Building Social Posts From Your Pastor’s Notes

What should a pastor post on social media?

It’s tough to create fresh and exciting ideas for social media every single day, especially if design or ideation aren’t your strengths.

But your pastor records a sermon every week that can be full of content generation gold if you know where and how to pan for it.

If you can get your pastor’s notes ahead of time, this is even easier! However, if you can’t, these are some things to look for during the sermon as you watch online or listen in-person. When one of these moments happens, mark how many minutes into the sermon (or grab the timestamp) and write it down in a note on your phone or dedicate a notebook to it.

Then you’re set up to pull these out later and create amazing social media content from your pastor’s sermon!

Scriptures Used

If your pastor uses Scriptures, take a photo of your people or even a nice part of your lobby, and put the passage on it using typography that fits your style. These are easy images to create that put Scripture out onto social media and can remotely disciple your followers. You may find a stock video site or take video of your people moving around in the lobby and blur it to use as a video background instead of a still image.

Pithy Quotes

Listen for short statements that are powerfully said to create a quote graphic. Use an image of the pastor from your archives, grab a screenshot from the video, or take a photo live to use in the graphic. Make sure that you use an image that has space to the left or right of the pastor that you can place the quote in. If you have access to the video, this is a great section to clip out and share as a video of the quote.

Illustrate the Illustrations

When your pastor uses an illustration or tells a story, find a photo on a photo-sharing site or paid site (such as Unsplash or Pexels), and use it to give a visual representation to the story to bring it to life. Then use your caption to give context to the photo and further reinforce your pastor’s point. Any way we can bring Scripture or Spiritual truth to life visually on social media is going to be a discipleship opportunity for growth.

Convert Lists or Points into a Photo Series

Typically, pastors use a series of points or may drop a list within a point in their sermons. These are really easy to turn into an album post on Instagram or a gif that plays them all for Facebook. Listen for a series of related items in the message that you can extend into helpful content later because most listeners may not remember the list past lunch time.

Homework or Calls to Action

If your pastor gives homework, your people are definitely going to need a reminder about it later in the week. Even if there isn’t an official homework assignment, most sermons have a pretty obvious call to action for the week. If there isn’t, then give the people one. What do you think people should do? Besides, if the sermon doesn’t give you something to encourage spiritual growth towards God each week then what was the point?

Every week, you are given lots of content to create social media that is fresh and relevant to your people. If you learn to pan for the gold, you’ll always have ideas for how you can use social media to encourage and equip people to follow Jesus.

What ideas do you have?