How Pastors Can Create Better Video Content | David Murrow

Well, David, welcome to the show. So glad to meet you and glad to have you on the podcast. How are you doing today?

Well, I am great and I’m really excited to be talking to you today about online preaching.

Yeah. Yeah. So tell us where you’re talking to us from. Where are you right now?

Beautiful Anchorage, Alaska, where it’s a summer day, so it’s nothing but wonderful here in the summer.

Love that. Love that.

This would be a first for us, right? I don’t think we’ve ever had any guests from Alaska.

Yeah, 18 hours of sunlight today.

Okay. All right. So all our listeners, you can deal with that. Well, so glad to have you, I’m really excited about this conversation. I’m passionate about this conversation. But tell our listeners a little bit about your story and kind of your ministry background and what you’ve been up to.

Well, I’m probably the least likely person on earth to be teaching pastors how to be better online communicators. I’m not a pastor myself, not a professor or a theologian, I don’t speak any Greek or Hebrew, and I’ve never been to seminary. I’m a television producer by trade, and a few years ago I noticed, I did a little demographic survey of my church, and I realized there were way more women than men involved. So I wrote a book called Why Men Hate Going to Church. And then that book kind of rocketed me into the upper tier of Christian authors, and I’ve been writing ever since. But in the last few years, especially in the wake of the pandemic, I have realized that many pastors are failing to reach their online audiences. They’re working very hard to post their sermons online, and they did heroic work during the pandemic to get online, but they are still using the same techniques that they always used when they had the attention monopoly when they had people essentially zip-tied to their chairs and couldn’t move. And so they’re doing the same slow intros, the same 40-45-minute monologue talks, no visuals. And, you know, I’m sitting there, I’m 38 years in the television business, and so I know, you know, this works fine in the room, kind of, but this is not going to work in the screen world. You know, you no longer have an attention monopoly, pastor, you are now a part of the attention economy and you have to compete for attention. Pastors have never had to do this and they’re ill-equipped to do so. So my job is to go in and help pastors make their sermons more watchable, memorable, and shareable.

Wow. Okay, holy, there’s a lot to unpack here right now. So this is what I’m passionate about, because you are so right, even if some churches will say we wish it was like the old days right before COVID. I’m going, wait a minute, you want to go back to the normal person attending 1.5 times a month? You call that success, you know? And so you got them online to start watching every week because that’s what they would do because it was convenient. So talk to me about like, what does that look like? I mean, you just made a really big statement about pastors where they’re just kind of in uncharted territory, waters they never swam, and they’ve got to produce something that’s more TV-like that grabs your attenti