When’s the last time you read a news story on sermon lengths?
Before this week, I mean?
If you follow religion news, you know that the Pew Research Center released a study Monday dubbed “The Digital Pulpit” and analyzing sermons in various Christian contexts.
It’s a fascinating topic, actually.
It’s also one that I don’t recall ever making headlines before. Of course, journalists get in trouble by making statements like that. So please feel free to educate me on past coverage if I missed it. That’s what the comment box is for.
From the Pew report, here is a rundown of the approach:
This process produced a database containing the transcribed texts of 49,719 sermons shared online by 6,431 churches and delivered between April 7 and June 1, 2019, a period that included Easter.2 These churches are not representative of all houses of worship or even of all Christian churches in the U.S.; they make up just a small percentage of the estimated 350,000-plus religious congregations nationwide. Compared with U.S. congregations as a whole, the churches with sermons included in the dataset are more likely to be in urban areas and tend to have larger-than-average congregations (see the Methodology for full details).
The median sermon scraped from congregational websites is 37 minutes long. But there are striking differences in the typical length of a sermon in each of the four major Christian traditions analyzed in this report: Catholic, evangelical Protestant, mainline Protestant and historically black Protestant.3
Catholic sermons are the shortest, at a median of just 14 minutes, compared with 25 minutes for sermons in mainline Protestant congregations and 39 minutes in evangelical Protestant congregations. Historically black Protestant churches have the longest sermons by far: a median of 54 minutes, more than triple the length of the median Catholic homily posted online during the Easter study period.
Both the Washington Post’s Sarah Pulliam Bailey and The Associated Press’ David Crary produced interesting news stories on the study. The New York Times’ Elizabeth Dias did a quick item on the study, asking for reader input for a possible future story.
Bailey’s lede nailed it before offering the details from Pew:
One of America’s most famous sermons, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” probably took Jonathan Edwards close to an hour to deliver in 1741. Today, most white Protestant pastors wouldn’t dare keep people in the pews that long.
Crary boiled down the news this way:
NEW YORK (AP) — How long should a sermon be?
The major branches of Christianity in the U.S. have sharply different traditions, with sermons at historically black Protestant churches lasting — on average - nearly four times as long as Roman Catholic sermons.
Both the Post and AP included helpful analysis from preaching experts.
From Bailey’s story:
Several pastors face pressure to keep trimming the length of sermons to fit people’s minimal attention spans, said the Rev. Tim Keller, the longtime evangelical pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City.
“I don’t think most evangelical pastors are good enough for a 39-minute sermon,” Keller said. “That needs to shorten.”
Keller said when he started preaching 40 years ago, regular church attendance meant someone was in the pew three out of four Sundays. That number has dropped; now, a regular churchgoer appears maybe 1.75 out of four Sundays. He wonders whether that’s because many are listening to sermons via podcast or online streaming as a fallback to showing up for a service.
“If I preach a good sermon, if you’re in the midst of other people, you’re going to remember it more and be shaped by it than if you pick up in a podcast somewhere,” he said. “If it’s totally supplemental, then it’s fine. If, on the other hand, if it undermines the times you’re in Christian community, it’s disastrous.”
But not everyone agrees with the idea that all sermons must be short in the 21st century.
From the AP report:
Numerous prominent pastors have pondered the question of a sermon’s length.
“I’ve asked and been asked that question a hundred times,” the Rev. Hershael York, a professor of Christian preaching at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote in 2016. “Today, after 35 years in ministry, I have a definitive answer: You can preach as long as you hold their attention.”
The question came up in a 2018 episode of “Ask Pastor John,” a Q-and-A forum hosted by the Rev. John Piper, chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary in Minneapolis. He said he generally needs at least 40 minutes, sometimes more than 50, to deeply explore his themes.
“If I look around the nation, there are many hundreds, maybe thousands, of growing churches where pastors preach rich, Christ-exalting, God-centered, Bible-saturated, textually rooted, intellectually challenging, emotionally moving, life-altering sermons for 50 or more minutes, and very few people get frustrated that they are too long,” Piper said.
It’s certainly a thought-provoking topic.
Also, dig deeper into the study, and there are some interesting insights, too, not just on length but topics and theology contained in the findings.