Sermon length
A friend mentioned that there was recently (is currently?) a vigorous conversation on Twitter about the ideal, or proper, or fitting, sermon length. Since I’m off Twitter I barely have access to people’s most recent two or three tweets; I definitely can’t go perusing anyone’s account for extended back-and-forth replies and RTs. But the mention piqued my interest.
I could have sworn I’d written about this—and I have, briefly, in this long essay on preaching—but it turns out what I was thinking of was the webinar I did back in April for pastors and preachers. Starting around the 28-minute mark I share a personal anecdote and then some remarks on the question of how long a sermon should be.
But since it’s not in print, let me say something here. To start, consider what I wrote in that 2019 essay:
Method [as in, homiletical method] is a matter of prudence, native talent, gifts of the Spirit, audience, context, training, and many more largely uncontrollable variables. A faithful sermon can be 20, 40, or 60 minutes long (or more); it can be done from memory, with a basic outline, or with a manuscript; it can involve gestures and movements and animation or minimal intonation and emotion; it can encompass the whole spectrum of human passions and virtues; there is no platonic ideal of Faithful Proclamation. (Nor, by the way, is there The Biblical Model of it.) Method depends; don’t be a slave to method; don’t be a disciple of methodologists.
This remains right. Sermon length is entirely a prudential question. And the factors involved have everything to do with the preacher in question, the congregation, the occasion, and the larger social, cultural, and ecclesial context. It’s true that a sermon is not a “lesson” (as I also say in the essay). Worship is a setting not for doctrina but for kerygma. But who says kerygma should be brief? That expectation, in my experience, is rooted in presuppositions about brief attention spans, poor listening skills, and logistical convenience. The implication is not that a sermon shouldn’t be on the shorter side. A “longer” (but it’s hard to use comparative language here, since we have no “average” sermon length by which to measure) sermon has to justify its length by the very same criteria. The point is that there is no platonic ideal. The length of a sermon is not one of the substantive features by which we may judge it. A 10-minute sermon could be faithful; a 2-hour sermon could be equally faithful. And both could be unfaithful. I’ve been in rural African contexts where sermons and “words from the Lord” lasted, in themselves and in sequence, hours on end. American frontier revival preaching was similar. Were/are they too long? It depends! We’d have to hear the sermons in question.
For these reasons I’m skeptical of generic advice on this front, that is, generic at the national or even denominational level. There are certainly principles that should inform a sermon’s length: clarity, substance, exegesis, saturation in the rhetoric of the scriptures, a commitment to announce the gospel (and not some personal advice or cultural commentary), a prayerful intention to be an instrument of the living Christ to his people, etc.
But here’s one anecdote that makes me wary of any broad push to keep sermons “shorter” (not just “standard” 18-22 minutes but even less than that). There’s a church here in town that draws many college students to it whose sermons are 45-60 minutes each week. Some peers wonder how that can be possible. I outline a theory in the webinar linked above. The theory is this.
Twentysomethings who make the decision to come to church today, even in west Texas, are doing something they simply do not have to do. No one’s making them. They’re coming because they believe it’s important or, at least, because they imagine it might be important. They’re already committed or open to becoming committed. At the same time, as I’ve written elsewhere, they’re illiterate—biblically and literally. They don’t read, and they certainly don’t read the Bible. How then are they supposed to be inducted, invited, drawn into the life and story and protagonists and plots and subplots and diction and style and majesty of the holy scriptures? This local congregation’s answer, one I’m inclined to endorse, is: through preaching. Note that the preaching is still proclamation; it hasn’t yet become teaching. But it’s doing what itinerant and revival preaching did centuries ago in a similarly illiterate age: namely, providing a means of access to and a rhetorical formation in both the letter and the spirit of the Bible. Precisely in the middle of the liturgy, as it should be.
Yes, don’t use long sermons as an excuse for poor preaching. Yes, don’t make sermons load-bearing for all the church’s pastoral work. Yes, don’t so hog the liturgical attention that the Eucharist—the climax of worship!—is sidelined, minimized, or forgotten. Yes, avoid the TED Talk–ification of preaching. Yes, yes, yes and amen to all this and more.
The upshot, though, is not that sermons ought to be shorter. The upshot is that the question of sermon length is downstream of the genuinely important questions. The length will follow from answering these. Once they’re answered, and answered well, the length will take care of itself.
