What are your services like?Our worship services are contemporary with worship leader John Phillips. He’s a great rock and roll guitar player who loves the Lord and loves to worship. We have a wonderful team of musicians and a lot of folks who attend or visit here comment on the music. Our repertoire tends to gravitate toward Tommy Walker (a fellow Foursquare guy), Chris Tomlin, Lincoln Brewster and Hillsong along with others and some originals that our Senior Pastor and our Worship leader have written. Our senior pastor, Ron Pinkston has a very nice conversational style when he preaches. He’s usually seated on a stool and he makes use of PowerPoint ® presentations and videos to illustrate his points. He’s the kind of preacher that can nail you between the eyes with the truth of God’s word – you don’t feel under siege because he does it gently and humorously but without compromise.
How did you first get involved with podcasting?
Yes, for a number of years we’ve been doing a radio broadcast, which has been supported, internally by our church. This was a good experience for us but as time and technology have progressed, it became obvious that we should consider making some changes.
First of all, it was very expensive to buy the airtime on the radio. Secondly, for what we were paying, the market was limited. Every radio station has its limited coverage area and in Danville, there really aren’t any Christian radio stations that reach us very well. Therefore the coverage that our program had really didn’t even reach our own area.
We began to consider the idea of podcasting and two advantages really popped out at us. One: much lower costs. Two: unlimited coverage. If you have access to the Internet, it doesn’t matter where in the world you are, you can receive our program.
What were the initial goals of your podcast?
In the beginning, we wanted to expand our audience and bring our costs down.
Learning so far?
On the down side we’ve found that expanding the listener base is more difficult than we’d realized.
What are the biggest challenges you encountered in your early podcasts?
1. Agreeing to do it.
It was a difficult decision to give up the radio program because there was some good fruit that came from that.
2. Programming. This wasn’t too difficult, because we have years of radio broadcasts already in the can on CDs so we were able to put these in the library while adding the current sermons as we go. But organizing and prioritizing was a little cumbersome.
3. Bandwidth issues.
We put all of our available titles on our website, which is over nine gigabytes, and we discovered that this occasionally caused some problems because there are certain sites that scan the Internet looking for downloadable stuff. When one of those hits your library and tries to download the entire library, it really sucks up your bandwidth and can create problems. In response we’ve considered keeping a smaller selection available on the site and rotating it.
4. Advertising.
As I mentioned earlier, we have to figure out ways to get the word out about our programming. For now, we are seeing it as a resource for our own church. For our members to have access to Pastor Ron’s sermons and as a vehicle for our congregation to share them with friends and loved ones who don’t come to Church.
Is podcasting going to have a place in the church for the next several years or is the flavor of the month?
It remains to be seen. It really is a great medium but I don’t know what is on the horizon that would take its place. It’s really a great way to share your sermons. But you can’t listen to it in your car unless you burn a CD or can plug your mp3 player into your car’s stereo. I’m sure that eventually that technology will be developed.
Can Shure Notes readers subscribe to your podcasts?
Technically, we aren’t really podcasting so much as posting our sermons on our website. The only difference between a download and a podcast is that the podcast is scripted to download the MP3 automatically when you log on to the Internet. With a download you’re doing the same thing except that you just need to point to the file to download it. We are preparing to begin the actual podcasting soon. For now if you want to hear Pastor Ron’s sermons our website is “Eastbayfellowship.org”. On the left there are ten orange links. The seventh one is “Radio” click on that and you’ll find four options for downloading or streaming the sermons.
Chuck Harris, world-class engineer, has been at the forefront of worship music production for years. According to East Bay’s worship leader, John Phillips, “Chuck’s patience, steadiness and ability to explain have made our entire team better musicians. If we could duplicate him, we would send him to every church in America so they could benefit from his expertise.” Well said. And we thank him, too.
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