As stated previously, the mission of our church library is to provide Christian-based media to help enrich the faith life of Jesus Christ’s followers, no matter where they are in their faith journey, even if it has yet to begin. We have been blessed to receive the donations and funds enabling us to build a collection of books, magazines, along with audio and video media for our patrons to borrow. In addition to the media contained by the physical walls of our library, we also think it is important to promote Christian-based Internet resources as yet another source of information to help draw us closer to Jesus during our daily walk.
I was recently faced with the need to take a 15-hour road trip by myself. In preparing for this trip I was wondering what I would be listening to during my time in the car. I wasn’t in the mood for music CDs or radio, so I thought an audio book or two, or perhaps an audio bible would be in order. Then I remembered an Internet resource from which I could make my own audio CD containing church sermons. That seemed like great way to spend my listening time during the next couple of days in the car.
Our church provides a ministry called WOW. WOW stands for Worship Outreach to the World. This ministry provides MP3 audio files of the readings and sermon for each worship service over the last several years. Additionally there are MP3 files of special lectures and classes that have been held at the church. By browsing to the WOW web site, one can find hyperlinks for directly listening to the MP3 files, or by right-clicking on the link, downloading the MP3 to one’s local computer. Once downloaded, the MP3 files can be burned to CD for listening with an MP3-compatible CD player.
Fortunately my vehicle is equipped with an MP3-compatible CD player so I created a folder on my computer into which I downloaded all of the recorded services for 2007 and 2008. Each MP3 file contains the lectionary readings and the sermon for a specific worship service. At St. John, we have four services each Sunday, two are held using a traditional Lutheran worship service format, and the other two using a contemporary format. So for each Sunday listing on the WOW web site, there is one MP3 for the traditional service, and one for the contemporary service since the two traditional services on a given Sunday will possess the same content, they are just held at different times of the day to provide folks with attendence options. The same holds true for the contemporary service.
An individual worship service MP3 contains approximately 20 to 25 minutes for the readings and the sermon and is about 5 megabytes (MB) in size. On a regular audio CD, 20 to 25 minutes of audio would consume about 250 MB of disk space, but MP3 is an audio format that allows varying degrees of compressibility to standard audio files. Wikipedia provides a detailed description of MP3 technology if you would like to read more about it. Because the worship service content is spoken word, the WOW MP3 files are created using a bit rate that provides a highly compressed audio file with adequate sound quality. Considering that a standard CD can hold 700 MB of data, we could theoretically fit 140 worship services on one CD. At an average of 20 minutes per service, that would be three services per hour. That equates to a little over 46 hours of worship services on one CD. So far in 2008, there had been 41 worship services posted to the WOW web site, so those alone would be about right to cover my upcoming trip.
Because we have two worship formats each Sunday, I will generally miss the sermon from the worship service format that I do not attend. That is unfortunate because our church is blessed to have pastors that provide thought-provoking, faith-enriching sermons each and every service. But thanks to the WOW ministry, it is now possible to listen to the sermons from the worship services that we are unable to attend.
Armed with my WOW CD, I embarked on my road trip. Listening to the worship services made the miles fly by. Services that I had attended in person were joyfully relived. Services that I had missed were listened to with fascination. Our pastors do an amazing job in their sermons of taking the lectionary readings from a given Sunday and provding many insights into the meanings of His Word and how they can apply to our lives and strengthen our walk in faith. The Holy Spirit is truly at work through the readings and the accompanying sermon in each and every one of the worship services.
I would highly recommend this Christian-based media to anyone with an MP3-compatible CD player and the time to listen. So far I have only listened to the 2008 worship services. There are still all of the services from 2006 and 2007, not to mention all of the special lectures and classes from the past couple of years to listen to. I believe that my solo road trip listening needs are well covered for some time to come.
Because of the positive experience that I had with the WOW MP3s on my recent road trip, I have found it very enjoyable and enriching to listen to the worship services even during my local drives around town. Of course this is not the only way to enjoy the content of the WOW files. The versatility of having worship services in a portable audio file allows one to listen to His Word wherever we are, both at home and on the go.
One final note: I ran into one minor techinical glitch in making the CD containing WOW MP3 files. Some MP3-compatible CD players, which happens to include mine, will not play MP3 files that use the sample rate contained by most of files produced by the WOW ministry, which is usually 16,000 Hz. So if you burn the WOW MP3 files to a CD and have difficulty with them on your CD player, please refer to this online article for an explanation of the problem and the associated fix. This article describes a fix for strange sound quality in MP3 files, but I was able to successfully apply the advice provided by this article to work around the issue of my MP3 files not playing at all.
Tags: WOW
