How Shall They Hear? Preaching to the Nations with SermonAudio.com
June 21, 2024
Host: Dr. Isaac Crockett
Co-host: Hon. Sam Rohrer
Guest: Steven Lee
Note: This transcript is taken from a Stand in the Gap Today program originally aired on June 21, 2024. To listen to the podcast, click HERE.
Disclaimer: While reasonable efforts have been made to provide an accurate transcription, the following is a representation of a mechanical transcription and as such, may not be a word for word transcript. Please listen to the audio version for any questions concerning this dialogue.
Isaac Crockett: Well, hello and welcome. I’m Pastor Isaac Crockett and joining me today is my co-host, Sam Rohrer, the regular host of this program and the president of the American Pastors Network. And we’re just glad to have you on this Friday edition of Our Stand in the Gap Today. In Mark 16, Jesus told his followers to go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. Paul tells us in Romans 10 14 how important preaching is by asking us some questions. He says, how then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed, and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher? Well, our special guest today is Steven Lee, the founder of sermon audio.com. Steven, thanks so much for taking time to be with us on this program today.
Steven Lee: Oh, thank you. It’s a great pleasure.
Isaac Crockett: Well, and we’re excited, Sam and I both because both of us for many years have used your ministry to put ourselves under good preaching, to hear good godly doctrine being preached through the word of God through the ministry there at Sermon Audio. And we’re excited about what you’ve been doing and what is going on right now and the plans, Lord willing for the future. But Stephen, before we go any further, Sam and I are both very familiar with your ministry and very likely many of our listeners are. But for somebody who is maybe new to hearing about sermon audio, could you just explain what sermon audio.com, what it is, what kind of platform you were talking about, and maybe a little bit of who could benefit from it?
Steven Lee: Sure. Basically sermon audio.com. You can think of it as a library. It is a library. It’s actually the largest library presently of preaching both in the audio and video format from churches all around the world. And we have over two and a half million sermons in this library. They’re all free, so it’s not behind any kind of paywall and never was and never will be. And we have millions of sermons being listened to every month all around the world. We keep track of where all the sermons are being listened to and it’s quite wonderful, but it’s a library of audio sermons, video sermons, preaching. The churches that have their sermons on sermon audio, they all have to sign off on the articles of faith that we make very clear on the site. So I guess it’s a library of preaching.
Sam Rohrer: And Steven, that’s a fantastic thing. The largest library of sermons in the world. That’s quite a statement. That’s an amazing gold mine in my opinion. That’s what I’ve found. Sermon audio to be, because you can search it. There’s title, I mean, there’s all kinds of hosts of things, but this is one thing, I don’t know, I dunno whether Isaac knows it or not, but could you share how did it begin? Did you originate this? Did lay this in your heart? How did it happen and how did it come about that somebody even thought of making a library for past preached sermons?
Steven Lee: Yeah, sure. This site, yes, I’m the founder of it. We started this site, it’s sermon audio.com. We started at 24 years ago, back in the year 2000. Now we’re talking about a time when the whole idea of listening to anything over the internet was still very, very new, very novel, and not a lot of people knew how to do it. It was something that was just kind of a party trick, Hey, check this out. And it was not easy for people to do. The MP three format that we’re all very familiar with was very new. It had just been announced. And so the dominant format up until then was something called Real Audio. Maybe a lot of people haven’t even heard of that. They’re no longer around, but they were the dominant. But then the MP three format came around, and that was an open source format.
Steven Lee: It was an open format and what that allowed people to do, especially hardware manufacturers, it allowed them to be able to play these MP three files on little portable players without being all tied up with restrictions like licensing costs and things that the real audio folks were kind of clamped down on their licensing. But that’s why the MP three format took off. And early on when we were developing sermon audio, we had to make a decision whether or not we were going to go with the real format, real audio or with the MP three format, which again was just release not a lot of adoption, but I believe that the Lord directed us to make the right decision. And here we are. All the sermons are in the MP three format. It has been widely adopted as the audio format for the internet, but this is 24 years ago.
