How can your church benefit from Sermon by Phone. How can it help your ministry? What are its’ limits?
Image by Kay Lenze, Sourced from Pixabay
Problem with the Online Digital Divide
Your Elderly members are missing out on your online worship services.
Challenge in Reaching Your Elderly Members
Online worship services are great for members who cannot make it to the in-person worship services. Yet, it is not the ultimate solution for those on the other side of the technology gap. Only if we could get the audio signal to them by the traditional telephone we could include everybody.
Sermon by Phone Answers the Challenge
Have you heard of the acronym K.I.S.S. – it stands for Keep It Simple Stupid … if the word “Stupid” offends you, you can substitute “silly.”
Well, SermonByPhone seems to have taken the K.I.S.S. approach when it comes to delivering audio sermons over the phone. It’s clear in the name, in the website, and in the feature set.
Let’s take a look.
Sermon By Phone gives you a dedicated phone number that plays the audio you upload week to week. When you sign up, you’ll enter your preferred area code, and they say within six hours, you’ll hear back with a phone number assigned to your account. I’m not sure how that works if you order on the weekends or late at night.
The only other option you need to work out is your monthly allotment of minutes. The default minimum is a basic monthly fee, which offers you a “bucket” of 500 minutes of streaming audio. Now, remember, that’s total minutes spread across however many callers you have. So, if you have 50 people call in, that gives you 10 minutes of content to share per month (not week). Since most of us have new content weekly, and the average sermon is at least 30 minutes, that means you can reach between three and four callers per month for that minimum fee.
So what happens if you go over? There is a per-minute charge that could go by pretty fast. One other curious note on the website is that 50+ callers can call in simultaneously and not get a busy signal.
I’m not exactly sure what happens at 60 callers or 100 … It’s also important to note that SermonByPhone is not LIVE. You can only upload audio files.
And it does not dial OUT like phone live streaming.
There is no archive of previous recordings either. So they really are Keeping It Simple.
