Church website, sermon podcast, The Quest

Thank you for your patience during my extended blogging break. I've been out of the lectionary for the last several weeks because our church has been on a journey entitled "The Quest." In many ways, you might explain "The Quest" as a sequel to Rick Warren's "The Purpose-driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For?" While Warren attempts to answer the questions of "what" or "why," Frank Moore is interested in responding to the question of "how."

In his book "The Power to Be Free: Discovering Life in the Spirit of Christ," Frank Moore poses the question "How on earth do I live the life I've longed for?" He answers that question by taking readers on a 40-day journey, accompanied by small group discussions, teaching videos, and weekly messages. We began our journey on the Sunday before Ash Wednesday, and completed it on Palm Sunday. From all I've heard from members of the congregation, they really enjoyed the series, but many people felt that they barely scratched the surface of the study, and are desiring more in depth study.

If you'd like more information about "The Quest," you can visit www.onthequest.org. Also, you can listen to the sermons that I delivered during this time at our church website - www.capenazarene.org.

Which brings me to the other item that's been taking quite a bit of my time the past few weeks. In addition to serving as a full-time pastor, I run a web hosting service that helps churches develop a ministry through the internet. You can find more about this at my website: www.yourchurchweb.net. Recently, one of the datacenters that I use to set up churches was bought out. Despite promises of better support, security, and stability, the new owners have generally disappointed me. Wanting to provide superior service to the churches that I am working with, I've been in the process of contacting them to help them move to a new datacenter.

The good news about that is that I've found a plan that is not only more robust--but also cheaper. I'm excited to be able to pass along some savings! In the middle of all of those changes, I decided it was time to move our church's website from its old location as a subfolder at www.yourchurchweb.net to its own domain--www.capenazarene.org.

If you go to our church website, you can find audio recordings of sermons, available for download at the sermon page. During a six-week time span, we had as many people download sermons from our website as were present in our morning worship service. It's been neat to realize that our small local church can have a global impact through the internet.

Not only are those sermons available for individual download, but you can subscribe to it as a podcast to have automatically delivered to your iPod or MP3 player. The podcast is now listed in the iTunes Music Store, or you could point your podcatcher to our feed-- http://feeds.feedburner.com/JonTwitchellSermons.

If you download any of the sermons or subscribe to the podcast, I'd love to hear from you. In particular, I'm interested in your thoughts about audio quality and download times. Many sermon podcasts I've looked at either seem to be too low quality to listen to for the 30 minutes of a sermon, or the file size is larger than most people want to bother download. I think I've hit a good compromise, but I'd like some feedback from some actual listeners! Feel free to reply to this post if you have any observations.

Anyway, that's about all from here. Thanks for reading. I'll get back into some lectionary blogging very soon.

Grace and Peace,

PastorJon