Two Sermon Libraries Added This Week
June 2, 2012
This week we added two new sermon libraries to our Recommended Resources page.
The first is a Discipleship Library that has been compiled by the Navigators. It contains a terrific assortment of messages preached over the last 60 years by many of the greatest Bible teachers. As they point out,
Messages presented by many outstanding Christian speakers during the last 60 years have often been recorded and shared on reel-to-reel, cassette and video tape thereby multiplying ministry to thousands of people who might not otherwise have had an opportunity to hear them.
I can remember going to a Bible conference in the 1960s and seeing long rows of reel-to-reel tape recorders lined up side by side so those attending could record the sermons. In the 1970s cassette tapes took over. About 10 years ago everyone transitioned to CDs. Today we live in a digital world where you simply download a file and play it on your iPod, iPad, or on your smartphone.
The folks at the Discipleship Library intend to capture the vast treasury of sermons that has been gathering dust as old reel-to-reel recordings that almost no one can play nowadays. Ditto for the later cassette recordings.
I hope that Bible conferences across America will begin to digitize their archives and make those files available so that we can all hear messages preached 30, 40, and even 50 years ago.
We also added a link to the media library of Metropolitan Baptist Church in Oklahoma City where they have compiled a digital archive of sermons going all the way back to 1964. The library is organized by text, preacher, series and date. It certainly took someone (or some group of people) hundreds of hours to convert those sermons to digital format and then upload them and create the index. Kudos to whoever had that vision.
Here’s an idea for larger churches. Don’t throw out those old sermon tapes. Digitize them and put the sermons online. If the sermons were worth listening to back in 1974, we’ll probably still benefit from them in 2012.
Check out these two resources and listen to some great preaching from the past.