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Marcus, a Southern Baptist church media director in Cleveland, Tennessee, opens up about six years of running livestream, sound, and sermon clips for a 180-person congregation, the eleven-minute announcement problem, flat viewership, and the burnout of five-hour Sunday edits.
Marcus has run media at a 180-person Southern Baptist church in Cleveland, Tennessee for six years — cameras, slides, audio, livestream, the works. In this conversation he gets honest about the eleven-minute announcement block, flat viewership, and the Sunday afternoons he lost trying to clip sermons by hand.
In this episode:
Subscribe: sermon-clips.com
Marcus Webb: ...eleven minutes. Eleven. Of announcements.
Marcus Tillerson: Eleven minutes, Marcus. And that's a good week.
Marcus Webb: Before the message even starts.
Marcus Tillerson: Before anybody says the word "scripture," yeah. By the time we get to the sermon, half the livestream chat has dropped off, and then the pastor walks past me Monday morning and goes, "Marcus, why aren't the young folks watching?"
Marcus Webb: And that lands on you.
Marcus Tillerson: That lands on me. Somehow the lighting, the lobby announcements, the choir mics, the fact that we don't reach anybody under thirty-five... all of that is a Marcus problem.
Marcus Webb: How long you been running media for the church?
Marcus Tillerson: Going on six years now. I started because nobody else would touch the soundboard. You know how it goes. Somebody asks for a volunteer, everybody looks at their shoes, and I just... raised my hand.
Marcus Webb: The classic Baptist hand-raise.
Marcus Tillerson: The one you regret for six years.
Marcus Webb: How big is the congregation?
Marcus Tillerson: We're about a hundred and eighty on a Sunday. Cleveland, Tennessee. Southern Baptist. Sweet folks. I mean it, sweet folks. But we are not a megachurch and we are not pretending to be.
Marcus Webb: And you're doing cameras, slides, audio...
Marcus Tillerson: Cameras, slides, audio, livestream, and whatever the pastor decides on Saturday night he wants on the screen Sunday morning. Which is its own ministry.
Marcus Webb: Walk me through a Sunday for you.
Marcus Tillerson: Sure. I get there at seven. Power up the board, check the wireless packs because somebody ALWAYS leaves one on, the batteries are dead, you know the drill. I run a sound check with whoever shows up. The livestream goes live at ten fifty-five.
Marcus Webb: And then?
Marcus Tillerson: And then I sit in the back, in that little media closet we built out of a coat room, and I watch the numbers. I watch the live viewers. Forty, fifty people on a good week. And it never grows.
Marcus Webb: Never?
Marcus Tillerson: I mean, it goes up two, down two. It's flat. Has been flat for two years.
Marcus Webb: When did you first realize it was flat? Like, when did it click?
Marcus Tillerson: Probably... it was after Easter last year. Easter we get a bump, right, we always get a bump. And the bump was smaller than the year before. And I sat there Monday morning with my coffee looking at the analytics page and I thought, "We're not reaching anybody new. We are reaching the same forty people."
Marcus Webb: That's a gut punch.
Marcus Tillerson: It was. Because I've been pouring into this for six years. New camera, better mics, I learned OBS, I learned the streaming software, I learned color correction on YouTube videos at midnight. And the needle... did not move.
Marcus Webb: So what'd you do?
Marcus Tillerson: First thing I did, I went to the pastor. I said, "I think the issue is the front end. People click on a Sunday service, they get eleven minutes of announcements, and they bounce. They never hear the message."
Marcus Webb: What'd he say?
Marcus Tillerson: He said the announcements were important to the congregation. Which... they ARE. I'm not knocking him. The widow's lunch matters. The youth car wash matters.
Marcus Webb: Sure.
Marcus Tillerson: But somebody scrolling on their phone Sunday afternoon does not care about the youth car wash. They want to know if there's something for them in the message.
Marcus Webb: Right.
Marcus Tillerson: So I asked, could we put the message first on the livestream and the announcements after, and he looked at me like I'd asked to rearrange the pews.
Marcus Tillerson: I'm serious. Like I had suggested we move the pulpit.
Marcus Webb: Okay so the front end was a no-go. What was next?
Marcus Tillerson: I tried the back end. I thought, alright, if I can't fix the live experience, I'll take the message after the fact and chop it up. Put highlights on Facebook, on the church YouTube, maybe TikTok if I got brave.
