Sermon Cloud

Posted by Mike Robinson on July 07, 2010 in Podcasting tagged with ,

Where can you go to find a sermon about anything? Sermon Cloud apparently. Right now they have just over 66,000 sermons available online. You can register and download sermons for free and you can post sermons for free — at least to a point. The “Free Plan” they offer allows you to post 52 sermons for free. Which isn’t bad. But if you want to post up to 110 sermons, you have to sign up for their “Core Plan” which is $9.99 per month. The “Plus Plan” gives you up to 250 sermons for $19.99 per month. (My question is why “52” and “110” though?) Both of the paid plans come with unlimited custom RSS feeds, unlimited disk space and Web-based account support. They also have Facebook and Twitter integration as part of their future plans for the site.

But I think one of the real appeals of the site (to me at least) are the extras you get to play with. You can “Amen” sermons to show that you enjoyed and would recommend that sermon, you can leave comments, tag sermons, let other people see your favorite sermons, add photos, and you can create and save personal playlists of sermons.


The four buttons at the bottom of each entry are to listen, download, log in and view feed respectively.

A Random Take

Obviously there are fundamental reasons why a site like this one is important. One, it’s a way to minister to the online community. Two, it’s a way to promote your church. But I’d like to take another, fairly specific angle to the discussion of online sermons today just for the sake of this article. My church started looking for a new pastor about a year ago after our long-standing pastor retired from the ministry. Our pastor search committee received over 150 resumes for consideration in addition to referrals and others they were interested in looking at as a potential candidate for our church. Several members of the pastor search committee have talked about how invaluable online sermons were in the search process. Choosing a minister is a delicate and incredibly important step for any church. In the past, you might be able to visit a minister’s church once or possibly twice to hear a live sermon on a Sunday morning or you might receive a tape of a hand-picked, pre-recorded sermon from the candidate, but with the wealth of online sermons that are available today, you can come a lot closer to getting a real, honest feel for a pastor’s style, level of energy, theology, philosophies, etc. from a broader sampling of the preacher’s material. You can listen to one or any number of sermons, you can listen to them in a controlled environment where you can properly focus on the message, and you can e-mail links around to other members of the search committee to share recordings of interest. Not to minimize the overall usefulness of a site like Sermon Cloud, but, especially with the ongoing state of the economy, finding the best possible fit for a church staff position can be a tricky and complicated process. Having a library of sermons like this from potential pastoral candidates from all over could be a very useful tool in the quest for a new church leader.

A Little More of the Technical Side

This is all fairly straight-forward, but the sermons are available as streaming audio and they can either be played directly on the site, downloaded, or added to a playlist. The dialog box for the streaming audio contains all the basic features you would expect…play, stop, pause, beginning, end, volume, repeat, etc. You also have some options for viewing the playlist showing in the window.

So how easy is it to find a sermon on a particular topic though? That’s a good question. Just playing around with the Search tab a little tonight, I tried searching for the word “love.” This brought up a long list of sermons either with love in the title of the sermon or love in the title of the church that posted the sermon (e.g., “The Love of the Father” and “First Love Church” were two of the entries the search engine returned). I tried several keywords and since all of the search returns had the keyword either in the title of the sermon or in the name of the church, it didn’t look like there was any way to search for the keyword where it may have been mentioned somewhere within a sermon message. Of course that sort of prompts a whole other technical discussion, but it doesn’t look like Sermon Cloud has that functionality yet. But I could be wrong. But you can sort the search returns a few different ways…by date posted, title of the sermon and by number of downloads.

And as far as the “Amen” feature goes, it looks like most of the sermons posted have 0 Amens. The highest ranking sermon of all time on the site only has 18 Amens. Sermon Cloud is powered by Ekklesia 360 though, so I’m sure the site will be getting more and more traffic as it matures and more folks start to post to it and use it.

Does your church post to Sermon Cloud? How well is working it out for you and your congregation?


Warning: file_get_contents() [function.file-get-contents]: URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration in /nfs/c01/h16/mnt/11381/domains/crucifiedmagazine.com/html/wp-content/themes/revolution/functions/theme-functions.php on line 449

Warning: file_get_contents(http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=http://crucifiedmagazine.com/podcasting/sermon-cloud/) [function.file-get-contents]: failed to open stream: no suitable wrapper could be found in /nfs/c01/h16/mnt/11381/domains/crucifiedmagazine.com/html/wp-content/themes/revolution/functions/theme-functions.php on line 449

Tiny URL for this post: