Welcome To Nucleus Sermons

Having a website for your church is basically a non-negotiable in the 21st century. The internet is almost always the first place someone goes to search for churches in their area, so making sure you have a great website that answers key questions, like service times, core beliefs, and where you're located is essential. (Thankfully, Nucleus Web exists 😎)

How amazing would it be to also ensure your past sermons with the life-giving message of the Gospel are easily accessible to anyone who lands on your website?

That's the power of Nucleus Sermons: easy accessibility to your entire sermon archive right at the fingertips of anyone who has access to the internet.

With Nucleus Sermons, you can categorize all your messages by playlists, topics, and speakers. You can add key Scripture references and upload any supplemental documents to each sermon. You can embed videos from YouTube or Vimeo, and link them to their corresponding audio recordings. And you can even distribute all your messages to podcast platforms (as long as you have the audio recordings uploaded to your Dashboard).

Ready to get started? Let's dive in!

In this guide, we'll cover the following topics. Click on any one to jump ahead.

"Sermons", "Playlists", & "Topics" - What Do We Mean?

Before providing an introduction to Nucleus Sermons, it's important to go over definitions to make sure we're on the same page.

"Sermons"

While the term "sermon" typically relates to a message or homily spoken to a church, we don't want you to be confined to thinking that this is the only piece of content you can add to Nucleus Sermons. Yes, this will typically be the majority of the content you add, but a sermon on Nucleus can link to a livestream url, any video url from YouTube or Vimeo, or you can upload any audio file (as long as it's 50MB or smaller).

What this means is that you can create sermons that aren't necessarily sermons, but are still important pieces of media that you want to make available to your church.

"Playlists"

This is also why we use the term "playlist" instead of "series". On the internet, a playlist is simply a collection of media that is all related to each other. That's exactly what a sermon series is: a collection of sermons that all relate to each other. But since you can include pieces of media that aren't just Sunday sermons we didn't want to limit you with only being able to create series.

"Topics"

Another term worth noting is "topics". While you can add one or multiple topics to any sermon you create, these aren't just topics. Much like how you can add "tags" to a video when you upload it to YouTube, topics in Nucleus Sermons works in much the same way. Not only can you view a specific topic and see all the sermons that are associated with that topic, but you can search for a topic as well in the same way that tags are used for keywords when searching online for content.

Where To Access Your Sermons

As an admin, you can access Nucleus Sermons via your Dashboard, just like any other product.

As a visitor to your website, anyone can access your sermons via your Sermon Hub.

The Sermon Hub is the area of your website where all your sermons can be accessed individually or by their respective categories (such as in a specific playlist or by viewing a specific speaker).

Think of the Sermon Hub as another section on your Nucleus Website. Your Sermon Hub has a main homepage, and that homepage can be linked to your Nucleus Website as an item in your navigation, as a button or hyperlink, or in The Launcher.

When you first set up your Sermon Hub, you can choose what the permalink will be for your Hub's homepage, just like any other page on your Nucleus Website. (Don't worry - you can always change this later, too.)

Categorize Your Sermons

While individual sermons make up the content for your Sermon Hub, searching through all your sermons without any organization can be a cumbersome experience. Nucleus Sermons allows you to categorize your sermons in order to provide easy searchability and navigation through your sermon archive.

There are various ways you can categorize your sermons:

Playlists

Just like how many churches often preach sermons in a series, you can create collections of sermons that are related to each other in a playlist (up to 300 sermons in a single playlist if you want! 😱). You can organize the playlist so that each sermon is in the precise order as you would want them to be viewed or listened to.

Featured Content

Anytime you wish to put a sermon front and centre on your Sermon Hub's homepage, you can add it to the Featured Content section. This section exists automatically (and can't be deleted), so you don't need to worry about creating it. When you want to promote one or more sermons on your Sermon Hub, simply add those sermons to your Featured Content.

Recent Media

In a similar manner, there is another section that automatically exists: Recent Media. Anytime you create a sermon, it will automatically show up in the Recent Media section of your Sermon Hub. You can also manually add sermons to Recent Media if you'd like.

