WEEKLY REPORT · AUGUST 16, 2026
📊 ANALYTICS · AUGUST 9 → AUGUST 15
🗓 ROLLING OUT · AUGUST 17 → AUGUST 23

Sin doesn't make you bad. It makes you dead.

Greater Than Our Old Life · Jeff Sullivan (Colossians 3:1-17)

Rolling Out

🗓 Rolling Out · AUGUST 17 → AUGUST 23
  • 📖 Published — Greater Than Our Old Life (Jeff Sullivan · Colossians 3:1-17 · GREATER THAN series), EN + ES same day — third consecutive same-day-parity week
  • 🏠 NEW: the 10-minute condensed cut now autoplays as the homepage hero — chapters, captions, and a phone-sized copy behind a tap
  • 📝 Two blogs: the sermon blog Why You Can't Stop Sinning by Trying Harder (live 8/16) and I Can't Remember the Day I Got Saved (publishes Tuesday 8/18, 6 AM)
View 5 more
  • 🎬 4 vertical Shorts → YouTube + IG Stories, Mon–Thu 4:30 PM ET, plus the condensed cut on YouTube
  • 📱 Mon–Fri 9 AM — devotionals Day 1–5, with a new card graphic each day
  • 🌐 A website-feature card every day at noon; a sermon pull-quote Mon/Wed/Fri at 3
  • 🇪🇸 A Spanish card every day at 7 PM — the last two 1:1 verse cards in the rotation were rebuilt 9:16 this week
  • 🙏 Four pre-service slides Saturday 8/9/10/11 AM — next Sunday is Greater Than Our Relationships (Colossians 3:18–4:1)

Snapshot

🎬 Sermon Snapshot
Greater Than Our Old Life - Colossians 3:1-17 View sermon details
📖 Sermons in English · Greater Than Our Old Life
Greater Than Our Old Life - Colossians 3:1-17

Guest Preacher Jeff Sullivan  ·  Colossians 3:1-17  ·  Sunday, August 16, 2026

Jeff Sullivan is fifty and relearning how to run — twenty minutes of warm-up for a twenty-minute run, stiff hips, the whole thing feeling like punishment even though a two-year-old does it for fun. That is the shape of Colossians 3:5. Paul lists what has to go and almost nobody disagrees with the list; we just cannot kill it. Sullivan's answer runs backward through the chapter to verses 1-4: set your heart, set your mind. The difference between forced piano lessons he quit the day he graduated and the guitar his son taught himself is desire, not discipline. And underneath desire is something God does. Quoting Louie Giglio — sin doesn't make you bad, it makes you dead — Sullivan argues that the reason effort never worked is that effort was never the right category. Dead people do not need coaching; they need someone who can conquer death. The chapter closes with clothing yourself in compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience, and with the reminder that the disciplines are not the goal — becoming love, humility, forgiveness and kindness is.

Devotionals

📅 Devotionals This Week — auto-rotate Mon–Fri
MON devotional
MON
TUE devotional
TUE
WED devotional
WED
THU devotional
THU
FRI devotional
FRI

Each card drops at 12:05 AM ET on its day; full bodies live in the app.cm devotionals rotation.

Blogs This Week

📖 2 Blogs This Week
  • Greater Than Our Old Life: Why You Can't Stop Sinning by Trying Harder ⚪ published
  • I Can't Remember the Day I Got Saved. Does That Count? 🟡 scheduled

Last Week's Pulse

📱 Instagram · PENDING *
👁
Views
🎯
Accounts Reached
💬
Interactions
27 📲
Stories Sent
▲ vs 25
* PENDING — Instagram still isn't in Supermetrics, so this tile is read by hand from the IG professional dashboard. What IS measurable from our own scheduler: 27 Stories sent in-window and none stranded in draft, second clean week running. Two frames were skipped by the cron (both copies of the Saturday 'invite for tomorrow' card) rather than left stranded — see What to Watch.
📺 YouTube · Aug 9 – Aug 15
362 👥
Subscribers
▲ vs 356
290 * ▶️
Views
▼ vs 311
13.9%
Avg View %
▲ vs 10.5%
3 🔁
Shares
▲ vs 2
Supermetrics (YouTube Analytics · ChannelTotals), Aug 9–15 vs Aug 2–8, pulled live 8/17. Two calibration notes that make this tile trustworthy: last week's 290 settled at 311 (+7%), inside the range this page predicted, and this week's 290 was pulled with Aug 15 barely reported, so expect it to settle near parity too. The honest read is FLAT on a ~300 baseline, no spike Sunday in either week — the seven-week series now runs 4,664 / 1,454 / 173 / 169 / 818 / 311 / 290. The quiet good news is quality over quantity: average view depth rose 10.5% → 13.9%, shares ticked 2 → 3, three subscribers gained, and the lifetime count moved 356 → 362.
📺 YouTube Shorts · Aug 9 – Aug 15
4
Shorts Posted
→ vs 4
4 🗓
Scheduled
→ vs 4
0
Never Sent
→ vs 0
YT + IG 📲
Surface
✅ Four scheduled, four posted, none stranded — second consecutive clean week. The pipeline change that fixed this (preflight approval as part of scheduling, not an afterthought) has now survived two full cycles, which is the difference between a fix and a fluke.
🌐 Website · Aug 9 – Aug 15
577 👤
Users
▲ vs 503
708 🧭
Sessions
▲ vs 585
1,675 👁
Page Views
▲ vs 1,049
48.3%
Engagement
▲ vs 47.4%
Supermetrics (GA4 property 514331806), Aug 9–15 vs Aug 2–8, pulled live 8/17. This is the tile last week's report said would decide everything, and it decided well. A surge that was noise would have decayed; instead users grew again, 503 → 577, sessions 585 → 708 — and the depth metrics turned around: page views 1,049 → 1,675 (+60%), pages per session 1.79 → 2.37, engagement recovered 47.4% → 48.3%. The people the campaign brought in came back and read more. This is the strongest week the new site has posted, and it is growth of the durable kind.
📧 Mailchimp · Aug 9 – Aug 15
1,327 ✉️
Recipients
▼ vs 1,331
51.0% 📬
Open Rate
▲ vs 47.7%
40.0% 📨
First-Hour Opens
▲ vs 37.8%
33 🔗
Total Clicks
▲ vs 27
CCM Sheet `mailchimp_weekly`, refreshed 8/17 by `mailchimp_pull.py`. Last week's small drift reversed: opens back up 47.7% → 51.0%, first-hour opens 37.8% → 40.0%, clicks 27 → 33, reach steady at 1,327 recipients. The list has now held at or near 50% opens all summer, which for a church list this size is excellent and worth saying out loud.
▶︎ Homepage Sermon Player · 2026-08-09 → 2026-08-16

