Sermon Length

Perhaps those with greater education have a message and they know how to deliver it.

Rob

 

I'm guessing the pastors with advanced degrees tend to like to "stay on schedule," so to speak.

 

A skilled orator strives to get to the point and polishes his sermons. It takes effort not to "chase rabbits." If you listen to a lot of preachers in small churches their sermons are all over the place.

But having said that, preachers who have larger congregations would cease to have larger Churches if they preached sermons that equaled the great preachers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Those preachers polished their sermons and got to the point too. They just knew their congregations really wanted to be there and did not mind if they heard a great sermon that lasted past midnight. . .

 

I'm curious: if "those preachers polished their sermons and got to point," wouldn't their sermons have been shorter, not ones that "lasted past midnight?"

 

I really don't know. I have read some sermons of older preachers and the ones I have read cover a whole lot of subject matter. Their sermons were not "Three Point" speeches.

Here is a list of Spurgeon's Sermons. Pick one and read it and see how it compares to the average preacher from today. https://www.spurgeongems.org/spurgeon-sermons/

 

Prime example of seminary acting as the cemetery.

 

We once had an interim that had his Doctorate, but worked as president of the local Tech College.
This guy would always have a sermon of 20-25 minutes, but the points were extremely clear and he delivered them concisely and orderly.
One never left his preaching wondering what he "really" meant to convey.
Oh, very biblical also!!

 

When you preach more about yourself than Jesus Christ and things related to him, of him, by him, and for him, it's time to quit... Brother Glen

 

One of my favorite preacherism as I call them, was of a visiting preacher back in the day, went into preach in a homemade stand that was rife with knotholes... As he was preparing to speak laying out his notes, his hand slipped... Turning the congregation he said... I had a sermon all prepared this morning but it went down the knothole... Brother Glen

 

Hm. Considering I used to sit through sermons where the pastor was literally talking about little else but rock music being evil and the King James being the only valid translation, that makes me think.......

 

I see that some here believe the axiom "Quantity has a quality all its own" applies to word counts in a sermon.

 

In one version of this story, I heard that the preacher went on to say that since he lost his sermon in the knothole, he would have to depend on the Lord this morning. But tonight, said he, I will be better prepared!

 

The difference is apparently more complicated than more education vs. less education. The article also indicates that mainline Protestants are more likely than evangelicals to preach less than 20 minutes, while pastors of "other ethnicities" apparently tend to preach longer than white pastors (they didn't say "white" but I assumed that was what they intended).

There may be a perception among some that the more educated are better speakers than the less educated. I have not found that to be a consistently correct in my experience. Some highly educated speakers are dry as Ezekiel's bones (and probably as brittle). You will pray that they don't go over 10 minutes, 5 would be better! Good and bad speakers come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and levels of education. The shorter time among the more educated may be as much because that was what they were taught to do as anything else.

The clock can be the enemy of the pastor and the congregation. Some preachers who are done in five minutes think they must drone on another 20 or 25 minutes simply because that is the time slot they have been given. Some preachers who aren't finished slice off some important things they should say because the services must be over by noon. (And there are numerous variations besides these.)