Up to 300 sermons will show up in Recent Media at a time, so as soon as you reach that limit when another sermon joins the Recent Media section, the oldest sermon will be removed from that section. (But it can still be found in any other section on your Sermon Hub that it's associated with.)

Topics

In the same way that you can tag a video when uploading it to YouTube to help with searchability, you can add one or multiple topics to an individual sermon. Any sermon tagged with that topic will show up on that particular topic's page in the Sermon Hub. And anytime someone searches that topic, any sermon with that topic added to it will show up in the results.

Speakers

Speakers is another great way to categorize your sermons. Every time you create a sermon, you can add one or multiple speakers to it.

Anyone added as a speaker in Nucleus Sermons will have their own page in the Sermon Hub, with a brief bio and description of who they are. Any sermon that they are added to will show up on their page. This makes it super easy for someone who is looking for a sermon preached by a specific pastor/speaker.

Scripture

Another type of categorization is with scripture references. You can add as many scripture references as you'd like to any sermon you create.

If you choose to add the Scripture section to your Sermon Hub's homepage, people can click to view that section and see all the various Scripture references used throughout your sermon archive. Organized by books of the Bible, someone can click on a book, and then view all the sermons that have a reference to that book linked to it.

Distribute Your Audio Recordings As Podcast Episodes

While Nucleus Sermons is a great destination for people to view your sermon archive on your church's website, not everyone is going to land on your website to listen/view your church's messages.

That's why Nucleus Sermons provides you with a unique RSS feed that you can use to distribute your sermons to various podcast platforms across the internet, making it easy for you to share the good news of Jesus in even more places online (like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more!).

Once you set up your podcast in Nucleus Sermons and add your RSS feed to the podcast platforms of your choosing.

Then go to your Sermons Panel and click on a sermon to edit it.

Scroll down to the Podcast section and click to toggle on the Include in Podcast option.

Assuming this is already a published piece of content (since you're wanting to add it to your podcast), click Publish in the top right corner and choose whether to publish immediately or to publish at a future date/time.

Now this sermon will appear in your list of episodes back on your Podcasts Panel here, and will be fed through your RSS feed to wherever you have your RSS feed published.

The list of episodes will appear from most recent at the top of the list (according to the date/time the sermon is set to have been preached) to the least recent.

Distributing your audio recordings in a podcast is not a necessity, but it's a fantastic way to allow greater access to your church's homilies, sermons, and messages 🎧

Coming From Nucleus 1 Sermons?

If you previously were uploading your sermons to a Nucleus 1 account and are looking to start using Nucleus 2 Sermons, you're in luck! We can actually migrate all of your sermon content from Nucleus 1 to your Nucleus 2 account for you!

(And all the admins in charge of uploading sermons rejoiced 🙌)

There are a few items to address before this can happen:

  1. It's imperative that you have an active Nucleus 2 account and subscription with access to both Nucleus 2 Web and Sermons.
  2. It's also crucial that a member of our Customer Success Team has connected your Nucleus 1 and Nucleus 2 accounts together. (This would have entailed moving your subscription over to Nucleus 2.)

  3. It's super helpful to have also created some Leaders & Staff in your Nucleus 2 Church Settings here. This is because you can link sermons to people you've already added there, so if you have any main speakers at your church, go ahead and add some there before having your sermon archive from Nucleus 1 migrated over.

  4. It's also helpful to have at least started working on your Nucleus 2 Website. If not, no worries! Just be aware that Nucleus 2 Sermons uses Nucleus 2 Web as the platform on which to display your Sermon Hub. And to have the best experience with Nucleus Sermons, we highly recommend setting up your Nucleus 2 Website first before publishing your Sermon Hub.

With all of those important details out of the way, if you think you're ready to migrate over from Nucleus 1 Sermons to Nucleus 2 Sermons, or if you'd like to take care of Points #1 and #2 above, send us an email to hello@nucleus.church.

What Next?

Now that you're oriented with Nucleus Sermons and where to find everything, now it's time to get started with adding your content.

While it might seem intuitive to begin by creating your first sermon, you'll actually have a better experience if you take care of your playlists, speakers, and topics first. So let's start there, and then you can create your first sermon! Click below to learn more:

Did this answer your question? Thanks for the feedback There was a problem submitting your feedback. Please try again later.