Sermons take time to prepare. Did you know that the majority (67%) of pastors put between 10 and 18 hours into sermon planning? That’s per sermon. A further 6% put as much as 33 hours into each sermon.

Here’s a question. Why would you put that much time into a sermon, preach it for a single Sunday, and then walk away from it? Sure, you might add it to a video archive, but we’re willing to guess it won’t get much attention in a dusty corner of your church website.

The best way to get the most out of each sermon is to take it from a Sunday service live event to a source of fresh, thoughtful content designed for every day of the week. Remember, church engagement is no longer a Sunday-only activity. It’s a 24/7 activity. 

Don’t skip over one of your most valuable pieces of content (your sermons) without getting the most out of each teaching. With that in mind, here are some tips to help you repurpose your sermons into daily discipleship content that resonates, creates impact, and changes lives.

Pull Relevant Sermon Moments

Here’s a little test for you. If you have analytics set up on your website (and you absolutely should be tracking data), go look at your sermon archive. Find the most-watched sermon and then see how many people watched it through from beginning to end. 

We’re willing to bet it’s a very small number. 

The reasoning here isn’t hard to understand. Does the attention of a goldfish ring a bell? 

People struggle to focus. It’s hard enough for people to sit through a sermon in real time, with their peers sitting next to them, looking forward and paying attention. Put them in a room at home, on a break at work, or in bed about to fall asleep, and it becomes that much harder to focus.

When it comes to screens, in particular, research has found that since 2012, the attention span while watching something has dropped from 75 seconds to 47 seconds. In other words, it already wasn’t great, and in the last decade and change, it got even worse.

Even if someone has a good attention span, chances are they won’t have the same time commitment during the week as they will on a Sunday morning.

This means, when you’re repurposing a sermon, you can’t just stick the whole 30 minutes up online and expect results. People will tune out before you’ve even finished that intro, where you comment on last week’s worship night or crack a joke about a recent Kids Min event.

What you need are clips from your sermon that are:

• Short and concise: There’s no perfect science here. Some platforms like LinkedIn tolerate longer clips. Others, like Instagram, thrive on shorter reels. Either way, go for concise over verbose.

• Relevant: Look for quotes and takeaways that hit home quickly and have hyper-relevance, especially the kind that resonate throughout daily life.

• Timely: If you mention something about living life during the week, at work, in school, etc., clip it!

Repurposing sermons starts with a willingness to encapsulate and isolate individual pieces of each teaching.

Remember Your Audience

When you’re at church, you’re preaching to people who have already made the commitment to get up early, get dressed (a significant step on the weekend), and come to your building. 

At this point, with so much “church shopping” happening online, if someone actually walks through your doors, they aren’t “seeking” anymore. (Sorry for the ’90s church terminology.) If they’re in the building, they probably already know who you are and have made some level of commitment.

Online, though, you’re working with a much more diverse audience. On a recent episode of the Church 3.0 podcast, guest Kacie Frazier from Ministry Brands highlighted this aspect of online engagement.

She pointed out that often, online, your audience sees you, even though you haven’t seen them yet. “Why would somebody be watching this?” Kacie challenged. “They’re seeking. They’re looking for community. They’re looking for a church home.” 

We have to make sure we’re making an effort to meet those people in those moments, even as we’re also using sermon clips to remind people about what they already heard on Sunday.

This is why you can’t just dump sermons into digital libraries and then walk away. You have to set them up in ways that are easy to engage. That requires:

• Using two-way platforms like social media or a church app, where people can respond, ask questions, and dig deeper. 

• Assigning staff to monitor your church social media posts throughout the week. Be ready to answer questions and stay engaged.

• Have “next steps” ready for specific scenarios, such as encouraging someone to visit on a Sunday or offering a direct email option for felt needs, like crisis resolution or bereavement.

In the digital discipleship world, every touch point should be as personal as possible. Don’t use your repurposed sermons as digital dead ends. Use them to engage, encourage, and ignite reactions from your people every day of the week.

Automate the Creation and Distribution of Sermon Clips

The final thought here is that you don’t want repurposing sermons to be something that consumes your week. Particularly if you’re the one preparing to do the preaching, you need time to get your next sermon ready. And let’s be honest. Your team is busy too. 

Everyone has limited time. You can’t spend the week monitoring social posts and church app conversations.

Fortunately, church tech has come a long way. In the Apollos platform, we’ve developed our Creator AI. This makes it possible to automate things like content creation, including turning a single sermon into a week of rich, engaging content.

This isn’t a shortcut. It isn’t cheating. It’s taking your pre-existing teachings and fast-tracking the laborious process of identifying, extracting, reformatting, and otherwise preparing the best moments to repost throughout the week.

The technology is there. Based on things like attendance this past Easter Sunday, people are once again becoming interested in faith and spirituality, too. Use this combination of interest and tools to make the most of every sermon by turning it into digital discipleship content that carries weight, challenges perspectives, and makes people think — not just on Sunday but every day of the week.

If you have questions about Creator AI, church tech in general, or other ways you can spark daily digital discipleship in your ministry, we want to talk. Reach out to our team for more information or to request a demo. We look forward to walking alongside you as we all navigate this crazy and exciting transition in how we do church.