One of the most important uses for technology in church is to increase accessibility. And one of the projects I’ve been slowly working on is trying to figure out the best way to make and distribute audio recordings of worship services, for members of our congregation who can’t make it to church for whatever reason.

In terms of distributing audio recordings of worship services, right now the best solution here in our church is probably putting the audio recordings onto CDs. Yes, I would prefer to distribute audio recordings via our Web site, but many of the people who would like to get audio recordings of worship services either don’t know how to use a computer to download audio files, don’t own a computer, or don’t have high-speed internet access (New Bedford is not a wealthy community, and some of our members cannot afford computers or high-speed internet access). But CD players are so cheap now, we think we can count on everyone owning a CD player.

In terms of making the audio recordings during the worship service, up until this week we have been stymied. We need to be able to process the audio recordings (cleaning up sound through compression, and deleting certain elements of the recording such as personal testimonies or requests for prayers during the worship service), and the easiest way to do that is using a computer and audio processing software (we use GarageBand on my Mac). I have been reluctant to record onto CDs because of their time limitations (about 75 minutes of recording time, not really enough to squeeze in prelude, worship service, and postlude). Fortunately, our music director, Randy Fayan, has a day job working for Avid, a company which makes digital media creation tools.

Randy borrowed a nice little digital audio recorder — it’s about the size of a deck of playing cards — which will record about 17 hours of monoaural audio in mp3 format (at 128kHz), onto its 1 gig flash memory. Yesterday we put the digital audio recorder on the pulpit and recorded the worship service, and then downloaded it onto my computer. It was incredibly easy. The sound quality was excellent, and the recorder picked up nearly all of the worship service with pretty good quality.

We still have a few problems to solve. We like to plug the digital audio recorder into the amplifier that provides sound to persons with hearing difficulties, but if we do that we will have to set up another microphone to pick up the piano. Then there’s the issue of processing the audio file. I spent yesterday afternoon editing the audio file we made and trying different compression rates, but I can’t spend four hours every week doing that and I’m going to have to learn how to process the file in less than an hour. Then we have to decide if we want to make the audio file available via our Web site, which may mean paying for more bandwidth — which we really can’t afford, and which won’t help us with our main goal of making worship services available to shut-ins.

Right now, it’s still a work in progress. But it does feel like we’re making some real progress.