Sermons Should End Mercifully On Time (February 11, 2007)

How long should a sermon be?

A pastor friend of mine told me that he just preached a 40-minute sermon: that would put him in the Pentecostal range. I did some research and found that the average Protestant sermon is 31 minutes, with Pentecostals the longest-winded at 40 while Lutherans are the shortest at 20.

Maybe that is why three different times people have come up to me
after a message and said, "You sound like a Lutheran!" They weren't
able to pinpoint why, but it had something to do with my style (or
lack thereof). Maybe they were keying on the clock. I don't time my
sermons, but I know that they're seldom longer than 25 minutes.

That is more than twice as long as what Catholics are used to. I read
a fascinating interactive blog among Catholics and found that 10
minutes was pretty much the limit of what they could stand from their
priests. (It must be torture for them to visit an evangelical worship
service. They must wonder, "When is that preacher ever going to
stop?")

My parents said that the greatest preacher they knew, Harry Ironside of Moody, gave 20-minute messages. When I mentioned this to a homiletics professor in seminary, an old-timer who had heard Ironside, he said, "Poppycock!" (Literally, he actually said the word "Poppycock," and loudly.) He insisted that Ironside preached 35-40 minutes. He was probably right. I think the discrepancy is accounted for by the fact that Ironside was so good that, in my parents' minds, his messages flew by in about half their actual time.

My advice to any young preacher is that, if you're as gifted as Ironside, go ahead and push past the half hour mark, because there is no need for you to be constrained by the rules that govern us mortals. Just as star basketball players get to jack up 20 shots a game, so the Ironsides and Spurgeons and Wiersbes get to preach as long as they want. The rest of us had better know our limitations. Once in Colombia a guest preacher at the church I attended began his message with, "My sermons aren't any good, but they're short." He was right. He gave an adequate (but bland and forgettable) message for 12 minutes and then sat down. I thought, "You're my hero!" What blessed self-awareness, what kind consideration of a congregation's beleaguered attention span.

Then there was the preacher who filled in for me while I was on vacation at my former church. I talked to him beforehand and told him that the congregation was accustomed to sermons about 25 minutes in length. He thanked me, but then when he preached (I saw the video later), his first words were, "Your pastor told me that he preaches 25-minute sermons, but where I'm from we don't know how to preach messages that short." He then proceeded to bore the dung out of my poor congregation for most of the next hour.

You can read aloud Jesus' whole Sermon on the Mount in under 20 minutes. If we make our words count, we preachers shouldn't have to take much longer than that to get our message across.