Marcus Webb: Did you?
Marcus Tillerson: I did. For about three months. I'd come home Sunday afternoon, eat lunch, and then I'd sit in front of my laptop for four, five hours pulling clips out of an hour-long service.
Marcus Webb: Four or five hours.
Marcus Tillerson: Every Sunday. After leading worship tech all morning. My wife was THRILLED.
Marcus Webb: I bet.
Marcus Tillerson: She was not. She was patient, she's a saint, but you could feel it. Sunday was gone. Just gone.
Marcus Webb: And were the clips working?
Marcus Tillerson: That's the worst part. They were doing okay. Better than the full service. A clip would get two hundred views, three hundred, sometimes more if the pastor said something that hit. So I knew the idea was right.
Marcus Webb: The idea was right but the math was wrong.
Marcus Tillerson: The math was wrong. I cannot give up my Sundays for the rest of my life. I have two kids. I have a job. I am not a full-time media producer, I'm a guy who said yes to a soundboard in 2020.
Marcus Webb: So where did it break for you?
Marcus Tillerson: It broke in October. I had a week where work was heavy, my daughter had a recital, and I just... didn't do the clips. Skipped a week. And then I skipped the next week. And then I felt SO guilty about skipping that I avoided the whole thing for a month.
Marcus Webb: Mm.
Marcus Tillerson: And during that month, the pastor pulled me aside after service and said, "Hey Marcus, what happened to those little videos? Those were good. We need to be reaching younger people."
Marcus Webb: Oof.
Marcus Tillerson: Yeah. And I just stood there. Because what do you say? "Pastor, I burned out. Pastor, I can't do five hours every Sunday for free." It felt like complaining. It felt like I was letting the church down.
Marcus Webb: That's a heavy place to be.
Marcus Tillerson: It was heavy. And I want to be clear, this is not on him. He's a good shepherd. He just doesn't see what goes into the clip.
Marcus Webb: Most pastors don't.
Marcus Tillerson: Most pastors don't. They see the clip. They don't see the four hours of finding the moment, trimming it, captioning it, picking a thumbnail, writing the description, scheduling the post. They just see a thirty-second video and think, "Well, that's not that hard."
Marcus Webb: So what changed? Walk me to the turning point.
Marcus Tillerson: The turning point was a guy in our association. We have a quarterly gathering of media volunteers from the smaller churches around East Tennessee. Just a handful of us. We get coffee, we complain.
Marcus Webb: Sounds like therapy.
Marcus Tillerson: It IS therapy. It's the only therapy a Baptist media guy gets.
Marcus Tillerson: And this fella from a church up near Knoxville, he says, "Marcus, why are you still cutting these by hand?" And I said, "Because that's how you cut them." And he said, "There's tools now. There's tools that watch your sermon and pull the clips for you."
Marcus Webb: And you'd never heard of that?
Marcus Tillerson: I'd heard of editing software. I'd heard of, you know, the big video tools. But something built for sermons specifically? No. I assumed if it existed it was for the megachurches with a budget.
Marcus Webb: What did he point you to?
Marcus Tillerson: He showed me a thing called Sermon Clips. He was using it on his end. He said you upload the service, it watches the whole thing, and it tells you, "These are the moments that work as standalone clips." Then it cuts them, captions them, gives you a few thumbnail options.
Marcus Webb: Did you try it?
Marcus Tillerson: I tried it. I was skeptical. I'll be honest, I thought it would be a gimmick. I uploaded a service from two weeks prior, a sermon on, uh, contentment I think it was. And I went and made a sandwich.
Marcus Webb: Make a sandwich, come back, see what happened.
Marcus Tillerson: Came back and there were six clips. SIX. Captioned. Trimmed. The pastor's best moments from that morning. And one of them was a moment I'd missed entirely.
Marcus Webb: A moment you'd missed.
Marcus Tillerson: I'd been switching cameras during it. I was so busy with the technical work I hadn't actually HEARD what he said. And the tool caught it. Pulled it out. Forty-two seconds. Hit me right between the eyes.
Marcus Webb: That's something.
Marcus Tillerson: It humbled me a little, honestly. Here I am, the media guy, I'm so deep in the buttons I'm not even listening to the sermon anymore. And a piece of software is more attentive to the Word than I am on a Sunday morning.
