Anchor and Ministry

by chadbrooksis@gmail.com | Oct 16, 2017 | culture, Evangelism, ministry, Podcast

Over the last two months, I have fallen in love with Anchor.fm. Imagine easy to create podcasts mashed up with Instagram stories. Anchor provides an amazing user experience, the ability to easily create up to 5 minutes blocks of audio content, the quickest publish to iTunes and Google Play that I have ever seen AND an amazing user community interacting with each other’s content. I think anchor and ministry together makes absolute sense.

I believe in the medium of podcasting right now. I think we are going to see audio content reach an unheard of level of engagement. And I think Anchor might be poised to become one of the major players in the field. If you have ever wanted to dip your toe into podcasting, I quickly recommend them to people constantly for the best beginner platform. You can use your phone or upload previously recorded and produced audio content to Anchor. And you can get the content on all the major podcasting platforms. Plus, and this is a big one, Anchor plays embedded clips on both Twitter and Facebook natively.

But before we talk about Anchor and ministry, we need to talk about social media and ministry…

I need to say something about using any social media platform for ministry. Social media is inherently…well, it’s supposed to be social. Before we investigate, utilize, strategize or anything else, we need to be users. I’d encourage you to sign up for Anchor first, start listening, engaging and creating content and then think about how you might apply it to ministry. We have to think about the end user, and if we don’t actually use the service…our marketing is going to appear false and disingenuous. Folks will smell that out quick.  And Anchor is all about the social side of it. Trust me, it’s like an all-day audio party.

So we will now get onto why you clicked this link in the first place.

Anchor and Ministry

Here are the potential use cases I see for Anchor. You need to approach it not from the perspective of a Facebook page. Think about it like an Instagram story that can be shared and publically interacted with. Jumping into any of these 4 will be for a great ministry design using Anchor.

Daily Reflections.
My channel is called Rev. Chad’s Real Life. I talk about ministry some, but I also talk about drinking beer in my neighbor’s driveway, ranting about bad traffic, and what the difference is between a good day and a bad day. I try to create at least 1, if not more, daily reflections on life.

If you’ve ever lived in an area where a church has a 2-minute radio spot, this is the 21st-century version. And folks listen and engage pretty well. I think most of them aren’t Christian and I’m the only pastor they have ever had a relationship with. So I work from that angle and try to be approachable.

Daily Devotion.
You can get a lot of devotional talk done in the 5 minutes (more if you upload external audio, it just breaks them into 5-minute chunks). It isn’t odd for me to pop on in the morning and connect the various pieces of scripture I read together that morning. My church has created 5-minute devotions on our normal podcast feed before, and we would get around 4x the downloads we would normally get in a week.

I could write several more blog posts about what this 5-minute devotion could do, especially in regard to continuing sermon content.

Leadership Notes
Think about how you might use Anchor to share information, tell stories and cast vision for your leadership. All from your cell phone. This is a delivery strategy that could make fantastic use of the iTunes/Podcast feature Anchor offers. As long as your leadership subscribes to the feed, they get the content. And they don’t even have to use the app!

Break Sermons Apart
If you have ever wanted to create a behind the sermon/after the sermon feature, this would be easy. Again, this could be shared via the podcast or with anyone who uses the app. Plus, the embed feature on social media sites makes it easy to get it out to folks who choose not to download an app or subscribe to an RSS feed.

Tell Stories of Church Life
If you are willing to do a little audio production, you could create killer 5-minute mini-docs about your church. Think NPR or American Public Media. This is really taking advantage of the highly social and 24-hour content cycle of Anchor.

So go be social. Engage with folks, create amazing content and dream about how you can use the audio revolution in your ministry content.

Previous Posts About Anchor

Keeping Up With Content Creation

Experimenting with Anchor