So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.Romans 10:17, KJV
Nearly every church I've worked with has the same folder. It lives on the computer in the sound booth, or on a thumb drive in the sound man's shirt pocket, or in a Dropbox somebody's nephew set up. Inside are Sundays: Sunday AM 3-8.mp3, SundayPM_0315.mp3, Wed night (good one).mp3. Years of preaching, recorded faithfully every week by someone who never missed, and heard by almost no one after the service ended. When the church does put a sermon online it usually goes on Facebook or YouTube, where it sits between a car ad and whatever the algorithm thinks your members should watch next.
This entry is about a better home for that folder: a little radio station on your own website that plays your own preaching, from your own files, on your own domain. FaithKit ships one on its homepage, but the idea doesn't need FaithKit — a church can run one from a folder and an ordinary web host. Here's how it works, start to finish, in plain words.
Who this is for.
The person who keeps the recordings, and the person who keeps the website — often not the same person, and often neither of them thinks of the sermons as "content." They're not. They're the preaching of the Word, and the only people currently benefiting from the archive are the ones who were already in the room. A station changes who can hear it: the widow who can't drive at night anymore, the man on second shift, the family two towns over deciding whether to visit, the missionary you support who wants to hear his home church. None of them will dig through a folder. All of them will press one button on a home page.
What a station is — and what it isn't.
It's not a livestream. A livestream is a camera and a hope that the internet holds up at 10:30. A station is simpler and more useful: a player on the home page that starts playing your recorded preaching the moment someone presses it, and keeps going. When one clip ends the next one starts — a sermon from March, then a special from Easter, then Wednesday's study — the way a radio station never goes silent. Nobody has to choose from a list. Nobody has to know what they're looking for. They press play and the church is in the room with them.
Three things make it a station rather than a "sermons page": the clips are short enough to sit through (a 45-minute sermon is one clip; a 2-hour service recording is not), they're all at the same volume (so the congregational singing doesn't blow out the speaker before the pastor comes in a whisper), and they're tagged, so the player knows a sermon from a song and can skip the announcements about the fellowship meal. That's the whole of it. The rest of this entry is about producing clips that meet those three tests.
From one recording to a station's worth of clips.
The sound booth gives you one long file per service. The player wants many short, leveled, labeled ones. Getting from one to the other is five steps, and FaithKit's slicer does them automatically when you upload a recording — but it helps to know what's happening, because you may end up doing some of it by hand.
ffmpeg and Python 3 on the host — most Linux hosting has them or can add them). If your host can't, steps 2–4 run just as well on a laptop, and you upload the finished clips.A word on Step 4, because it's the one people skip and the one listeners notice. Recordings from a sound board vary wildly week to week — the volunteer nudged a fader, the pastor moved off the mic, the piano was closer. Leveling (the technical word is normalizing, to a broadcast loudness standard) brings every clip to the same felt volume so a listener sets it once and leaves it. Without it, a station is a thing people turn off.
Doing it by hand, on a laptop.
Some church hosting — the $4-a-month kind, or a plan someone set up in 2014 — can't run the slicer. That doesn't cost you the station; it costs you about twenty minutes a week at a kitchen table. Here's the hand version of steps 2 through 4, using free tools that run on any Windows or Mac laptop.
The laptop version — once per service
- Open the recording in a free audio editor (Audacity is the usual one; it's free, open-source, and runs on anything). You'll see the whole service as a waveform — the tall, even blocks are singing; the ragged, spiky stretch is the preaching.
- Find the sermon. Click just before the pastor's first words, drag to just after the closing prayer, and export that selection as its own MP3. If the church does a special or a testimony you want to keep, do the same for it.
- Level it. Every editor has a "normalize" or "loudness normalization" command. Run it on each exported clip with the same setting every week (FaithKit's own tools aim for −16 LUFS; if your editor asks, use that). Same setting, every week, is the whole trick.
- Export as MP3 at a modest quality — 96 or 128 kbps is plenty for speech and keeps a 45-minute sermon around 30–40 MB, small enough to play on a phone in a parking lot.