Steven Lee: This is before streaming audio, streaming video. Of course, the iPhone was not invented. This is before Facebook, and this is even before YouTube. So we go back a little bit and it’s something of a small miracle that we are still around because we consider ourselves primarily a technology company, and tech companies come and go as you know. But this is something of a small miracle that we’re still here and I believe it’s for a purpose. We have a very strong in our mind, and that is that this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world as a witness to all nations. Matthew 24 14.
Isaac Crockett: Wow, Steven, you’re taking us down memory lane and a lot of folks we can remember some of these changes going on. For me, it seems, I guess more in my mind because that was when I was high school and college age, and I think many of us, we kind of get frozen in time, time in our lives. And I remember buying cassette tapes to listen to sermons and they would get worn out. I worked on a farm every morning, six days a week, and I would listen to a lot of sermons on tape. You’d wear it out, you’d hear the same sermon over and over. And so I remember in 2000 as a college student being introduced to sermon audio, being able to download it onto a disc or USB drive eventually and how things have changed and how providential that God would give you all the insight to use the MP three format, which is now just taken for granted.
Isaac Crockett: I remember, I want to say 15 years ago, it was more than that when I was traveling on a Christian drama group, staying in a man’s house in Illinois. He was a farmer, I think third generation farmer, and he had children and grandchildren on the farm, and he was just such a deep theological person. His theology was so deep, his love for God was so strong. And I started talking to him and I found out very soon that a big part of what was helping him was that he was listening in his combine to sermon audio sermons. He would download them into one of those MP three players. This is before the iPhone, and he would listen to them all day, just amazing. And he was introducing me to some books he had for me, but then also eBooks, and we want to talk about that with you some later in this program.
Isaac Crockett: But just it’s amazing how everything from the Gutenberg press with having the printed Bible to even using MP threes for sermon audio, how God can in his providence allow technology to give the written word of God and the spoken and preached word of God to the nations. And that’s what’s happening@sermonaudio.com. We’re excited about what the Lord has done and just under 25 years and what the Lord is going to do when we come back. We want to talk with Stephen Lee, the founder of Sermon Audio about this premier site and asking more questions when we get back from listening to some of our partners on this short break. We’ll be back on Stand in the Gap today.
Welcome back to our Friday edition of Stand in the Gap Today. I’m Isaac Crockett and the Honorable Sam Roar is my co-host and we’re talking with Stephen Lee, the founder of the premier sermon site sermon audio@sermonaudio.com.
Isaac Crockett: And this is a site that both Sam and I have used for many years. I would say that I still listen to it at least weekly if not more. And I remember even using it in some church plants. I was working in, one of the church plants was a Spanish speaking church plant. And then even working in Central America, how helpful it was because it is, as Steven as you mentioned, it’s international and there’s different languages to find sermons and other languages. That helped me in learning to listen to preaching, but it helped me also have resources and trustworthy preachers that I could share their sermons to people I was ministering to in Spanish. And so it’s amazing how God, in 24 years from the year 2000, this tech startup group that as Steven was mentioning, came before Facebook, before YouTube, before the iPhone has come and the Lord has continued to allow it to flourish and to grow, and it’s free of charge to use.
Isaac Crockett: You can listen to these sermons for free, which I know has been very helpful for me too. But Steven, on our program on Standing the Gap today, we talk about biblical worldview every day. It’s this idea that we start with God’s word as authoritative, the inspiration of scripture. It’s a foundational part of our biblical worldview. You sort of mentioned this I think already at the beginning, but can you talk to us about the kind of preaching on sermon audio and just, I mean our group at the American Pastors Network and Stand in the Gap Media, we are blessed to be joined by pastors and churches and Christians from all around the globe, especially here in the United States of America. We have multiple different churches and denominational backgrounds represented, but we all come together and that belief of this biblical worldview of belief in the authority of scripture. And we partner with groups like Answers and Genesis and others who also believe that. And that’s one of the things I enjoy so much about your sermon site is that you have good churches, good preachers on there. So could you maybe talk to us a little bit about the kind of preaching that is on sermon audio, and then could you tell us again, I think you said it was already over two and a half million sermons that are available,
Steven Lee: Right? Two and a half million sermons that are available. They’re all free, most of them in the audio format, many, many of them in the video format. And there’s probably about 5,000 sermons that are added to the site every week. And so it’s just growing. But I think one of the things perhaps that makes us unique is the fact that we consider ourselves a fairly large broadcasting platform with conviction. What I mean is that we’re not just a broadcasting platform, and our goal is just to be big for the sake of being big. We want to be big because we believe that we have to be able to reach more people. And so when you have a library of 10 sermons, I don’t think that’s going to reach the kind of people that a library of two and a half million sermons will reach, because then there will be sermons for every occasion, for every topic, for every verse of the Bible and so on.
