1. Give second life to your best sermons
by sharing them with a world-wide audience.

2. Get more feedback.

    Your cyber-sermons will attract
more feedback than regular sermons
because the readers are already seated at their keyboards,
which gives them the capacity to respond easily.

    And because these readers
are not members of your local congregation,
readers might feel more free to speak their minds.

3. You might benefit from detailed comments
on your cyber-sermons.

    Whether the feedback is positive or negative,
readers' responses might encourage you
to revise your cyber-sermons
to make your points even more forcefully.
Small ambiguities, which led to misunderstandings,
can be eliminated
so that the future readers will avoid those problems.

4. Make a permanent record of your thought,
which will always be available to new readers in the future.

    All cyber-sermons released by FUUCI
will be permanently stored on our Facebook Page and/or our website,
where they can be called up and read at any time.
New people will benefit from your thought literally years later.

5. Introduce new people to your thought.

    When you are identified as the author of a particular sermon-of-the month,
the links you provide in your author description
can lead readers to unlimited additional information about you.
For example, perhaps you have additional sermons
also available on the Internet.
Do you have a personal website?
Can readers discover more about you on Facebook?
Have you written any books?
Many people will meet you for the first time
as the author of cyber-sermons for FUUCI.

6. Attract new people to your congregation.

    If they live close enough geographically,
people who discover your cyber-sermons thru FUUCI
might want to hear you more regularly in your congregational setting.
Or perhaps in their travels, they will have occasion
to visit your congregation some Sunday morning.

7. The content of your cyber-sermon
is the only criterion for selection.

    Everyone has an equal chance to 'speak'
to the members of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of the Internet.
You do not have to have an established reputation.
You do not need to occupy a prominent pulpit.
You only need some interesting and meaningful ideas to share.

8. Your audience selects itself—according to your subject.

    You should not try to please everyone.
People who have no interest in any particular subject
will simply skip reading that particular cyber-sermon.

    Be as intellectually-challenging
and spiritually-profound as you wish.
Some readers somewhere in the world
are already interested in what you have to offer.

9. Address a larger audience than your local congregation.

10. Cyber-sermons are excellent outreach
to people who would never attend a UU gathering.

    Many people will be introduced to UUism thru cyber-sermons.
If your sermons show that UU thinking is radically different
from their rejected childhood religions,
your cyber-sermons might be the means by which some people discover
that in spirit they have been Unitarian Universalists for years.
They just did not know that such a religious movement existed.

    Some people who first encounter UU thinking in a cyber-sermon
will ultimately join a local UU congregation.
It could be your congregation.
But more likely it will be some other UU congregation,
close to where they live.
Your cyber-sermons might have such effects
far beyond what you can now imagine.

    The small additional effort needed
to convert a spoken sermon into a cyber-sermon
could be seen as an outreach service paid for by your congregation.
Your Board of Trustees would probably approve
of you using paid professional time
to revise your spoken sermons into written cyber-sermons.

    But if your Board of Trustees does not approve,
you can still perform this service for the
First Unitarian Universalist Church of the Internet on your own time
—just as you do many other volunteer community services
that you find meaningful.

11. Cyber-sermons enable you to get inside the minds
of very skeptical readers.

    If your cyber-sermons become available on Facebook,
they will be read by many people
who would never think of darkening the door of a UU church.
These readers might begin with a negative attitude
toward anything called a "sermon".
But your brilliant thought—forcefully expressed—might win them over.
And the concept of "sermon" will be redeemed in your cyber-sermon.

    These very skeptical readers do not care who you are.
Perhaps they have rejected
every manifestation of religion they have ever encountered.
But even readers with maximum skepticism
might give a few seconds to reading your synopsis.
If something in the first two sentences
rings strong and true in their minds,
they will be compelled to read further.

    Your cyber-sermons will reach people
who would never enter your church
—no matter how much advertising you do.
Your cyber-sermons might not directly benefit you or your church,
but they will give other UU groups somewhere in the world
a second chance to be considered
by these intelligent, skeptical people.

    The additional effort is small
compared to the potential long-term benefits.
Can you think of a better way to devote an hour or two
that could potentially have such a far-reaching impact?

    Back to the Cyber-Sermon section of the FUUCI home page.
Here you will discover how to submit a proposal for a cyber-sermon,
the criteria of excellence recommended to the members,
who select which proposal will become the next Cyber-Sermon-of-the-Month,
and see some examples of actual proposals for cyber-sermons.