- Name it and upload it to the clips folder on the site (naming is the next section). FaithKit's admin has an upload page for exactly this; on another site it's whatever file manager the host gives you.
Twenty minutes, and it gets faster. If the person who records the service is willing, this becomes part of the same job: record, export the sermon, level, upload, done before Sunday dinner.
What to cut before it goes on the air.
A recording made for the church's own archive contains things that shouldn't leave the building. Go through this list once and it becomes habit. It's short, and every item on it has burned some church somewhere.
One more, which isn't a cut but a courtesy: ask the pastor before his preaching goes public. Most are glad. A few have things they'd rather say only to the church. Either way it's his voice and his call, and asking once makes the whole project his instead of the sound man's.
Naming the files so the station can read them.
The player can only show what the file tells it. Sunday AM (good one).mp3 tells it nothing. A consistent name, plus the built-in tags every MP3 carries, means the station can show a title, a date, and who preached — and means the next volunteer can find anything in the folder without opening it.
One naming rule, kept forever
- Filename: date first, in year-month-day order, then service, then a short title.
2026-03-08-am-the-god-of-second-chances.mp3. Date-first means the folder sorts itself; lowercase and hyphens mean it works on every server and in every link. - Tags inside the file: every MP3 has fields for Title, Artist, Album and Year (called ID3 tags). Put the sermon title in Title, the preacher's name in Artist, the church's name in Album, and the date in Year. Any audio editor can set these; FaithKit's slicer writes them for you.
- The text, if you have it: "Romans 8:28–39." Put it at the end of the title or in the Comment tag. Strangers search for the passage more than the sermon title.
- One folder, flat. Don't nest by year. A single clips folder, sorted by the date-first name, is easier for the player, for backups, and for the person who inherits it.
FaithKit keeps the finished clips in media/clips/ and the raw recordings in media/audio/, as plain files. That's deliberate: if you ever leave FaithKit, you copy two folders and you have your whole archive, tagged and named, ready for whatever comes next. It's the same principle as No. 01 — the church's things live in the church's files.
Why not just put it on YouTube?
You can, and many churches should keep doing so — it's where some people will find you. But understand what the arrangement is. On a platform, the preaching plays inside someone else's page, next to ads you didn't choose and recommendations you'd never make, to an audience you can't see and don't own. Every listener is logged; the platform decides who's shown your sermon and who isn't; and the whole archive lives at the pleasure of a terms-of-service you've never read. It is not rare for a church's video to be muted or pulled over a copyright claim on a hymn, with no one to call about it.
A station on your own site is the other arrangement. The files are in your folder. The player is on your page, with nothing else on it. Nobody is logged — the site doesn't call anyone when a listener presses play. And if you change hosts, or builders, or platforms, the station comes with you because it was never anywhere but with you. Post the link on Facebook, by all means. Just let the link go to your house.
The Monday routine.
The station stays alive on one habit: every service recording gets processed within the week. Print this and tape it in the sound booth. Whoever records the service owns the list; it's ten minutes if the host runs the slicer and twenty if it's done on a laptop.
Every service — before the next one
- Copy the recording off the recorder or board to the computer. Name it date-first right now, before anything else.
- Slice — upload it to the site and let the slicer run, or open it in the editor and export the sermon (and any special) by hand.
- Cut — confirm the prayer requests and announcements are not in any public clip. Listen to the first and last thirty seconds of each clip.
- Level — same normalize setting as every other week.
- Tag — title, preacher, church, date; the passage if you have it.
- Check — open the home page on a phone, press play, hear the new clip come up. Then it's done.
- Back up — once a month, copy the clips folder to the drive in the desk drawer.
The station is built into the home page; the slicer is built into the admin.
Upload a service recording from the FaithKit admin and the slicer finds the sections, splits them, levels them, tags them, and drops the sermon into the homepage player — steps 2 through 5 without a laptop. It needs ffmpeg and Python 3 on the host; where a host lacks them, do the laptop version and upload the clips, and the player works exactly the same. The files stay in plain folders you own. The sample church's station is playing right now — press it. (The sample is a sample; nothing on it is a real congregation.)