Hello and welcome to RayFowler.org. If you are new here, please take some time to look around. If you enjoy your visit, be sure to bookmark the site or subscribe by email or feed reader so that you don't miss any future posts. You can also check out the Top Posts page to get a feel for the site. Thanks for visiting!
The preacher’s 5 year-old daughter noticed that her father always paused and bowed his head, for a moment, before starting his sermon. One day, she asked him why.
“Well, Honey,” he began, proud that his daughter was so observant of his messages, “I’m asking the Lord to help me preach a good sermon.”
Hi Ray! Can you help settle a discussion issue for S. and me? Is there any research on how long the average sermon is? Or “should” be? Thanks! We love to pester our pastor friends with random questions.
Here was my answer:
____________________________________________________
Great questions! The first question is the easier one. Average sermon length seems to be about 30 minutes for Protestant churches in the United States. How long “should” a sermon be? Probably depends on whether you’re asking the preacher or the people listening! I usually preach somewhere between 25-35 minutes on a Sunday. At the nursing home I preach for about ten minutes. A lot depends on the congregation and the particular situation.
The main consideration should be effectiveness rather than length. In other words, what length sermon will be most effective in communicating this portion of God’s Word to these people at this time? Here are a couple links with some more information:
Although much has changed in worship just in the last five years, one thing that has not changed is the length of the sermon. The average pastor preaches for nearly 31 minutes today – about the same as five years ago. Pastors in the study preached for anywhere from eight minutes each week to almost two hours. Pentecostals tended to have the longest sermons, averaging just under 40 minutes. Of the major denominational groups, Lutherans (20 minutes) and Methodists (just under 22 minutes) had the shortest sermons, on average.
Can you imagine what it might be like if the American Idol judges weighed in after your pastor’s next sermon?
Randy: Look, dude, check it out. Ya know, that really worked for me, man. That sermon was outstanding. It was da bomb!
Paula: I’m so proud of you because you’re really being yourself with us. Plus, you look great today. I just love you and can’t say anything bad about you because I never say anything bad about anybody, except Simon.
Simon: I’ve got to be honest with you, pastor. I came to hear the word of God today. But what I got was more like the baby talk of demons. You just didn’t do your homework this week. Frankly, your sermon was a nightmare! If I were you, I’d pack my bags.
I don’t think I want Simon on my board of deacons. Have you ever played “judge the preacher” during Sunday lunch after church? (Be honest now!)
Well, I am back from my study retreat. (Last week I took a three-day study retreat to prepare for the next message series at church.)
Wednesday morning I drove up to my parents’ home in Kennebunk, Maine. It was about a three-hour drive, so I began my retreat on the road by listening to some of my favorite music that helps me focus my heart on God. I arrived just in time for lunch (how convenient!) and spent some time catching up with my parents over a meal before settling in to study for the afternoon.
For the retreat I spent my mornings and afternoons in study and prayer. I spent Wednesday afternoon just reading through 1 Samuel 1-7, lingering in the text, taking notes on various themes and looking for connections. The next several days I spent blocking out the sermon texts and themes while interacting with several commentaries. I took breaks for meals and in the evenings to enjoy time with my parents.
It is amazing how much you can get done with large blocks of uninterrupted time. Time management experts say that even a five-minute phone call can disrupt your concentration and easily cost you 30-40 minutes of productivity. The computer with email and internet access can also be a source of small interruptions during the day. To guard against this, I did all of my studying away from the computer, writing out my notes longhand on lined paper in a notebook. Hopefully, I will be able to read my own handwriting as I reference these notes in the coming weeks for sermon preparation!
All in all it was a great study retreat. Thanks to my wife and children for graciously letting me take off for several days. Thanks to my parents for hosting me at their home. Thanks to my church for letting me take the time away from the office for this extended time of study. And thanks to my blog readers for being (mostly) nice in the comments while I was away.
I am off this morning for a three-day study retreat in preparation for our next sermon series. I don’t often get to do this, so I am looking forward to some uninterrupted time with God in his Word in a different setting than at home or at church.
Needless to say, the blog will be on vacation while I am gone. I should get back to posting on Monday. In the meantime, here is a fun little commercial from the Discovery Channel that has been making the rounds. Enjoy!
Discovery Channel: I Love the World
(Video length: 1:00)
I think we should remain dissatisfied with our preaching, so that we are always motivated to grow in our preaching. But I think there is a difference between being dissatisfied and being discouraged. For me, when I’m discouraged, normally that reveals the presence of pride, that to some degree in my preaching I was attempting to impress rather than serve.
