It's my great pleasure and privilege
to have with me here today at PRTS, Stephen Lee, the founder
and president of sermonaudio.com. Sermonaudio.com is probably the
world's largest and most popular sermon website. Stephen, tell
us, how did Sermon Audio begin? Sermonaudio.com began to fill a need that we had in
our own small local church. The desire of my heart was to
try to get our ministers preaching to many more people. I was sitting
there one day on a Sunday, and the church was seemingly empty,
and the people that were there didn't seem very interested,
and the preacher was just really preaching and going at it. And
I felt discouraged because I just felt like this was such a blessing
to me. I wanted so many more people
to hear what he was saying. So I wanted to create a site
where churches like ours, small churches that couldn't afford
a lot of advertising or outreach, could put a sermon on there and
thousands of people would be able to hear it. So that's how
it started. Well, yes, that's how it started,
but it's grown a lot bigger. What's your mission now, Stephen?
The mission of Sermon Audio is really to get great Bible preaching
out to as many different people as we possibly can, as economically
as we can. We like to partner with doctrinally
solid churches and what we consider conservative churches to get
great preaching out to the four corners of the world. And we've
achieved something of that mission, but there's just so much more
ground to cover, and we're just taking it a day at a time. In
connection with that, we're also very desirous to promote and
give as much exposure to the local church as much as possible. We believe very strongly, I'm
very passionate about this, I believe that the local church is the
God-ordained institution. And whatever we
can do to help promote the local church, to help find good local
churches, to strengthen that local church body, I believe
that that is what we need to be doing in these days. Sure,
Stephen, yeah, I mean the local church is the center of everything,
isn't it? Where are you in terms of statistics,
how many sermons are online, how often are they listened to
and things like that? Statistically, we have currently the largest number
of sermons anywhere online that we're aware of. We have 250,000 MP3 sermons that are completely
searchable by Bible reference, by topic, by speaker, by church,
by language, keyword, you name it, you can find it. So we currently
have the largest collection of MP3 sermons on the internet,
completely free of charge. We have a very active listening
audience on the site. There are over a million sermons
that are downloaded each month. And we're very thankful for that.
People are obviously starving for great preaching. And I know
myself, I listen to many, many sermons a week. And people write
in telling us that they listen to sermons on their way back
and forth to work. And so people are starting to
listen to great preaching and sermons even as a substitute
for music. Good.
Interview with Steven Lee, President of SermonAudio.com (1)