Steven Lee: So there is a sense where we have to support an ever broadening size. We were praying like Jabez, that the Lord would enlarge our coasts. There’s nothing wrong with that. We don’t want to shy away from praying for great things, but we do so with conviction. What that means is that we have articles of faith. I mentioned that the first bit here, that the churches that broadcast with us, they have to sign off on these articles of faith, and these are the core essential Bible Christian doctrines. So the virgin birth, the Trinity, the inerrancy, the infallibility of the Word of God and so on. And they’re all there. We don’t hide that. We’re not ashamed of that. And so we’re having to turn churches away all the time. Our site would be a site that has a large number of sermons, but they’re all being gathered from Bible believing churches. And that’s what I think makes us somewhat unique out there,
Sam Rohrer: Steven, anytime, as we can attest to here at American Pastors Network and stand in the Gap, anytime that you lead with a foundation on the authority of scripture, you already put yourself in a different kind of a category, but that’s where the remnant is. That’s where God would have is to direct people. So I really appreciate what you are saying there. Here’s a question I just haven’t followed. What I was thinking about when you were sharing that you’ve got two and a half million sermons, you have people that you already have said, listen from around the world. Here’s the question, I don’t know if you can analyze it or not, but what type of people are accessing these sermons? In other words, are they individuals that just want to learn more self discipleship? Are they pastors listening to other pastors to get research on it?
Sam Rohrer: I mean, when I was listening so much in the past, I was teaching Sunday school class of young couples some years ago. And so there were a lot of subjects that I was dealing with with these young couples. At that point, I thought, I need to go and find out what some other good people have done. And so that’s why I did it. But do you know primarily the profile of the person that is coming and accessing the sermons and why? Because I’m thinking about the average person listening to our audience right now. A lot are pastors, but most are not,
Steven Lee: Right? Well, we don’t have hard data on that because we don’t collect the data on that. We don’t have these forms that pop up and ask for that kind of information. Like I said, everything is free. We don’t even ask for your email address. So you can go ahead and download sermons and listen to your heart’s content without any kind of limitation. So we don’t have the hard data, but we do know just based on very loose metrics, that the age range is anywhere from the twenties to the fifties. That’s a pretty big age range. But we have a lot of young adults, a lot of adults that listen, we don’t know if they’re pastors. A lot of them anecdotally, we know that they are pastors, and of course they use it to feed their own souls because pastors need to listen to preaching too.
Steven Lee: But they use it for either feeding their own souls or just to get some helpful insight as to how others have dealt with the passage. Because you can go to any verse of the Bible book chapter and verse and look up the sermons that were preached on there. This is probably an understated feature of the site because a lot of people use the social sites today, YouTube and Facebook. But the problem with the social sites are a couple of things. Number one, they’re run by organizations that really don’t care for the message of Christianity. Number two, these are ephemeral sites. What that means is that it’s just very transient. Everything is in a feed. It comes and it goes. It’s hard to find content once it’s gone from your feed for a while. And number three, it’s not downloadable content. The purpose of these sites is to keep you on the site.
Steven Lee: So they’re advertiser driven. And so it’s not as if you can download the content and listen to it offline, but because it’s more ephemeral and it’s more feed-based, ours being more library centric, there’s no concept of being able to go to sermons preached by a book chapter and verse on any of these sites. They are not a library based site, and they’re certainly not a sermon based site. And so all these fall factors I think make us a little bit unique. We’ve had a huge headstart in all of this because we go back to 25 years almost, and the Lord has kept us going. And I think that a big part of why the Lord has kept us going is because we really do seek at the heart of what we do to have a kingdom first mentality. We are a business. We’re trying to run it in a way that’s where it’ll sustain for the long term. I think there’s some very practical things that have to be brought into consideration for that sort of thing. We’re not a donation based business, and so we know that we have to be responsible in how we run this, but it is completely free for the people to listen to. And it’s a library of sermons where they can get to it by book, chapter and verse.
