How to start a church podcast

Content · audio

A podcast meets people in the in-between moments — the commute, the school run, the walk, the washing up. For a church, it turns Sunday's sermon into something members carry through their week and newcomers can sample before they ever visit. And because the audio is a by-product of preaching you already do, a church podcast is one of the highest-return, lowest-cost things you can start.

What a podcast actually is (in plain terms)

A podcast is a series of audio episodes, distributed through a special web address called an RSS feed. When you upload a new episode to your podcast host, the feed updates, and every app subscribed to that feed — Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and others — automatically shows the new episode. You publish once; it appears everywhere. That's the whole magic.

What you need to start

• Audio to publish — your recorded sermon (see how to record church sermons).
• A podcast host — a service that stores your episodes and generates the RSS feed.
• Cover artwork — a square image (typically 3000×3000 px) with your church/podcast name.
• A title and description for the show.

That's it. No studio, no fancy microphones beyond what you already use for preaching.

Step 1 — Get clean sermon audio

Podcast quality lives and dies on the source audio. Export the audio from your service recording, or record a dedicated feed from the sound desk. A close preaching mic and a clean desk feed give you podcast-ready sound with no extra work. Export as MP3 (128 kbps mono is plenty for speech and keeps files small).

Step 2 — Do a little light editing

Keep it simple. Trim dead air at the start and end, and optionally add a short spoken intro ("You're listening to [Church]…") and a closing line with your service times. Free audio editors handle all of this. Don't over-produce — consistency beats polish.

Step 3 — Choose a podcast host

A podcast host is not the same as your website — it's built to store audio and serve the RSS feed reliably. There are free hosts and low-cost paid hosts; paid ones typically add better statistics, unlimited storage and support. Pick one, create your show, and upload your artwork and description.

Step 4 — Publish to Apple, Spotify and the rest

Your host gives you one RSS feed URL. Submit that URL once to each directory — Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and others — through their podcast-submission pages. Approval can take a few days the first time. After that, every episode you upload to your host appears on all of them automatically.

Step 5 — Title and describe episodes well

• Episode title — the sermon title plus the passage or theme, so it's searchable and clear.
• Show notes — a few sentences of summary, the Bible references covered, and a link to your church.
• Consistent naming — a predictable format helps listeners and search alike.

A simple weekly workflow

1. Export the sermon audio from Sunday's recording.
2. Trim the ends; add intro/outro if you use them.
3. Export as MP3.
4. Upload to your host with a title and show notes.
5. Publish — it flows out to every app automatically.

Write show notes in minutes, not hours

Show notes are where most churches run out of steam — writing a summary and pulling the references each week is real work. This is where TajiCast quietly saves you: as it runs, it transcribes the whole sermon and can generate structured sermon notes — a title, key points, every scripture reference, quotes and applications — from that transcript. Drop those straight into your episode description and you have accurate, ready-made show notes with almost no writing. See how to take sermon notes automatically.

You also get a full transcript of each episode, which you can publish alongside the audio to help people who prefer to read and to make your content more searchable — see how to transcribe a sermon.

Frequently asked questions

Related: How to record church sermons · Great audio for your stream