously consider podcasting as one more extension of your church ministry.

If you're interested in setting up a weblog, there are a few benefits you get that you might not get with just updating and uploading an RSS feed on your own website.

Podcast blogs can generate a larger audience
If you have a weblog as the foundation for your podcasts, that means you'll be writing short articles, or posts, for your blog every time you upload a new file. This provides an opportunity to "sell" your podcast every time someone visits your weblog. Many church sermon archive Web pages only list the date, the title of the sermon, the main text, and the name of the person delivering the message. But with a blog post to promote a particular message, you can do much more. You can describe the events that led to the creation of a message; you can describe its effect on you, or the congregation; you can include thoughts that only came after delivering the sermon; you could even include a short outline to preview the message. In addition (this is the best part), you can invite comments from your reading and listening audience. If any given sermon was particularly compelling or interesting, your audience comments will only add to the post and invite new visitors to join in the fun.

But blogging about your podcast will generate a larger audience in another way: your words on a post will attract search engines like a fire sale draws swarming bargain-hunters. Every post on a weblog eventually gets noticed by the big search engines like Google, Google Blogsearch, Yahoo, AltaVista, Technorati (a blog search tool), and others. Every time someone does a search on Google that includes key words you used in your post, there's a good chance they'll visit your site at least once.

Not every visitor from a search engine stays—they often leave after only a few seconds. But unless you get your message in front of eyeballs, there's no way for them to consider what you have to offer. Every bit of text describing your podcast helps select the audience that should hear it.

Podcast blogs make a better preacher
Too often, pastors preach in a vacuum of feedback—and what feedback they do get is often unhelpful by being thoughtlessly critical or uncritically loyal. When you promote your sermons and teaching with a weblog that allows audience feedback and comments, you will find yourself thinking more carefully about your sermons. You will find yourself listening to your sermon as you preach it with a more sensitive ear for wasted language, rabbit-trail asides, distracting ums and ahs, and weak illustrations. You'll find yourself sharpening your argument, getting to your points more quickly and with greater clarity, and you'll be more eager to see what feedback you get. You will become more intentional. Your words are no longer vanishing into the foggy mist of uncaffeinated minds on Sunday morning—the messages live on. Your congregation will be able to find and return to the messages for review and to pass them on to their friends and family, and you'll re-enroll in the school of hard-knock communication, knowing that with a podcast archive you cannot rely on the warm glow of a good worship service to mask poor preparation or lazy thinking. You'll remember that dynamic hand gestures, anguished facial expressions, and well-coiffed hair won't impress your podcast audience. And you just may enter a new era of intentionality in your preaching.

You may think: my tape ministry didn't do this, so why will podcasting?

Because your podcast audience won't let you get away with this anymore, and you'll know it. They'll either unsubscribe, or tell you about it. Tape ministries have typically been for the in-house crowd, who aren't really likely to tell you what they did or did not like about a particular message. Podcasts, however, reach a much more intimate and familiar audience—maybe presumptively intimate and familiar—but that difference will make itself felt.

As you think about whether to begin a podcast, consider the costs:

It takes time to produce a podcast.
Your level of time-commitment depends on the type of podcast you want to produce. If you're simply looking to put sermons online in an easily accessible format, then all you need to do is record your sermons in a high-quality digital format (usually the WAV format), convert them to a lower-quality MP3 format, put the files on a Web server, and update an RSS feed or Weblog. In fact, you may already have an online sermon archive. In this case, all you would need to do is produce an RSS feed to go along with what you're already doing online.

Also, somebody needs to maintain the website and weblog, or RSS feed, for your podcast. This takes time.

Reliable website hosting can be had for as low as $5-7 a month, with monthly costs likely to increase as you use more bandwidth. If you've already got a website, you should note that once you put sermons or other MP3 files on your site for automatic download, your bandwidth usage will increase dramatically. A 45-minute sermon download could easily increase your bandwidth usage by 20-30 megabytes for every download. A single 20 megabyte MP3 audio download could be the equivalent of about 2-400 page views on your site. As you can see, your bandwidth usage will go up quickly, so you may wind up moving to a new level of usage and cost with your ISP when you start offering podcasts online.

Offering podcasts with an RSS feed on your website—especially in conjunction with a regularly updated weblog—could increase your traffic dramatically. So be prepared for the costs if that happens.

Next week in part two: How do I podcast?

Rich Tatum is online-media managing editor for Christianity Today International and was the original webmaster for PreachingToday.com.