Though I don’t have time to experiment with online audio for the foreseeable future, while I was packing up some things for our move to Massachusetts I ran across the project that initially made me aware of what you could do with religion and audio.

A year ago, I was serving temporarily as minister of religious education at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, California. The facilites supervisor there was a fellow named Mark Johnson, a talented musician and visual artist, who had a degree in film studies (now you know why he was working as a faciltities supervisor — no money in the arts).

Mark was a Pentecostal, I a Unitarian Universalist, and our religions overlapped in three crucial areas — the importance of Spirit, integrating religion and the arts, and trying to get kids interested in our religious heritage. So one Sunday he recorded a chidlren’s story I did in the worship service, cleaned up the sound, and added a beat and sound effects to it. We put in a minimal amount of time — it took me a few hours to prepare the story but I would have had to do that anyway, and it took Mark about an hour and a half to produce the recording — but in spite of that the results were pretty good. Check out a compressed mp3 version of “12 days of magic” here. It’s the wrong season, but hey….

We talked idly about producing other stories from the Christian tradition, trying to produce something children and youth might actually listen to. But Mark had a new baby in his life, and I moved here to Geneva, Illinois, so we never got around to it.

But wouldn’t that be cool? I mean, podcasts of sermons are fine and good, but they’re kinda boring. The UUA’s “Drive Time” recordings are well-produced and fine for church geeks like me and boring for most people. But wouldn’t it be fun to do something with a little more… pizzazz?

Just throwing the idea out there, hoping someone picks up on it.