From Church Meeting to Mobile App — How we optimize the sermons for personal pursuing

I was born in 1990. So I can say I have the privilege to experience the first generation of listening to church messages. There were countless moments and inspiration I have got from them and I can say it was really important to bring my relationship with God closer.

The first revolution was in how the audio were preserved. In year 2000, we began to digitize our video production effort and post-production process. We began to favor digital over physical format to increase the longevity of them.

The second revolution came when we began to distribute the digital files over the internet. Especially with our church’s direction to plant churches around the world, it became a necessity to make these messages more readily available.

The third revolution, which is the mobile revolution is the one we are currently preparing for to take on. Traditionally, we could only access the internet from our computer, but with last 10 years technological advancement and the proliferation of hand-held devices, not only do we expect to consume media from our phone, we also have the opportunity to consume richer media content such as videos and receive notification when there are new content.

Unfortunately, we currently lack such digital experiences, and we can observe many organic efforts around the world trying to bridge the gap of church members digital habit with the sermon message content that have been helping us since the beginning of the church movement.

How come the church didn’t just build an app, you may ask.

Not only because app development is a very expensive process, it also requires a good digital foundation from within the organization. Thankfully, in the past two years, we have gradually prepared for it and now we are ready to build an app. Here’s a short list of requirement that we have fulfilled in the last two years.

• Digitizing messages from physical to digital.
• Designing a fast, high availability and secure media storage network
• Creating a workflow convenient for content creator to pass assets upstream for post-processing
• A reliable server and database to handle mobile request, with an Application Program Interface (API)
• Experience in native development and a contingency plan.

We are currently in active development of our sermon app, and we hope to beta test in this year summer.

As always, please pray for the church’s IO team in all of our digital and online promotion ministry.