Isaac Crockett: That is so helpful. And even just hearing how you’ve thought through it, I know Sam would agree with me that it’s helpful to see that foundational to it. And I have more questions I want to get into with you, but we’re running close to our break. But Sam, as we’re just hearing Steven explain this and looking at how he’s using technology, we’re using technology by being on radio and podcast. What are just some of your thoughts here, just 30 seconds, Sam, about the thoughtful process that’s gone into making this based first and foremost on conviction?
Sam Rohrer: Well, Isaac, as you and I were texting back and forth while we’re doing on this, is that as Steven was talking, I’m saying yes, yes, yes. Because a foundation has laid down like that early on, breaking down the search ability for a book and chapter and verse and speaker, and I’m looking at the site right now. That’s been one of the most practical things. That is foresight. And Isaac, I think for all of us who are involved in communicating the gospel, Jesus Christ, we must think generationally not for the moment. And I think Steven, as yours is talking about the social media of the day, it’s for the moment, it’s transient. It’s not a permanent type of a thing, but what you’ve laid down is, and I just thank the Lord for it.
Isaac Crockett: Amen. Amen. Alright, well, we’re going to take another quick time out to hear from some more of our partners. And when we come back, we want to talk about this. We want to look at how sermon audio is using modern technologies to protect sermons and to make Christian books available to everyone. There’s so many things that are going on there, and some of it is hard to understand because it’s some of this newer technology. Sometimes we get scared when we see newer technology, but at the same time as Christians, we know we need to be light and salt in this world. So we’ll be right back to talk about this on Staying in the Gap.
Well, welcome back to the program and Pastor Isaac Crockett, if you’re just tuning in, I’m here with my co-host, the Honorable Sam Rohr, the president of the American Pastors Network and the regular host of this daily program.
Isaac Crockett: Our guest today is Stephen Lee, the founder of sermon audio.com. We’re learning a lot of information from you, Stephen, about just the foresight that God gave you and the providence and having just all these things coming together at the right time. But then as it’s continued and it’s been based on conviction and based on getting the preaching of God’s word out there, we started by talking about passages from Jesus to Paul talking about the importance of preaching, and that’s what Sermon Audio realizes. But before we go back to Steven with more questions for him, I would like to ask our program producer Tim Schneider, he can give us some updates on some of the things going on right here at the American Pastors Network and stand in the Gap Media.
Speaker 4: Well, yes I can. Thank you for that introduction. Good afternoon to everybody. Hopefully you’re having a great afternoon. Want to let you know about a couple of things happening behind the scenes here at the American Pastors Network. We are on social media. If you do social media, please like us on Facebook or follow us on X formerly Twitter by searching for American Pastors Network and Stand in the Gap radio. We also over on Bit shoot subscribe there by searching for our channel by looking for Stand in the Gap today, and you can find out all the great information that we’re posting as we post it. So please consider looking us up on social media if you are there on social media. We also have two great websites, American Pastors network.net and stand in the gap media.org. You can find lots of great information, archives of shows, lots of things over there.
Speaker 4: Also, one of the things, if you go to American Pastors network.net, we have an e-newsletter. We encourage you to sign up for it so you can find out about all the information that’s happening here at the American Pastors Network. We’ll send you out information that you’ll find useful. We won’t inundate your inbox with spam, but things that you might find useful about the ministry, one of the things that we do is we send out a prayer email every couple of months. So if you get on our E-newsletter, you’ll find out things like that. You’ll also find recaps of radio programs, weekly shows, transcripts, much as of things that we send out through eNewsletter. So if you’re not signed up for our e-newsletter, we encourage you to@americanpastorsnetwork.net. Also, as I was mentioning about prayer, we please encourage you to please pray for this ministry. Nothing happens without prayer as the catalyst for things that happen, and we certainly covet your prayers here. So please pray for us and the things that we’ve got going on. And also, if the Lord has blessed you through this ministry, please consider giving financially. No amount too big, no amount too small is too much, but whatever the Lord to put on your heart, please consider giving. And if that would be the case, then we greatly say thank you in advance. So those are some of the things that got going on behind the scenes, Isaac, but I’ll go ahead and send on back to you.
