Signing up
Apply for an account
One person runs this service, so churches are admitted at a pace that person can support, and every application is read before an account exists. The form takes about five minutes, and you’ll hear back within three business days either way.
The form is in the dashboard, so you’ll create an account and name your church first, and the application is the page that follows. There’s no waiting list and no queue position to watch.
Before you start
Everything the form asks
- Your church’s name
- The name your library carries from the first day.
- Where your church meets
- The town or city, and the country if it isn’t the United States. Church names repeat, so it’s how we tell yours apart.
- Your part at the church
- Whether you preach there, serve on staff, volunteer, or help from outside. It tells us what help to offer.
- Where we can see your church online
- Optional. A website, YouTube channel, Facebook page, or podcast. It’s the quickest way for us to confirm your church.
- How often you preach
- One a week, two or three a week, more than three, or irregularly. It’s how we tell you which plan fits instead of leaving you to guess.
- How many recordings you already have
- None, under 50, 50 to 300, over 300, or not sure. A rough count is fine. It decides whether bringing them over is an afternoon or a project.
- Where we should reply
- An email address. It starts as the one you signed up with, and you can change it, because the person filling this in often isn’t the one who should hear back.
- How you heard about us
- Optional, and a sentence is plenty.
- That you can sign your church up
- A checkbox. It’s your decision to make, or someone at the church has asked you to make it.
What you sent
- Church
- Grace Chapel
- Meets in
- Millbrook
- Your part
- I’m on the church staff
- Online
- gracechapel.org
- Preaching
- One a week
- Archive
- 50 to 300 recordings
- Sent
- 2026-09-23
An example of the page you see after sending, with an invented church. It shows your answers back until the reply arrives.
After you send it
Three business days, then your library
- Within three business days
- An email to the address you gave, yes or no. A no carries the reason, written by the person who read your application, and you’re welcome to apply again.
- If it’s a yes
- You sign in and set up your church, which takes a couple of minutes: your library’s address, your timezone, and your services. Nothing is guessed for you, and all but the address can change later.
- Then one sermon
- You upload a single recording before you commit to the whole archive. You see the transcript, the passages it cites, the summary, and the page, made from your own preaching.
Recordings
Send the sermon, and decide what publishes
- Upload the sermon rather than the whole service. We transcribe the message. If a recording also carries the welcome, the readings, the announcements, and the singing, all of it lands in the transcript and the full length counts against your allowance. Most churches already export a sermon-only cut for their podcast, and that’s the right file. If all you have is the whole service, as a video or as audio, mark the sermon on the upload page and only that part is sent. We don’t screen recordings for anything, so what a church uploads and publishes is its own decision.
- Nothing publishes on its own. Processing is automatic. Publishing is a person at your church reading the sermon over and pressing a button.
Tell us about your church
The form takes about five minutes. If you’d rather ask something first, write to help@shepherdsmessage.com and a person will answer that too.