Sleepy Sermons
by Pastor Russ
I got asked a question a couple weeks ago. “Does anybody sleep during your sermons?”
Huh?
Well, there was a old guy, well in his 80’s and long widowed at my first parish in Nebraska. In the first year I tended that congregation he slept through every sermon from July through October. He also beat me to church every morning. No matter how early I tried to arrive, there he was in the parking lot.
And every Sunday that first summer and fall, he’d go clunk when I began the sermon.
I finally doped it out. He lived way, way north of the church and on Saturday nights he’d go way, way south of the church down to the V.F.W. dance. He’d close the place and rather than drive all the way back north of the church to his farm, he finish what was left of the night snoozing in the parking lot, and there he’d be next morning, ready for another snooze as soon as I started my 20 minute talk.
Winter came and the V.F.W. shut down the dances until the next spring, then he stayed awake, and he wasn’t first at church nearly as often, either.
Nine-second goldfish
I don’t do 20 minute sermons any more. Nobody could handle that. In fact, people today have trouble handling nine seconds.
MIT researcher Ted Selker found out. He did a study on how people browse the internet. Most people hit a web site and spend about nine seconds looking it over. If they don’t find what they are looking for by then, they move on. Nine seconds is just about as long as the attention span of a goldfish.
Even adults practicing what is called “active listening” don't do much better. Figure 420 seconds. Sustained attention to a speaker lasts on average about seven minutes. Attention drifts for some little while, and then refocuses on the speaker, only to drift again. Preachers these days are being advised to package their messages in 7-minute segments, interrupted by attention-getting jokes, flip charts, or by getting the congregation to stand up and stretch.
This is in some contrast to previous generations. I saw a pastor's contract from the 1790’s that specified the pastor would preach at least one hour.
There was an upper limit, though, so there was a church council from this same period that told their pastor they thought a three-hour sermon was a bit too long. Two hours, they explained, would be about right. But, protested the pastor, there were some Scripture texts that took longer than two hours. Ooo-kay, the council said, when you come to one of those Sundays, preach two hours in the morning, and we’ll come back in the afternoon to hear the end of it. Uh huh.
Snack food culture
I ran across this in an issue of Wired magazine:
That about sums it up.
Church services — we are lead to believe these days — that do not come with flashy staging, movie-screen packaging and visually illustrated sermons can't cut it for contemporary Christians. And the sermon is dismissed as irrelevant if it doesn’t tell us something practical, like how to handle the kids, balance the check book, or deal with high gas prices.
Words of the Word
Me, I’m still sort of old school.
I think the words of a sermon should be an encounter with the Word of the Scripture.
A good sermon should tell us something about the Bible we did not know before, something about Christ we had not suspected, something about us and our need for Christ above all other needs that we had not known.
A sermon should tell us how we were lost, and didn’t know it until we were found. It should tell us how we were ransomed from “sin, death, and the devil” long before we even knew we were hostages. It should tell us of a divine love that sweeps away hatred, of a solace that mitigates grief, of a sanctuary in safety.
A good sermon should respond to a call we have heard but dimly, but are now eager to answer.
And if you need to stand up and stretch, well, can you wait until the sermon hymn?
I got asked a question a couple weeks ago. “Does anybody sleep during your sermons?”
Huh?
Well, there was a old guy, well in his 80’s and long widowed at my first parish in Nebraska. In the first year I tended that congregation he slept through every sermon from July through October. He also beat me to church every morning. No matter how early I tried to arrive, there he was in the parking lot.
And every Sunday that first summer and fall, he’d go clunk when I began the sermon.
I finally doped it out. He lived way, way north of the church and on Saturday nights he’d go way, way south of the church down to the V.F.W. dance. He’d close the place and rather than drive all the way back north of the church to his farm, he finish what was left of the night snoozing in the parking lot, and there he’d be next morning, ready for another snooze as soon as I started my 20 minute talk.
Winter came and the V.F.W. shut down the dances until the next spring, then he stayed awake, and he wasn’t first at church nearly as often, either.
Nine-second goldfish
I don’t do 20 minute sermons any more. Nobody could handle that. In fact, people today have trouble handling nine seconds.
MIT researcher Ted Selker found out. He did a study on how people browse the internet. Most people hit a web site and spend about nine seconds looking it over. If they don’t find what they are looking for by then, they move on. Nine seconds is just about as long as the attention span of a goldfish.
Even adults practicing what is called “active listening” don't do much better. Figure 420 seconds. Sustained attention to a speaker lasts on average about seven minutes. Attention drifts for some little while, and then refocuses on the speaker, only to drift again. Preachers these days are being advised to package their messages in 7-minute segments, interrupted by attention-getting jokes, flip charts, or by getting the congregation to stand up and stretch.
This is in some contrast to previous generations. I saw a pastor's contract from the 1790’s that specified the pastor would preach at least one hour.
There was an upper limit, though, so there was a church council from this same period that told their pastor they thought a three-hour sermon was a bit too long. Two hours, they explained, would be about right. But, protested the pastor, there were some Scripture texts that took longer than two hours. Ooo-kay, the council said, when you come to one of those Sundays, preach two hours in the morning, and we’ll come back in the afternoon to hear the end of it. Uh huh.
Snack food culture
I ran across this in an issue of Wired magazine:
Music, television, games, movies, fashion: We now devour our pop culture the same way we enjoy candy and chips — in conveniently packaged bite-sized nuggets made to be munched easily with increased frequency and maximum speed. This is a snack culture.
That about sums it up.
Church services — we are lead to believe these days — that do not come with flashy staging, movie-screen packaging and visually illustrated sermons can't cut it for contemporary Christians. And the sermon is dismissed as irrelevant if it doesn’t tell us something practical, like how to handle the kids, balance the check book, or deal with high gas prices.
Words of the Word
Me, I’m still sort of old school.
I think the words of a sermon should be an encounter with the Word of the Scripture.
A good sermon should tell us something about the Bible we did not know before, something about Christ we had not suspected, something about us and our need for Christ above all other needs that we had not known.
A sermon should tell us how we were lost, and didn’t know it until we were found. It should tell us how we were ransomed from “sin, death, and the devil” long before we even knew we were hostages. It should tell us of a divine love that sweeps away hatred, of a solace that mitigates grief, of a sanctuary in safety.
A good sermon should respond to a call we have heard but dimly, but are now eager to answer.
And if you need to stand up and stretch, well, can you wait until the sermon hymn?
posted by Pastor Russ | 10:02 AM
2 Comments:
I am not a member of your church. But I found a like minded Christian from across the country through this blog. A Pastor who is in tune with both God and Christ, but also with his congragation and his community. With a prayer to God, and a blessing for Pasttor Russ I tell you one and all. You have a keeper in Pastor Russ.
God Bless you one and all.
Rev. Roy Freeman
Interesting topic.
God bless you and your Church.
In Christ Alone,
Nova
http://pastornova.blogspot.com/
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