Publishing sermons publicly is usually the right default. It helps people find you, it serves members who missed a week, and it gives visitors a way to know you before they arrive. But treating it as an unbreakable rule creates a problem the first time a service contains something that should not be on the open internet.
The failure is rarely dramatic. No one sets out to publish a member's medical history. It happens because the archive is automatic, the service ran as normal, and there was no moment in the process where anybody was asked to make a decision. By the time somebody thinks to ask, the page has been live for a week.
The services that need a different answer
- Testimonies. Someone describing addiction, abuse, a prison sentence or a family breakdown may be entirely willing to speak to two hundred people who know them, and not at all willing to be found by a search engine in five years. Those are different audiences, and consent to one is not consent to the other.
- Prayer requests by name. "Please pray for Maria, who starts treatment on Tuesday" is a normal sentence in a service and a permanent, indexed health record on a website. Attach a surname and it becomes findable by an employer.
- Members' meetings. Budgets, salaries, property decisions, disagreements. Some of it may be legally required to be minuted; almost none of it needs to be public.
- Safeguarding and pastoral announcements. Anything naming a person in a difficulty.
- Congregations with reason for caution. Some members' safety depends on not being publicly identifiable — converts from another faith, people who have left a controlling group, families with a protection order. For those congregations "public by default" is not a neutral setting.
Three settings, not two
Most tools offer a switch: published or not. That is the wrong shape, because it forces a genuinely private service and a service that is simply for the congregation into the same box. The useful distinction has three levels.
| Setting | Who can read it | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| Public | Anyone, including search engines | Ordinary teaching, guest speakers, anything you would happily put on a noticeboard outside |
| Members-only | People signed in as part of your congregation | Members' meetings, vision evenings, pastoral teaching, anything internal but not sensitive |
| Not archived | Nobody, afterwards | Testimonies, prayer by name, safeguarding, anything involving a minor |
The third row is the one people forget exists, and it is the one that matters most. Translation still runs. Everyone in the room and on their phone still follows the service in their own language. Nothing is written down afterwards.
"Not archived" has to mean not written, not deleted later
There is a real difference between never storing something and storing it and removing it afterwards. Anything that exists, even briefly, can be cached, screenshotted, indexed, or backed up. If a testimony is genuinely sensitive, the honest promise is that no transcript was ever created — not that one was created and then tidied away.
This also affects what you can truthfully tell the person speaking. "We won't publish it" is a promise about your intentions. "It isn't being recorded" is a statement about the system. The second is the one that lets someone speak freely.
Decide at the start, not afterwards
The decision belongs at the beginning of a service, at the same moment you start the broadcast, for a simple reason: afterwards is too late. A page that was public for two hours on a Sunday morning may already have been crawled, and material that was visible to the congregation's group chat has already travelled.
A useful test: if the answer to "should this be public?" is "I'll decide later", the answer is members-only. Promoting a members-only sermon to public later takes one click and costs nothing. Taking a public one back does not undo anything.
The accidental archive
The other way private material becomes public is accident rather than decision — a microphone left running before a service, a two-minute test broadcast, a session started to check the sound and forgotten. Each of those can produce a stub page with a fragment of a private conversation on it.
The guard is a minimum length: anything shorter than a few minutes is treated as a test and not archived at all. It costs nothing and it removes a whole category of mistake. Check that whatever you use has one, and that the threshold is long enough to cover a sound check.
Members-only depends on knowing who members are
A members-only setting is only as good as the definition of "member". If anyone who fills in a form is instantly a member, the setting is decorative. Most churches want a small gate: someone signs up, and a leader confirms they are actually part of the congregation before they can see internal material.
That gate should be narrow. Being unapproved should stop someone reading the internal archive — it should never stop them following this Sunday's service in their own language. A visitor standing in your building on their first morning must not hit a permission screen.
Say what you do
Whatever you decide, announce it. One line in the welcome — "this morning is being translated live, and this part is not being recorded" — costs five seconds and buys a great deal of trust, particularly from anyone about to speak personally. It also does something practical: it tells a nervous person that the room is safe before they have to ask.
If you are recording, say that too, and say where it goes. People are far more relaxed about being recorded when they have been told than when they discover it.
A policy short enough that people actually follow it
Long policies get filed. This one fits on a card by the sound desk:
- Default is public.
- Members' meetings and vision evenings are members-only.
- Testimonies, prayer by name, and anything involving a child are not archived.
- If in doubt, members-only — it can be promoted later.
- Whoever starts the broadcast sets it, before the service starts.
Five lines, one decision, made by the person who is already at the desk. That is the whole discipline.
Built into the workflow
InMyTongue asks how each sermon should be stored at the moment you go live — public, members-only, or not saved at all — so the decision happens before the service rather than after it, and it can be changed later for anything you did keep. New accounts include free credit. See the options.