Marcus Webb: That's a real moment.
Marcus Tillerson: It was. It was a real moment.
Marcus Webb: So what does the workflow look like now?
Marcus Tillerson: Now? Sunday after service I upload the file. Takes me about three minutes to start the upload. I close the laptop. I go have lunch with my wife. I take a nap. I am a fifty-two year old man and I take a Sunday nap and I do not apologize for it.
Marcus Webb: As you should.
Marcus Tillerson: As I should. And by the time I check back later that afternoon, there's a handful of clips ready. I look them over, I pick the two or three I like best, I schedule them out across the week, and I'm done.
Marcus Webb: How long is that whole process now?
Marcus Tillerson: From end to end, maybe forty minutes. Down from five hours.
Marcus Webb: Forty minutes.
Marcus Tillerson: Forty minutes. I got my Sundays back. My wife noticed before I did.
Marcus Webb: She noticed.
Marcus Tillerson: She noticed in week two. She said, "You seem like yourself again." And I hadn't realized I'd stopped being myself.
Marcus Webb: What about the numbers? The thing the pastor cared about?
Marcus Tillerson: The numbers moved. Not overnight. I want to be honest about that. It wasn't, you know, viral overnight. But over a few months, the clips started getting shared. People in town would mention them. A woman came up to me at the grocery store and said her son, who hadn't been to church in years, watched one on his phone and texted her about it.
Marcus Webb: Wow.
Marcus Tillerson: Yeah. That was a moment.
Marcus Webb: That's a moment. That's the whole point.
Marcus Tillerson: That's the whole point. And here's the thing, Marcus. The clips were already IN the sermon. The pastor was already preaching the Word. The minister was already doing his job. I was just the bottleneck. The Word was getting trapped in an hour-long file that nobody was clicking on.
Marcus Webb: The bottleneck was the volunteer with a day job.
Marcus Tillerson: The bottleneck was me. And not because I was bad at it. I was just one person.
Marcus Webb: Has the pastor noticed?
Marcus Tillerson: The pastor noticed when somebody in the foyer asked him about a clip he didn't remember making. And he came to me and said, "Marcus, where did this come from?" And I said, "Pastor, you preached it. I just made sure people could find it."
Marcus Webb: That's a great line.
Marcus Tillerson: It's the truth. I didn't write a word. The message was his. The Spirit's. I just stopped being the choke point.
Marcus Webb: Marcus, if somebody listening is in your shoes... volunteer, small church, burned out on the clips, no budget for a full-time media person... what's the one thing you'd tell them to try this week?
Marcus Tillerson: One thing. Okay. Take last Sunday's sermon. Just last Sunday. Upload it somewhere that will pull the clips for you. Don't try to fix the whole livestream. Don't try to fight the pastor on the announcements. Just take the message that's already been preached and let something else do the cutting.
Marcus Webb: One sermon.
Marcus Tillerson: One sermon. See what comes out. You will be surprised what your pastor said that you didn't catch. And if you save five hours doing it, that's five hours back to your family, back to your own walk, back to actually being present in the service next week.
Marcus Webb: Five hours back to your family.
Marcus Tillerson: That's the part nobody talks about. The volunteer is also a husband. Or a wife. Or a dad. Or a mom. The ministry doesn't end when we stop being healthy at home.
Marcus Webb: Amen.
Marcus Tillerson: Amen.
Marcus Webb: Marcus, thank you. This was a gift.
Marcus Tillerson: Thank YOU. This was good for me to say out loud.
Marcus Webb: For anybody listening who wants to take a look at the tool Marcus mentioned, it's at sermon-clips.com. No pressure. Go poke around. If you're the volunteer in the back of the room with a soundboard and a Sunday you'd like back, it might be worth twenty minutes of your time.
Marcus Tillerson: Twenty minutes. That's all.
Marcus Webb: Marcus, brother, thanks for being here.
Marcus Tillerson: Thank you, Marcus. God bless.
Marcus Webb: God bless.
Honest conversations for the church communications team. Marcus and Priya unpack the real problems facing church comms directors, media leads, and pastors trying to reach people outside the building. No platitudes, no tactics from 2018 — just two people who've been in the weeds talking about what actually works on a Tuesday. Resources at TheSundayProblem.com. With peer mentions of Sermon Clips, sermon-transcription.com, and bibleverserandomizer.com.