What is the trend? Are church members and church leaders saying sermons should be longer or shorter? The answer is “yes.”
If my answer is confusing, I understand. But the reality is there are two major trends taking place related to sermon length. I have been following these trends through anecdotal information and social media polls for three years. There are growing numbers of respondents who believe sermons should be longer. There are also growing numbers of respondents who believe sermons should be shorter. And there aren’t many people in the middle of those two divergent views.
By the way, there is a smaller, but consistent, number that feel the pastor should preach “as long or short as God leads” with no constraints at all. That view is the third of the three perspectives.
I am reticent to put my numbers in statistical percentages since my social media polls of the past three years are not scientific. Since numbers, however, can provide greater clarity, I list them here with the caveat that the accuracy is definitely not precise.
- 41%: Sermons should be shorter, in the 20 to 30 minute range. These respondents see a cultural barrier related to short attention spans. Any sermon over 30 minutes, they say, does not connect with the typical mind of today, especially in Western culture. We, therefore, must keep the message shorter and pack more information into a relatively brief time period.
- 37%: Sermons should be longer, in the 35 to 55 minute range. A solid exposition of Scripture, this perspective argues, cannot be done in just a few minutes. The sermon is the central part of the worship service, and the time allocated should be significant. We do a disservice to the Word of God when we move toward shorter sermons.
- 9%: There should be no time constraints on the pastor’s sermons. The pastor should have a sermon length that is only subject to the leading of the Holy Spirit. Anything else lacks sensitivity to God’s work and involvement.
Obviously, if you add the numbers, another 13% had a variety of responses that fit none of the categories. By way, some of the responses in my most recent social media poll and in previous polls advocated sermon lengths from 8 minutes to 75 minutes. We church members definitely are not in full agreement on these issues.
What do you think of the two trends moving in opposite directions? One group is advocating longer sermons; the other group embraces the shorter sermon. Let me hear your thoughts on this issue.
Posted on July 30, 2014
With nearly 40 years of ministry experience, Thom Rainer has spent a lifetime committed to the growth and health of local churches across North America.
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153 Comments
If someone wants to do the work, look at what the Catholic and Episcopal/Anglican seminaries teach their students in preaching class and compare that to what the evangelicals teach in theirs. I think you will find a significant difference. It seems like the former teaches students to make one point well. (They have much more in their services besides singing and preaching, especially when the readings and prayers take 20 minutes.) The latter teaches two kinds, the short one for use in chapel and the long one for use in church on Sunday. The chapel ones tend to be better, IMHO. Sometimes one sentence is all that is needed to make a point.
I do my best to keep them between 20-30 minutes. It is my experience that people start to “check out” if you go too long. Whether that is right or wrong is up for debate…but it seems to be common. I have preached as long as 45 minutes and no one complained…but I don’t do it often. I had a preaching professor tell the class that if you can’t preach it in less than 30 minutes…you have too much material. Once again…that is probably debatable.
As a trained educator, they usually tell us to keep our lessons to about 15-20 minutes when covering new material. Hence I believe the trend toward shorter sermons for some people have come from the education realm not from the church.
I am of the opinion that the sermon should be long enough to adequately cover the material. Anyway I have been in places where the preacher has been speaking for 10 minutes and I’m praying that he’ll hush, also on the opposite side I have heard sermons that went 90 minutes and wishes he could have gone longer.
As a pastor’s daughter, I would say on average 20-30. I know there are exceptions. But unless the topic and speaker are really engaging, the majority of your congregation is not going to have an attention span over 30 minutes.
One person compared sitting in a sermon to sitting through a movie or watching a race. I totally agree with the point they were making. But, at the same time, you have to remember that during the movie and races, etc, you are free to get up and go to the bathroom, get snacks, check your phone, look at facebook, talk, etc. Even in the theaters, people can’t make it through a movie without looking at their phone. But in church, this is considered unacceptable and we are expected to sit still and listen.
One of the worst sermons ever was a Sunday night sermon at a sister church that lasted over an hour and I have no idea what the pastor was talking about because after 35 minutes, I was reading lyrics in the hymnal.
Two points:
1) There are very few preachers who can hold my interest for more than 30 minutes.
2) Someone mentioned demographics. I wonder if the response depended on whether it was a preacher or a listener?
I say what I have to say, and I quit. Usually about 25-30 minutes.
Here is a funny, but true story. My dad was a pastor for years in the same church, in a small town. Every day (including Sunday) at noon they blew the “fire Siren”. He said he always tried to be finished before the siren blew, because once the congregants heard the siren, worship was over, whether he was finished or not.
I am somewhere between opinion #1 and #2. You cannot deny the reality of our sound-bite age and the effects it has had on people’s attention span and on the way they process information. It does take some time, however, to develop and present a Bible-based expository sermon. Perhaps that means we preachers must face the reality and work harder to make our sermons interesting and engaging. When I was studying for my secondary teacher’s certificate (back in the dark ages) I was taught that a good lesson plan for high school students would include at least three learning activities for the hour or 50 minutes you had them in your class. This principle might help the preacher. Rather than droning on, he might try to include some illustrations or other features that would punctuate and highlight the message. (I don’t know why I’m saying this, because I’m probably the world’s worst at monotony!)
I would suspect that the #2 and #3 crowd have never worked in the nursery. 🙂
Funny. True, but funny.
I’m in the 2 & 3 crowd, and I was in the nursery for years 🙂
That is a fair point, but it’s not always the preacher’s fault. Many times people overdo it with the announcements and other preliminaries so the pastor doesn’t get into the pulpit until a quarter till twelve. If that happens, it’s not fair to blame him for the service running over the usual time.
I think the manuscript vs outline point is right on. I’ve moved outline to allow myself to be more dependent on the Holy Spirit to empower my preaching. No longer do I worth about saying everything I have written in a manuscript, and my sermons are now in the 35 minute range from 45 minutes.
Peter preached a pretty short sermon in Acts 2, but seems to have given effective exposition from the OT scriptures.
Extra innings of a baseball game is deemed “free baseball.” Extra minutes of preaching is deemed “lack of preparation?” There is something wrong here.
Extra innings of baseball can be the result of two excellent teams playing at their highest level of skill until one of them manages to scratch out a winning run.
Or, it can be the result of two lousy teams who keep giving up multiple runs to each other every inning until one of them manages to not lose.
The same would be true for “extra minutes of preaching.” Occasionally, long sermons are the result of excellent preparation and great preaching. On those occasions I don’t actually know how long the sermon was because I haven’t been checking the time.
But generally (not uniformly), long sermons are the result of poor preparation: the preacher is rambling, re-iterating points already made, forgetting where he (or she) left off on their last point, essentially ranging around and tap-dancing until they are sure they’ve said everything they thought they might want to say.
“If I am to speak for ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.” Woodrow Wilson
I love that Woodrow Wilson quote! Thanks for sharing that.
Some short sermons are too long. Some long sermons are too short.
Well said!
I tend to take the Goldilocks approach and avoid what I would consider the too long or too short sermon. My standard for over 30 years has been to preach shorter than we worship and we generally worship for 30 minutes. Our overall service time is 75 minutes for three services per Sunday.
Thanks Dave.