By today, I have 41 five minute commentaries recorded, but have less idea than ever on how to get them broadcast on a radio station, as I have no extra money to do it with. This is in part due to having been unable to obtain stable work over the past nearly three years.
How do we have such a huge amount of Christian radio programming? First, almost all is connected with some institutional church, or someone who at one point got their springboard via the institutional church. As some of these commentaries have mentioned, institutional churches lean on people to give money, and mainly use it on themselves. Admittedly, the people inside see it as ministry and the Lord’s work, but buildings and payroll were not commanded in scripture. Very honestly, even for small churches, the amount of money needed to do a radio program is small, and oftentimes, all it takes is a recording device for the speaker’s voice, and some editing work done after the end of the message, to stick the intro on the front, and trailer on the end, and then edit the rest into the time frame. Let us say a program done once a week costs $100 per program. Over a year, it is about $5000. Currently, we are told average family income is $50,000 per year. If one family is new to an area, or decides for whatever reason to switch churches, and gives 10%, given that most institutional churches teach tithing, just one family pays for a year of the program. If they give the more typical 2.5% (while spoken against, this is the real average), either that one family will cover that program in four years, or four families in one year. Now, if the program is not sufficiently impressive to draw any people to a church, the pastor can still claim to other pastors that they have a “radio ministry” even if they never see any sign of anyone listening, and can even embellish that to an “evangelistic ministry,” even if this program is buried on one of these all day sermon stations that even most believers don’t listen to. Let’s face it, in my area, there are three Christian stations that are mainly contemporary music, and those get almost all the listenership. Those Christian stations playing music that would fit World War II and previous, or do all programs, get minimal amount of listeners, and stay on the air selling program time, and speak about their “potential listenership,” as their Arbitron rating would be 0.1 at a good time.
My goal would be to be in the middle of music programming. I know one station which offers a five minute block (I’m in no position to name names). At another, I believe I need to cut these down to one minute segments, somehow. Also, I would not be surprised if these commentaries might be ruled “too hot to handle,” but that’s for later. I am thinking about producing these to an mp3 and giving these out in strategic places, such as to Christian high school or college students, or other sympathetic individuals.
To that effect, I am currently re-editing these commentaries to put the local website tag (www.hrscn.org) as the last word of the commentary, so it could be deleted for another city’s website, phone, or other contact info. This is also, in part, because technologically challenged me just figured out how to do it. Also, I have been working on putting more footnotes at the end of the commentaries.
All this should logically bring up a question—if, in these commentaries, I state that the early church gave money to helping the poor and sending out apostles to those areas that had not heard the message of Jesus, where does coming up with money for these programs fit in? Obviously, it does not, unless a person’s heart is to give more to educate already believers on these issues that, for the most part, are not being spoken of in most places. My heart is there, my income is not, and it would not take much. My eye is out for a like-hearted person. My prayer is to be allowed to teach one fellow believer more correctly, and then another, and…
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