How long is the message?

I have got to agree. I am going to say up to 30 minutes....There are so many ministers today who have an over inflated feeling of self importance.

 

Any number of books on communication as well as one or two texts on preaching. I'm not around my resources so I'm not going to look up exact references. The reality is that most people will grant you about 20 minutes of time for the best communicators (religious or not) and then their attention seems to wane.

Listenership tests have traditionally demonstrated that about 20 minutes is the max form people in our context. There are lots of reasons for this.

Our philosophy for proclamation is we meet people where they are at and provide them with sound communication and life application. For our context we try to not go beyond 20 minutes with our main message. Now we can have an additional 5 or so minutes for the wrap up, but we try to be concise and a good steward of people's time. We also try to preach to one point in our messages. This is an important practice, we work from big ideas.

Also, given that we do about 30 to 35 minutes of music before and after the message we also note that people's bladders are content within that range.

Listen, I've got reasonable grounds for saying this. I've been around lots of preachers and communicators. The consensus for the ones who get it and are doing it well is about 20 to 30 minutes. Too often I think we, pastors, believe that we have the spiritual authority to confine people to our standard of listening and attentiveness. One of the acts of spiritual humility, for pastors, should be to confine ourselves to a reasonable time limit.

I'm not dogmatic about it. Preach however long you want. I really don't care. Proclaim with authority and discernment.

 

"If you ask me how you may shorten your sermons, I should say, study them better. Spend more time in the study that you may need less in the pulpit. We are generally longest when we have least to say. A man with a great deal of well-prepared matter will probably not exceed forty minutes; when he has less to say he will go on for fifty minutes, and when he has absolutely nothing he will need an hour to say it in." —Charles Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students

 

Good post! :thumbs:

 

Suggesting that a longer sermon is verbose and a lack of humility sounds pretty dogmatic.

 

Such silliness! A sermon should be as long as God intends for it to be. I suppose too many of us either respect ourselves or the watch more than we do Him.

I generally preach for 45-60 minutes. However, I am preaching in American Sign Language so it takes longer to get the message across. Our Deaf folks don't mind it. It's the hearing folks who get up and leave. Interesting, hmm?

 

"Yall" do know what it means when the preacher takes off his watch during the sermon?.............

Absolutely NOTHING!!!

 

Curious Mex, are you a preacher (pastor)? Does God give you such clarity and boundaries about a message as to its content and length? Does he give you the message fully or nearly fully developed? Or do you sense, by His leadership to preach on a certain relevant topic, and then you develop the content around that topic. I am interested in knowing for the pastors out there specifically "how specific" God is to you when constructing a message or even a series of messages.

 

BTW, I usually "lose" the Calculus students after about 20-30 minutes, and thus try to insert something "off topic", anecdote etc, to get them to "snap back" for the second half of class.

 

Love that quote Jerome, thanks for sharing.

 

The message is as long as the Spirit speaks through a preacher. When the Spirit leaves, the message is over. I have heard many "babble on" after the Spirit has left them, and they tore down what the Spirit built.

 

Sounds to me like the truth hurts.

 

One of the things we intentionally seek in a church is shorter sermons.

We do not believe those who preach or sit under long sermons are necessarily any more spiritual or better fed than those under short sermons.

In fact, we have encountered hubris, the attitude of judging one's commitment to Christ as lacking unless you sit for very long sermons.

Uh, no. Too much training as teachers I guess. Attention spans are simply not that long, uninterrupted. Don't even bother mentioning movies (frequent scene changes), tv (frequent scene changes and commercials), or sporting events (frequent action changes.) Anything you expound after about 20 minutes literally goes in one in and out the other of most folks. Sorry

Also, if you leave folks wanting more they will be back. Leave them wondering if you are ever gonna finish and they probably won't be back.

The human body can also sit still for just so long. We worship as a family, and smaller fry need to wiggle badly after around 20 minutes. For that matter, our older knees start to seize up and our fannies are just tired after that long.

Yes, the puritans sat for long sermons. They also burned witches at the stake and put people in stocks for falling asleep in church. Needed the deacons to have a feather stick to keep the ladies awake and a whap upside the head for the guys.

We also shun churches with very loooonnnggg song portions, or prayers that go on for 20 minutes or so.

I'll say it gently, but sometimes when someone runs on toooo long they think they have more to say, or more to teach, or are leading folks intimately to Jesus, but maybe they really....um....don't.

Pastors who know when to speak and when to hush up are rare jewels, and seem to me to produce disciples in love with and following Christ, not the pastor.

 

Another good post! :thumbs:

 

Indeed, as Martin Luther said, "Stand up, speak up, and shut up!"

Cheers,

Jim

 

"Sermonettes are for Christianettes..." :smilewinkgrin:

 

After listening to any sermon I always ask myself, What did I learn from this message? I think it has more to do with content than time. I have gotten a lot out of short messages and I have gotten a lot out of long messages. Some could have gone on and on and I would have listened intently and some just seemed to ramble on and should have ended 5 minutes after it started.

 

I have sat under sermons that went well over an hour and I wanted more when the preacher finished.

I have sat under sermons that went well under 10 minutes and it was 9.5 minutes too long because nothing biblical was said.

Time is meaningless as far as sermons go. What is critical is an exegesis of the Word of God and a "so what" question for application.

I have sat under a ton of sermons where the preacher THOUGHT he was preaching the Word of God because of the great preponderance of Bible verses used in his delivery. They actually said little or nothing apart from "choose" and even that was often botched, because they often offer so many "points" and "poems" that no one listening really knows what to choose!

I strive for something different in my sermons -- clarity of the Word and action based on that clarity. Generally just ONE action and ONE point, though some sermons may have more, but only if driven by the text. I find that most pericope of Scripture have one basic concept that the writer was trying to get through to the people and preaching that makes the flow come very naturally and one does not have to resort to common sermonizing techniques such as alliteration, 3 points and a sad story, etc. Explain the text in context, draw inferences, illustrate, and let the Holy Spirit do what only He can do. Preach "verb" sermons instead of "noun" sermons. Noun sermons deliver information. Verb sermons ask for action. Simple and powerful, and people move.

An example of a verb sermon concept versus a noun sermon concept based on the story of Jonah:

Noun:

Blah, blah, blah, run from God, blah, blah, hide from God, blah, blah, God casts Jonah into the belly of a great fish, blah, blah, the fish spits out Jonah who goes on to do what God said in the first place.

Verb:

Ever been in the belly of a great fish while you ran from God?