"Greater Than Our Old Life - Colossians 3:1-17" is in the homepage hero now; the numbers below are last week's. First-party counters, not GA4 — aggregate only, nothing traceable to a person.

146
Shown
returning visitors who got the sermon instead of the brand film
115
Played
78.8% of those shown
11
Turned sound on
9.6% of plays — chose to listen
26
Kept it playing
took the sermon with them while browsing the site
1
Tapped on a phone
deliberate taps, never autoplay
0
Listened only
picture off, voice on

Watch depth: 21 → 14 → 13 → 9 reached 25/50/75/100%, so 7.8% of plays ran to the end. Captions on 3 times; listened without the picture 0.

Plays by day
S
3M
27T
26W
12T
21F
10S
16S
📈 Sermon Views — YouTube, Homepage & Podcast (last 5 Sundays)

Each bar is one Sunday’s total across every channel — the number above the bar — with the segments showing which channel contributed. YouTube = views; homepage hero = plays of the condensed cut; podcast = deduped downloads. These are lifetime totals, so older sermons have had longer to accumulate. Read the mix and the recent trend, not a strict week-to-week ranking — the newest bar is hatched because it has had days rather than weeks.

† Aug 16 = hatched: still accruing, fewer days than the bars beside it.

What Worked / What to Watch

📈 What worked

🟢 🌐 The surge passed its test. Last week's report put the question plainly: if engagement recovers as the spike decays, this was reach; if it stays at 47%, we bought traffic that never intended to stay. The answer came back better than either branch — users didn't decay, they grew (503 → 577), engagement recovered to 48.3%, and pages per session jumped 1.79 → 2.37. Page views up 60% is the cleanest growth number the new site has posted. The people the campaign brought in are coming back and reading more.

🟢 📏 The forecasting method is calibrated. Last week's report predicted the 290 view count would "settle nearer 320" as late attribution landed. It settled at 311. That matters beyond one number: it means the daily-shape read — strip the spikes, watch the baseline, expect ~7-11% late revision — can be trusted, and week-over-week deltas on this channel can't.

🟢 ✅ The operational streak held. 31 of 33 scheduled posts sent — 27 Stories and all 4 Shorts — with nothing stranded in draft for the second consecutive week. The two exceptions were skipped by the cron (both copies of one Saturday card), which is the system declining to double-post, not the old failure mode of work silently never leaving the queue.

🟢 📈 YouTube's quality metrics moved while its quantity stood still. Average view depth rose 10.5% → 13.9%, shares ticked up, three subscribers gained, lifetime count 356 → 362. Small absolute numbers, but every quality signal pointed the same direction in a flat-views week.

🟢 🇪🇸 Same-day Spanish, third week running. Dubbed sermon, transcript, study guide, podcast episodes, devotionals and the evening Spanish card all landed with the English — and as of this week the AI-content disclosure is set by the pipeline rather than by hand in Studio.

🤔 What to watch

🟡 📺 The sermon-video baseline is ~300 and hasn't spiked in two weeks. 311 then 290 (which will revise up to roughly parity), no big Sunday in either week. Nothing here is declining — but nothing is compounding either, and the growth engine this summer has plainly been the website, not the channel. That's the strategic reason the condensed cut moved onto the homepage this week: put the sermon where the growth is. Next week's report gets the first read on whether the hero placement moves watch numbers.

🟡 📲 Two skipped Stories deserve one look. Both copies of the Saturday "invite for tomorrow" feature card were skipped by the cron on 8/15. Skipped-not-stranded is the system working, but the why (a duplicate row, or a timing collision with the pre-service slides' reserved Saturday) is worth five minutes before the rotation queues it again.

🟡 📱 Instagram remains the last hand-read channel. Outbound is fully measured — 27 sent, none stranded. Inbound (Views, Reach, Interactions) still requires copying from the professional dashboard, and those three tiles are empty for another week.

This Week on IG — Scheduled

Sermon Videos — YouTube

This week’s sermon on YouTube, and what is playing on the homepage right now — tap to open.

Complete Service

Worship, liturgy and the sermon, unedited — the whole Sunday for anyone who could not be in the room.

On the site: https://christchurchmiami.org/complete-services/2026-08-16-greater-than-our-old-life/