Isaac Crockett: Alright, thank you very much for that update, Tim. Well, Steven, everywhere we go nowadays, we hear of all sorts of new tech coming out, but especially the hot topic right now is artificial intelligence here at Stand in the Gap Media. We’ve done some programs, radio and tv. We’ve had experts with folks from Answers and Genesis and other places discussing some of the dangers, especially what we might call generative ai, generative artificial intelligence. And yet we also recognize that there are amazing opportunities like even having our radio programs transcriptions made from it or translating into other languages as is needed as our ministry has grown into other countries. It’s definitely needed. But I wanted to give you a chance to talk about your AI, what you call your AI. It’s the audiobook initiative, which I love listening to sermons. I also love reading sermons and then also listening to books. Could you talk to us about what’s going on at sermon audio with AI audiobook initiative and how it is incorporating a lot of this modern technology?
Steven Lee: Sure, I have to do, so obviously we’re just playing on those two letters. AI, since it’s all a rage and we’re calling it audiobook initiative and we are using some AI in that initiative. So AI, artificial intelligence is very big right now and it actually is one of these sort of pivotal moments that we’re living through right at the moment. I think we’re not really going to truly understand just how significant this is until a little bit later. But with every new technology, obviously we all understand that it can be used for good and bad. Every technology, every single one, you just name it, it can all be used for good and bad. But I believe that these are gifts to be used by the church responsibly for the kingdom of God. And here’s how we’re using it, and we’re using it in very sort of limited ways, but there’s four ways in particular.
Steven Lee: Number one, as you’ve already discovered, we’re using it to transcribe sermons and our goal is to transcribe all two and a half million sermons. Now, why AI is important for this is because it does a very good job at transcribing, whereas we’ve had transcriptions in the past. You’ve all seen those closed captions on the TV and you can see it being transcribed, but it’s usually pretty poor. But because of the AI smarts that’s added to it, the transcriptions become very good. In fact, there have been many times because we use human, we have been using human transcribers over the years. Many times where a human transcriber would not be able to transcribe a sermon just because of the audio quality or they just can’t do it. It would take them way too long, but you throw it into a machine and AI transcriber and it’ll do it near perfect, which is a great tool.
Steven Lee: It’s a great help. And so our goal is to be able to use the machines that we have in-House to transcribe all two and a half million sermons. And that’s actually a really big deal, and I don’t want to belabor the points, but it’ll take me to my second use of it, which is to use AI to do much more intelligent searching. So we all know about searching Google style with keywords and you find different keywords and things, but we’re also now introduced to a GPT style searching where you’re just asking questions naturally using natural languages and answers are coming back. And so we want to be able to apply much more intelligent searching to sermons. So you can ask questions, you can ask, what does this particular preacher believe about a specific doctrine or about baptism or about the end times? You can ask it to summarize a sermon in three points.
Steven Lee: You can ask it to give the main points of a sermon, and there’s all kinds of things that come out of that. That’s number two. The third way we’re using AI is in something called the audiobook initiative. Now, this is the thing that we want to talk about here. The audiobook initiative is it’s a little bit of a play on those two letters. As I said, audiobook initiative is ai, and the reason why we’re doing it that way is because we are using AI to generate audio books. And what do I mean? So there’s been a gentleman that we are aware of. His name is Charles Kel. He’s been spending the last, I think 30 years reading in professionally the sermons of Ch Spurgeon, the sermons of Ch Spurgeon. He spent the last 30 years of his life doing that, and he has read in 500 of those sermons, which is an amazing feat actually when you think about it.
Steven Lee: It’s taken him a long time to do that because he has to do it and edit it and he does a good job, but he’s an older man now and he’s no longer able to do this. So we asked him if we could, and I know this is going to sound a little bit odd, but if we could clone his voice, if we can use his voice and using the AI tools that are out there now, we are able to finish the job because Spurgeon actually has preached over 3,500 sermons that have been recorded. And so now using his own voice, we have now been able to read in all 3,500 sermons, not in 30 years, but in six months. And it sounds just like our friend Charles Kels. And this is one of the ways that we’re using ai. It’s through this cloning ability.
