Ingenuity, you know it when you see it

One of my favorite all-time Super Bowl TV commercials was the MasterCard "priceless" commercial that featured Richard Dean Anderson in a reprise of his MacGyver TV series character. In the commercial he cuts through a thick rope using only a pine-scented air freshener and creates an impromptu zip-line escape using a spare tube sock. He always seemed to find a way to save the day with stuff that was readily at hand.

We've seen ingenuity in children when they turn a empty appliance box into a "fort" or an elementary school teacher who can keep children mesmerized with a good book from her bookshelf. James Naismith invented basketball using a couple of spare peach baskets and a spare ball The ability to make use of handy items is an art form and ministry is no different.

Our current podcast setup is based entirely on stuff we had on hand. Each week the A/V committee makes a tape of the entire service using a cassette tape deck in the booth. In the past these tapes would go to the library and would effectively disappear from the planet. (We have tapes from say the last 10 years or so) Occasionally people would check one out.

Here is how we turn a cassette tape into the podcasts that you hear on our sister podcast blog

1. I grab the tape from last Sunday from the church library
2. I use a CD recording deck in John's office to convert the cassette into a CD
3. I use my PC and Window's Media Player to import the audio track off of the CD as an MP3 file.
4. I import the MP3 file into the free Audacity sound editing tool.
5. I grab the portion of the audio that is the sermon and export it as a separate MP3 file with additional metadata fields that describe the contents of the file. Note: We can currently only podcast the sermons due to copyright and licensing issues.
   
6. I upload the MP3 file to our web site using FTP.
7. I create a post on the Sermon podcast blog so that people will know about the new file.
8. I place the CD in the church library.

So in short, everything we are doing is with stuff we already had on hand. Pretty neat in a MacGyveristic sort of way. However, it could be better.

• The cassette tape drive flips the tape at a random point in the service (usually in the midst of the sermon) so we loose about 5 seconds of audio.
  
• The process takes a long time. It takes as long to make the original CD as it did to record the original service.

The plan is to purchase some better recording gear that will enable us to record directly to CD or to a computer hard drive and a better mechanism for duplicating CDs. In the future we will build copies on cassette tape as an exception and we will primarily distribute CDs and DVDs.

So, look around at the stuff you have in your midst. What could you accomplish if you applied a little ingenuity.