(Posted by Cameron)
If you’ve come along to Campus Church for a while, you’ve probably worked out that we think the Bible is a pretty important book. One of the ways that shows itself is that we like to talk about it a lot – in fact, most of what we do revolves around explaining the Bible and its message to people in some way or another. It may be most obvious in our 30+ minute talks that would be traditionally referred to as sermons, but it’s also there in our short “feature” slots and in our songs (although of course, songs aren’t really “talking”).
If you’ve ever been to our website before (or you have just been looking around it), you may have noticed that we have a section where you can download recordings of lot of our talks. Up until today we’ve entitled that section “Sermons”, because, well that was the only type of talk we put up there. But there were two problems: first, that when most people hear the word “sermon” they think of a lengthy and maybe angry speech of disapproval; and second, that we had a lot more audio than just those ‘sermons’ that we could put up. So, from today we’ve banished the word “sermon”, and everything is now just known as a talk. With a re-titled section, that has meant we’ve been able to put up a whole lot more material – all of the long talks, most of the short talks, and even a couple of special-event talks. All up it’s just under 34 hours’ worth at the moment. Not too bad for a church that’s only been going for 46 weeks is it?
But the changes haven’t just been to the name and to the content. We’ve tried to make it look nicer and be more useful. You can now email your friends a link to a talk you like directly from our site, and you can make a comment on a talk in much the same way as you could do on the contact cards we have attached to our Sunday-night handouts. And you can do things like filter talks by book, by series, by date, or even by speaker. Our facebook app has duly been updated, and a few bugs fixed. There are lots of things we’d still love to do, but we have more ideas than we have time to do them.
So, give it a whirl, and tell us what you think. We hope it’s an improvement!
Cameron – for the web team