Steven Lee: And the way we see it is it’s an acceleration tool. It’s an acceleration tool. They had scribes back in the old days and they can copy the scriptures and they did a great job, but when the printing press came along, sure, maybe it wasn’t as great as a human scribe, but it did the work a lot faster and it got the word out there a lot faster. This is exactly the same thing. We’re not trying to replace people. People will never be replaced, but it’s an accelerator tool and it gets the job done a lot faster. But the fourth way that we’re using AI is through what we call global sermons. And this is something that we’re developing as we speak, but it will take any sermon preached in English and allow us to have it essentially preached in any target language, multiple languages. It’s your Acts two moment. Again, we do hear the wonderful works of God in our own language. So you can imagine a preacher who’s a faithful man of God and he’s preaching and he has his sermon out there and at the click of a button with just a little bit of expense, he’s able to now have that sermon heard in audio in let’s say two dozen languages almost immediately. And we want to do this not only for sermons, but we want to do it for the audio books themselves. So that’s how we’re using AI.
Isaac Crockett: That is incredible. And again, everything is going back to your belief in scripture, your convictions, the articles of faith, and then building out how can we seek first the kingdom of God? How can we use the technologies? The Bible was based on the technologies that the people had in those days, the languages that were the most useful. The written part of it describes Gutenberg press. It was the Bible that was used to print that and then scriptural things. And so trying to harness technology for the kingdom rather than just for the sake of this world, I just find it fascinating. I find it amazing. And when we come back, I actually want to talk to you about some of the safety things you’ve talked already about how you don’t spam people or ask all these things and stuff, but it’s really amazing how God has led you all to have in mind the safety of these searches and safety of the sermons and preserving them.
Isaac Crockett: So we want to get into that. We’re going to again, take our last time out to hear from some of our partners and come back, talk to Steven Lee from sermon audio.com about what God is leading them to do and some more places in the world that can be reached through sermon audio, but also what they’re doing to keep things secure and the connections that God has given them. So just a great opportunity here. We’ll be right back on Staying in the Gap today.
Well welcome back to the final part of our program. It’s hard to believe when we get to the fourth segment. It always seems time flies, but I’m Pastor Isaac Crockett, joined by the Honorable Sam Rohrer, and our guest today is Steven Lee from sermon audio.com. And Steven, you were talking to us about the different technologies going all the way back before YouTube, before Facebook, before the iPhone, and 24 years ago when the Lord allowed you all to start sermon audio, this ministry to make it free to hear sermons, good sermons from people that are like-minded, that it’s just amazing all the changes that have taken place since then.
Isaac Crockett: All the tech companies that have come and gone since then. And hearing you talk about building it on conviction and then using the wisdom that the Lord has given you and shown you to try to keep building it, to make it even more expansive so that more languages can hear more resources. You’re talking about Charles Hadden Spurgeon. I’ve read before that he was the most prolific writer in the English language, more than Shakespeare or anyone because of the number of sermons that he has out there in writing. And to now have that after 30 years of having somebody read so many of them hundreds and hundreds, but to now have all of them done, it’s just really a neat accomplishment. Incredible and give the glory to the Lord. But thank you for what you have put into that. But I wanted to ask you, we talk about the artificial intelligence and things, but we also, there’s a lot of concern about online security and safety and many drawbacks.
Isaac Crockett: Some ministries are trying to put things on the cloud, and like you said, even with social media, it’s kind of meant for the moment, kind of shows up in your feed for a while and then kind of fades away. What you’re doing is building a library that can be used as a tool, as a search tool, as a research engine that helps power these things, but also just storing everything on the cloud has its drawbacks and dangers. Could you talk to us about what sermon audio has started doing and handling this by developing the vault as you call it, and maybe talk to us about the partner of where it’s located? I think we have a partner in common that is helping you with that.
Steven Lee: Sure, absolutely. So basically we are a sermon site, and so we’re a library of sermons. We’re a sermon site with conviction, and that means you’re going to have a Bible preaching on there that might rub some people the wrong way, a time or two. Hey, listen, even if you just say marriage is between a man and a woman, even something like that is going to rub people the wrong way. And it’s becoming, the climate is such nowadays in our society, sadly, where cancel culture is becoming more and more commonplace, where if you have an offensive message and you have an offensive ministry, it would be very easy for big tech companies to cancel you and to silence your voice. Now we have two and a half million sermons. That means there’s essentially two and a half million targets on us and reasons for people to find something that they will be offended about.
