Ken Myers has been recording long conversations about culture and Christian conviction since the early 1990s, first on cassette, then CD, then MP3. The Mars Hill Audio app is where that archive finally feels like it belongs: on a phone, in the car, with a membership that already knows who you are.
AppPresser built the app. Mars Hill Audio built the website. The app does not keep a second copy of the catalog. It pulls audio, covers, summaries, and access from their WordPress site, then lays that library out for listening.
About Mars Hill Audio
Mars Hill Audio is an audio publisher hosted by Ken Myers. The mission on its site is to produce creative audio resources that encourage Christians to grow in obedient wisdom about the cultural consequences of loving God and neighbor. It is a small staff, and the work is long interviews and readings, not a sermon feed.
The flagship is the Mars Hill Audio Journal, an audio magazine of conversations with authors, critics, artists, and scholars. Around it is a catalog built since the early 1990s: Friday Features published almost every week since 2018, Archive Features taken off old cassettes, Areopagus Lectures, conversations, anthologies, reports, and bonus audio from partner organizations such as the Eliot Society. Membership is how listeners get the full library, on the website and in the app. A Listen for free page and a Visitor’s Pass open more than 15 hours before someone joins.
Mars Hill Audio built and runs marshillaudio.org. That site holds the catalog, the membership plans, the guest and topic indexes, and the account. AppPresser did not build the website. The app is the listening room for the same WordPress library.
A player built for long conversations
Open a program and the screen gets out of the way. Cover art, a pause button, a scrubber, and 15-second skip in both directions. That skip is the feature people actually use, because these are interviews you stop to think about, then rewind a sentence.
The Now Playing screen adds two controls that matter for this catalog. Chapters jumps between segments inside a volume. Car mode is there because a lot of this listening happens on the road. A share icon sits in the corner when you want to hand someone a conversation.
The Journal, one volume at a time
The Mars Hill Audio Journal is the flagship: a quarterly audio magazine, about two to three hours, built from interviews with authors, critics, artists, and other thinkers. In the app, a volume opens like an issue. Cover, date, guest list, a Read more link back to the longer note, and a track list. Recent volumes run about seven tracks, and each one plays or downloads on its own.
A star on the track saves it to Favorites. That list lives on the membership account, so it matches the Favorites list on marshillaudio.org. Browse on a big screen. Listen on the phone. The list stays one list.
More than the Journal
The same layout holds the rest of the catalog. Areopagus Lectures, conversations, anthologies, reports, and bonus features from partner organizations each get a cover, a date, a short note, and a track. The home screen below shows a From the Archives note on Richard Wilbur beside Simon Oliver’s 2017 Areopagus Lecture.
Full-screen playback keeps the artwork large and the controls few. Fifteen seconds back, fifteen seconds forward, pause, scrub. Nothing else competing with the voice.
My Library, search, and offline downloads
Sign in with the same email and password as the website. My Library then lists what that membership unlocks. Paid members can be looking at hundreds of items: current and archived Journals, Friday Features, lectures, and partner audio. Search sits at the top. A download button on each row saves the file to the phone.
The home tab stays open to visitors. It shows the 10 most recent Friday Features, the same window Mars Hill Audio describes on its site. Members get the rest of that collection, hundreds of hours, from the catalog. A Visitor’s Pass on the website also unlocks a Listen for free shelf of more than 15 hours, and those files can be downloaded in the app.
Filters narrow a big archive without making people guess. Journals, Friday Features, lectures, and the rest can be switched on or off. The categories are not invented in the app. They are the ones already organized in WordPress, including Archive Features pulled off old cassettes and Bonus Features supplied by partners.
What the website still does
The site remains the publication. Membership plans, gift and group options, guest and topic indexes, related reading, partner pages, and account details all live at marshillaudio.org. The app signs in against that account, shows what the membership allows, and plays it.
On the App Store the app is free, listed in Education, rated 4+, and scored 4.4 from 35 ratings. On Google Play it is rated 4.6. Listeners who have followed the Journal since the 1990s say the app is what finally made the back catalog easy to reopen.
The short version
This is a membership audio app that knows its job. It does not try to replace the website. It takes a WordPress catalog that has been growing for thirty years and makes it searchable, downloadable, and ready for a long drive. For a publisher with a deep archive and a small staff, that split is the whole product.
AppPresser built the Mars Hill Audio app on top of their existing WordPress site. If you publish interviews, courses, or a members-only library the same way, compare plans and pricing, or request a custom development quote when the app needs more than a standard build.