We will soon need to make some hard choices, as far as the website is concerned. We have nearly used up the 6 GB of storage space we purchase from WordPress. The vast majority of that is sermons, going back to when the website was launched in 2015. It’s been nearly nine years and for a few different reasons I don’t think buying additional digital storage is the right thing to do.
One would hope that after pastoring this church for nearly a decade my sermons are better now than they used to be. I will go back and replay a few of the older ones and try to confirm the truth in that statement. Some of them are repeats, or close to it. Every year during Advent for instance we retread some of the same ground, and again before and after Easter. Finally there’s the law of supply and demand. I will check the stats but I doubt anyone is looking at the church website and deciding to listen to sermons that I preach seven, eight or nine years ago. Like dusty boxes that sit in the attic they are just taking up space.
In the very beginning, March or April of 2015, I was adding slides to the sermon audio and loading the final video to YouTube. That process was time and labor intensive. It took a couple of hours to create and even longer for the final video to render. So those are hosted on YouTube and do not take up any memory here. Then we switched to uploading audio to the website and so it began. If you want to roam the halls of the virtual archive now is the time to start. I will listen to a few of the old ones and might keep a handful for posterity’s sake; maybe Mama’s Buttermilk Biscuits or a few others that really speak to me. I will start with the oldest in the archive and delete sermon posts from 2015 and 2016 so that more 2024 sermons can be added. If you find anything from back then you really like you can listen to it again or download it yourself. One 30 minute audio recording saved as .m4a takes only a few megabits of memory. But when you save 50 a year for nine years it really adds up.
Unity Baptist Church 