A Sunday-night workflow for one volunteer

If you are "the media person", you already ran the camera and uploaded the full sermon. Someone then asked you to "put something on social". That request is how volunteers burn Tuesday night in CapCut.

This is a smaller week. One person. No timeline editor. The full sermon still goes up. Five short reels come out of that same file.

Sunday, after the last handshake

Upload the full talk first. Same habit you have now: YouTube, title, thumbnail, link in the church app. Members who missed the service still need that file.

Then, in Sermon Short Reels, paste the YouTube link (or upload the same file if the church does not post the long version yet). You do not pick in and out points. You do not sit through the talk again to hunt a hook.

If the church can fetch new uploads automatically, connect the channel once in settings. Until that is reliable, paste it yourself. Thirty seconds, then go home. Processing runs while you pack down. You are not waiting in the building.

Monday morning, on your phone

Open the review page. You should have five vertical clips, each about 20 to 40 seconds, already captioned, with a hook line, a scripture pill if a verse was spoken, and the church name.

Watch them on a phone, not on the desktop used for slides.

For each reel:

• Keep if the thought stands on its own and the crop is on the preacher.
• Discard if it needs the previous point, if it is still in the welcome, or if the face-follow grabbed the front row.
• Edit a caption when a name, a suburb, or a verse is wrong. Change the words, re-render the caption layer, do not recut.
• If none of the five are the moment the pastor asked for, use request different moments and say what you want in a sentence. That re-runs the picker on the same sermon. It does not spend a second sermon.

Budget 15 to 25 minutes. If you are spending an hour, you are directing a film. Stop. Approve three keepers and move on. "Some reels are stronger than others" is acceptable. A missed week is not.

When a reel is approved, download the MP4 (Reels plan) or leave it in the schedule (Publish plan).

What to post when

Do not drop every clip at 9pm Sunday. That is the same traffic jam as the full upload.

A week that works for a solo volunteer:

| When | What | Why | | --- | --- | --- | | Monday lunch | The strongest hook. Question, turn, or the line the room answered. | People are back in ordinary life. One sentence from Sunday belongs there. | | Wednesday | The teaching clip. A verse and what to do with it. Scripture pill on screen. | Midweek is when small groups and Bible apps are already in someone's hand. | | Friday | The pastoral clip. Comfort, sending, or "stay". | People are tired. Do not post the confrontation clip here unless that is the care. | | Sunday morning | A short invitation plus the link to the full talk, or a reminder that gathering is today. | This one is for the church family. The others were for the feed. |

If you only kept two reels, post Monday and Wednesday. Empty slots are fine. Filling them with a landscape zoom of the notices is not.

Write a title, two-line description, and plain hashtags once per clip. Publish can draft these; still read them. Put the full sermon URL in every description. Times are local to the church. Pick one slot and keep it for a term.

YouTube, and the rest

On Publish, connect YouTube on the Publish page, approve the reel, and let the scheduler post Shorts. Revoke that connection any time in the app or in Google's permissions. Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok may still mean download-and-post until those pipes are live.

On Reels, you download and post yourself. Same calendar.

Never post a watermarked free sermon as the church's finished public work. The first sermon is how you see whether the clips sound like your pastor. Paid reels go on the channel.

If you are away next Sunday

Invite a backup person as editor (they can review and approve; they cannot delete the church). Write the posting slots in a shared note: Monday hook, Wednesday verse, Friday care. Tell the pastor that "request different moments" is a sentence, not a meeting.

If nobody can review, do not auto-post unreviewed clips. A wrong name in a caption is worse than a quiet week. The full sermon can still go up. Shorts can skip a Sunday.

What you stop doing

You stop making a landscape recap. You stop transcribing by hand. You still do the jobs a person has to do: rights and taste. Is this verse the one we said. Is this clip kind to the people on camera.

Paste on Sunday. Review on Monday. Post a few times. Leave the rest of the sermon on the channel for people who want the whole hour.