The Bishop of Lichfield’s plan to shorten services might make them more palatable, but at what cost?
(A Telegraph Editorial) A short sermon
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The Telegraph is spot on. It is a fundamental part of your duty as an Anglican to suffer through bad services with a stiff upper lip. That is how you will get to heaven. As Lord Nelson once put it, in only a slightly different context, “Thank God I have done my duty!”
Sermonettes make Christianettes.
Both my favourite preachers speak for 45 mins plus.
Once upon a time, the standard was for one-hour sermons. One reason the hourglass was invented was so the preacher could keep track of how much time he still had to talk. However, some of them actually went for two hours straight, which was known as a “two-glass sermon.”
It is said, however, that Queen Victoria did not like the length of sermons of her day, and that the hourglass in the church she regularly attended was one day mysteriously replaced with one that ran out in 18 minutes. For some reason, that then became very popular, which is the origin of shorter sermons.
In some churches, especially conservative ones of the Reformed tradition, one-hour sermons are still the norm.
A video of the very famous sermon “Payday Someday” goes on for an hour.
While the content and delivery are good, I have trouble staying focused. Maybe a touch of adult ADD.
I think that our Rector would get fired if the sermon went past 15 minutes.
I think it all depends on the preacher. I once had the good fortune of hearing R.C. Sproul preach extemporaneously. He was on vacation in our community and basically just showed up as a last minute guest preacher at a small church that was using his materials–I only found out about it because I saw a scrawled handwritten announcement at our local Christian coffee shop. He preached for an hour, without any notes, on a passage from Romans and it was wonderful.
Other preachers, ten minutes is too much.