Preaching is really hard, and many churchgoing people have no idea what goes into preparing a sermon. Perhaps they shouldn’t care, but preachers are disappointed to find that many folks think we just preach on Sundays and do little else. There are preachers who wait until Saturday night to get their sermons ready; they are either extremely gifted or stupid and lazy.
The late Rev. Dunstan Stout, a Roman Catholic missionary priest to the American community in Mexico City, was the best homilist I have heard, ever. I knew him in the mid-1960s, and he could deliver a four- to six-minute homily, hard-hitting and even accusatory, and everyone in the church believed he was speaking directly to them…[He said] “a homily or sermon must be Gospel-centered and relevant to the listeners.” His final rule on preaching: “Never say anything from the pulpit that you do not believe.”
Preachers, past and present, violate Father Stout’s rules. Sometimes I suspect the problem is that these preachers have lost their Gospel faith and turned to their own agenda. One hears social justice and political agendas of all sorts preached, but little or nothing of the Gospel.
This has many very good parts but I wish there were not these 2 blemishes: (1) the obsession on short length and (2) the overreaction to revivalist preaching (sadly typical of too many in the mainline…)
Length is a tough subject but this remains true–Sermonettes produce Christianettes (I don’t know who said that first though it is often attributed to the late John R.W. Stott). Haddon Robinson is very good on this, length is more than anything related to strength of sermon, some he says can preach 10 minutes and it seems like an hour and some can preach 45 minutes and it can seem like 10 minutes.
Mr. Smith writes for the church in the globe which has the greatest distance between its view of its own preaching versus the reality of that preaching, and that makes this piece all the more impressive.
Most to be appreciated is the plea for the gospel, oh yes, please can we have more of that.
Kendall–Preaching is subject to Einsten’s explanation of the theory of relativity to reporters. It is like the difference between being with a pretty girl and sitting on a hot stove–you can be with a pretty girl for hours and it seems like a minute; but you can sit on a hot stove for a minute and is seems like hours. If the preaching is good and Biblically based then time is irrelevant. We are quite fortunate in my local church, and in PEARUSA, to be blessed with MANY great preachers. My local church service starts at 10 and usually lasts until 11:45 including at least a 30 minute sermon and no one complains–quite the opposite. The flip side of that is, at my prior church I used to say if I heard another sermon about a mentally challenged child on a farm and the peracher’s grandfather’s shot gun, one day I was going to snap and starngle somebody!
I am afraid that in many cases the preacher is trying to give away something that he does not have.
Unfortunately, many so-called preachers think they are masters at the craft, and they have no idea what constitutes a sermon, let alone a good sermon. I have often been subjected one preacher who never talks (he seldom preaches, although he thinks he is) less than an hour, goes down at least a half-dozen rabbit holes explaining individual words, but never gives you any idea how to apply his words in your life to try to live a better, Christocentric life. As a consequence, virtually everyone either goes to sleep, or tunes him out and reads or thinks about something else. If they are visiting, they are never seen in our church again.
Sad to say, I have heard very few sermons longer than 25 minutes which were worth listening to. Most of them rambled, some would have been better lectures at a Sunday adult ed class, and more than a few were designed to impress the faithful with the speaker’s mastery of Scriptural trivia and Biblical languages. The best advice given me by a wonderful preacher who rarely exceeded 15 minutes was “Be Blunt, be brief and be gone.”
[blockquote]Preaching is really hard, and many churchgoing people have no idea what goes into preparing a sermon. Perhaps they shouldn’t care, but preachers are disappointed to find that many folks think we just preach on Sundays and do little else. There are preachers who wait until Saturday night to get their sermons ready; they are either extremely gifted or stupid and lazy.[/blockquote]
Too many times I can still be working on my sermon on Saturday evenings but I would be in serious trouble if I was only getting started then. My homiletics prof at theological college said one needs to spend at least one hour of preparation for every minute preached. So if I preach my usual 12 to 15 minutes that’s 12 to 15 hours at least of prayerful wrestling with the text and writing. I find that to be a bare minimum for me. Too often I need twice that amount of time. And this doesn’t take into account the time spent reading to help keep the inner fires burning. Preaching really is hard work. It is rewarding, enjoyable, and nurturing for sure, but still very hard work. Almost thirty years of doing it hasn’t made it any easier.
I was once fortunate enough to hear R.C. Sproul preach extemporaneously for an hour on the Book of Romans. I could have sat there for another hour. It all depends on who the preacher is.
I would mention that I have another friend who is a pastor who says he often gets very depressed writing and preparing his sermons, which surprised me since he is a pretty good preacher. When I asked him why, he said he felt the Holy Spirit’s pressure to write the sermon so that it would get the message across to as many people as possible who were listening to it. He said that is extremely difficult given how different people are, and so he really struggles on how best to put things.