Power of Audio on Your Website

This week we had an amazing visit from a pastor in a small town.  As many of you know my husband pastors a church in Puebla, Mexico.  About three years ago he began to add downloadable audio preachings to the church website, http://www.iglesiacristianabautista.com.  Little did we fully understand the impact that one site was going to have on the lives of hundreds of people. If you have any type of informational website and don’t have audio, read the following summary of how one simple addition to your website can have a tremendous effect.

A pastor had been pastoring for over 20 years in a small town in Mexico and had 30 people attending his church.  The small town he pastors in does not have internet access or most of today’s modern conveniences.  About three years ago while visiting another town and searching the internet for some information, he stumbled upon the website www.iglesiacristianabautista.com.  He found that the website contained many preachings about soulwinning, evangelism, and how to build your church.  He began to download the preachings to his MP3 player and take them back to his church so that the rest of the church congregation could listen to the preachings.  The church members had a great desire to reach others for Christ but did not know exactly how to do it.  After listening to the preachings about soulwinning, the church members and teens of the church began to go out and reach people in their community.  Every time the pastor visited the larger town he downloaded more preachings and brought them back to his church so they could continue to listen to them.  They finally heard about a soulwinning conference that was going to be held in Pastor Kevin Wynne’s church in Mexico City.  The pastor attended the conference and met a pastor and friend of ours, Pastor Victor Castillo in Texcoco, Mexico.

Fast forward three years to this week.  Pastor Victor Castillo had invited the pastor from the small town to come to preach to his church in Texcoco.   As they were driving through Puebla, the pastor began to explain to Pastor Victor Castillo how his church had grown from 30 people to an astounding 120 in the last few years due to the impact of listening to the preachings from a pastor named Pastor Arturo Munoz and asked him if he knew him!  As we are good friends he called us up and a few hours later they had lunch in a local restaurant where my husband, Pastor Arturo Munoz heard this amazing story.  The pastor explained that each month he now travels to the large town close to his to download the preachings and takes them back to his church so that they can listen.  He said that all the teens in his church know my husband by name and would be very excited to be able to now see a picture of him and know that their pastor met him in person.  He also asked if my husband could please upload some new preachings as they had already listened to all of the preachings from November!  How exciting is that!

As I heard this amazing story I remembered another amazing story about a church in the country of Columbia.  While we were visiting churches for four months in 2008, we ran into some missionaries that are pastoring in Columbia.  They said that everyone in their church know us as each Sunday after their services, they log in to the site www.iglesiacristianabautista.com and watch our live streaming preaching services!  They also subscribe in readers and download the preachings to listen to throughout the week.

What a tremendous blessing it is to know that the power of God’s word is being spread throughout the world through our efforts of learning and using multimedia on the internet.  If you are pastoring a church or running a business and still don’t have audio on your website, now is the time to get started!