Steven Lee: And it was just a matter of time in our opinion that some of these bigger cloud providers would not really want to take the heat of that, not want to get into the controversy of that. And it just takes a very vocal minority to get it done. And so all they would have to do is flip a switch and all two and a half million sermons would disappear overnight without recourse, and it was too risky. We hear news pretty regularly of churches saying that their sermon one, two sermons, sometimes all 3000 of their sermons were taken down by a platform because of some offensive thing. And it’s not some fringe, we’re not talking about fringe ministries out there. We’re talking about solid bible preaching ministries that are conservative men. They’re just being faithful to the word of God. And so like I said, it’s just a matter of time before this becomes a problem for us wholesale.
Steven Lee: The only way to deal with that sort of thing is to start hosting the content yourself. You have to build your own infrastructure. You just can’t keep depending on the infrastructure of these companies that clearly have their own agenda and we’re just assuming that they will always be there for us to broadcast our message. I don’t think you can make that assumption forever. And so we have started down this road of building our own physical infrastructure and it’s not easy and it’s not glamorous and it’s very expensive and it’s time consuming and all the rest of it. But we’ve partnered with the Christian University called Bob Jones University. I’m a Bob Jones University graduate of 95 in computer science. And so I’ve always been very friendly with the school here, but we partnered with them in this sense. This is still from an audio, so we have no organic relationship.
Steven Lee: There’s not a union here, but we are helping one another in this sense. We have set up physically on the campus of BJU, a space of almost 4,000 square feet of space in their library of all things where we are setting up this infrastructure, we call it the vault because we believe that there needs to be a safe and secure way for us to perpetuate the propagation of solid preaching. And we have this space here on this campus and we are also using interns, which are students from the computer science department to help us because it’s not just about having the hardware and the equipment and the space and even the money. You need manpower. You need to have people to train and to help in this work. And so that’s been the big project here. We’re still doing sermon audio as you see it on the website, where churches can upload their sermons and listen to sermons. But behind the scenes it’s running on largely now on our own machines and the sermons are safe and secure in our own hands.
Isaac Crockett: That is amazing. What an incredible idea and opportunity. And then just following the scriptural commands and that emphasis on preaching that we started with, but that is so exciting to hear what’s going on. I knew some bits and pieces of this. I try to follow some of what you all have going on with sermon audio, but hearing this from you has been a learning experience. I think even for me today. It’s exciting. And I would encourage you pastors out there who are listening, I don’t know of any other website that you can upload your whole library in batch, in batch format and put it on there and then it goes out to all sorts of places. It’s such a good website that way. For those of you who want to hear Godly preaching, who want to listen to it for your own nourishment or for maybe sharing with others, again, this is a great place to go sermon audio.com and to hear from Stephen today how all these steps have been thought through and how the Lord has opened doors and opportunities. It’s quite incredible. Steven, thank you so much for coming on this program today. Thank you for what you’re doing there. We’re just thankful that God put this on your heart 24 years ago when technology was so different and for the steps that are being taken. Sam, I want to give you a chance to close our program in prayer, and before you close this in prayer, if you have any final thoughts or comments as well, we’d love to hear that
Sam Rohrer: Today. Well, Isaac, I do have a thought, and as I’m listening to this, I think truthful remnant messages that therein, Steven, I think as you’re talking about preserving this, even as we talk about, be careful what we say, and then we do think about the next generation. But as we approach, I think Isaac and Steven as we approach, I think the soon return of the Lord, I think this kind of a thing may be even more advantageous and helpful to those who will be here in the next few years when truth is going to be really squashed. I think there’s something very significant about what you’re talking about doing, Stephen, and thank the Lord for it. Back to you, Isaac.
Isaac Crockett: Alright, well thank you Sam. Thank you Steven so much for coming on, for talking to us about what you’re doing and we just praise the Lord for what he has done for every ministry like yours and others like ours that is going on. And we just love seeing how God is using us all around the world. And thank you for listening today to our program, stand In the Gap Today, and we appreciate your prayers and your involvement listening to us. And until next time, until the next program, I pray that you’ll stand in the gap for truth wherever you are.
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