Do pastors prepare their own sermons? I believe that most do, but looking at my stats from last week gave me pause.
I received over a thousand hits last week from people searching for such things as “Palm Sunday sermon,” “sermon for Palm Sunday,” “sermon about the donkey,” etc. The hits started coming first thing Monday morning and continued throughout the week. The greatest number of hits actually came on Saturday, the day before Palm Sunday. The hits continued late into Saturday night, and I even got a hit from someone searching with this phrase: “If I had to preach a sermon on Palm Sunday tomorrow, which Scripture would I use?”
Now I am sure many of these people were looking for devotional material to read or perhaps for illustrations or supplementary material for their own sermons. I often read other people’s sermons for personal benefit or to help in my own sermon preparation. But the pattern of searching would suggest that there are some people scooping the internet for sermons to preach the next day rather than actually preparing a message during the week.
Some of these hits came from foreign lands where perhaps not all pastors have the same benefit of training and financial support that many pastors enjoy here in the United States. But most of the hits came from cities right here in the U.S. It just makes you wonder.
Like to alliterate? Try out the free Something of Something Alliteration Generator. One practical application could be for preachers putting together three-point alliterative outlines for their parishioners. (That’s six “p” sounds in a single sentence. How many can you do? Pick a letter, any letter.)
One of the reasons I started this blog was simply to have a place to publish my sermons on a weekly basis. The thought was that if anyone at church missed a message, they could catch up with it later in the week on the blog. Also, this seemed like a great way to expand the ministry of the messages by making them available to a wider audience than the congregation present on Sunday mornings.
I have been pleasantly surprised at how many people actually find and read these messages while searching for various items online. It is gratifying to see God still using a message that was preached months ago in the lives of people today. So, with that in mind, here is a list of the most read sermons on the blog for 2007.
Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee has attracted a lot of attention in recent weeks, especially among evangelical Christians. I know I have been looking at him more closely as I consider which candidate to vote for in the upcoming primaries.
On Sunday, November 4, Huckabee preached a sermon at Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas. Jeremiah 29:11 was the Scripture text for his message: “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”
In his opening remarks, Huckabee made it clear that this was a personal not a political message.
I want to share really more of a message from my heart then about just politics, and I know that sometimes when people like me come to a church, the expectation is, okay, he’s going to use this to politicize. I want to assure you, I’m not … I want to … distance myself from ever making the pulpit a place where I would try to somehow take advantage of it in that way.
You can view the video of the message at the three links below. I have also included a transcript of the videos if you would rather read Huckabee’s sermon. He has a great illustration using the Arkansas Razorbacks at the end.
Talk about a sermon illustration – check out Pastor Lee Cummings’ amazing prop for his message series I Love the Eighties at Resurrection Life Church in Richland, Michigan.
(Video length: 0:44)
All I could think was, “Wow! And here I thought it was pretty cool this past summer when we added a graphic to the slides on my message series.”
So, what do you think of props in church? Helpful? Distracting? Gimmicky? Depends on the church’s culture?
Yesterday I was really tired preaching. No, not tired of preaching, just tired while preaching.
I was working off of about three hours of sleep after getting back from an all day trip to New York City with the family. It was a great trip with a lot of fun experiences capped off by a Larry Norman concert in the evening. But we didn’t get home until close to 2:30 a.m., which is very late for us as a family.
Anyways, I have never preached on so little sleep before, so I was wondering what might happen. I was hoping I wouldn’t fall asleep in the middle of my own sermon.
The funny thing was that I had a feeling that I was preaching too long. This was a Communion Sunday, which meant we would need an additional ten minutes at the end of the service to celebrate Communion together. I don’t like to look at the clock while I am preaching, and I usually have a pretty good sense of the time. I felt the sermon was dragging on forever, so I began to edit on my feet. I preach from a manuscript, so at first I clipped a sentence or two here, then a paragraph, eventually whole sections!
Finally, I got to the end of the message, called for the deacons to come forward to serve Communion, and looked at the clock. Our service runs from 10:00 to 11:00, and I fully expected the clock to read 11:05 or even 11:10. The time was . . . only 10:53!
So as it turns out, I actually preach shorter on less sleep. I wonder if this means I will start getting middle-of-the-night crank phone calls from people in the church to keep me up late Saturday nights?
Recent Guest Comments