Churches around the world are currently adapting to how they’re offering services to members due to COVID-19. Many have naturally shifted to online live streaming or share digital recordings of sermons. This has proven to be successful for many, with online attendance in some cases raising about 8% higher than in-person attendance pre-pandemic. 

As churches continue to optimize the virtual church experience for congregations, the need for accessible content is becoming increasingly evident. Sermon transcripts provide both members and pastors with a multitude of benefits.

In this post, we detail how to get those transcripts and why you should prioritize them in your faith-based organization. 

What Are Sermon Transcripts? 

Churches can record videos of their sermons. This can include recordings of live streams, or recordings they’ve filmed to upload at a later time. These recordings are sent to a transcription agency that will, in turn, provide written, text-based transcripts. These are sermon transcripts. 

You can upload sermon transcripts online alongside or instead of the church recording, giving your followers more ways to interact with your sermons overall. 

How Sermon Transcripts Help Churches Help More People 

Church sermons are created weekly to teach and spiritually guide members. 

Sermon transcripts help pastors do this in many ways, including:

• Improving accessibility, making it possible for attendees who are deaf or hard of hearing to read the sermon.
• Broadening your sermon’s reach, as part of a smart church marketing strategy, because more attendees are able to participate fully regardless of disabilities. Plus, it’s easier for more people to share.
• Offering attendees the option to save time, especially since reading a sermon is typically much faster than listening to it or watching it on video.
• Increasing search friendliness, as the rich keywords found in sermon transcripts are text-based. Search engines can track these keywords as a result. This could help your sermon reach those who are looking for it, giving your site and online presence more traction through improved SEO.
• Minimizing language barriers, allowing non-native speakers to copy the transcript into a translation tool so they’re able to read it in their own language.
• Opening the door for repurposing, including content marketing, social media posts, website pages, and more. Written content is often easier to repurpose quickly than audio or video. 

How to Choose the Best Sermon Transcription Service 

Fortunately, getting a transcript of your church sermon recordings (both from video and audio files) is exceptionally easy, as long as you’re capturing video or audio recordings that have clear sound. You simply need to find a reliable, quality transcription service.

Choosing the right service, however, can be difficult, especially with so many competitors out there.

Here are a few things that you’ll want to look for when considering sermon transcription for pastors in your church:

• Quick turnaround times. When creating transcripts for your church’s sermons, it only makes sense that you’d want them as quickly as possible so that your members can access them fast, too. Watch for agencies that charge high rates for rush fees; these are unnecessary, and especially with many churches struggling financially right now, it’s the last thing that you need.
  Rev, for example, offers the following turnaround times based on the length of the recording:
• Guaranteed accuracy. When sharing your faith and guiding congregation members, the last thing you want to worry about is having transcripts riddled with mistakes. You’ll want to find a service provider that only uses humans instead of speech-to-text automated tools. You also want to find a high accuracy guarantee. At Rev, we ensure you’ll receive 99% accuracy or better on every transcript.
• No hidden fees. The last thing you want is to submit a file for sermon transcription, expecting one price and end up paying more without knowing why. Many churches are on tight budgets, and the last thing you want is to get hit with unexpected fees.

How to Order Sermon Transcription Through Rev 

Ready to convert your sermons into transcripts through Rev? 

First, simply upload the file recording. Choose add-ons like timestamping or whether you want the transcripts verbatim, including filler words like “um.” 

After that, Rev will automatically calculate the price based on the length of the file, and you can checkout. You’ll receive an accurate, quality transcript before you know it. 

Rev can help you offer sermon transcripts to your church’s followers.

Transcribe Your Sermons