Rethinking the Sermon Part 1
"I wish we could just get rid of the sermon."
That’s what one friend said to me at Starbucks recently. For us that view worship as holistic and not as song and sermon, both music and preaching seem to take precedence over other forms of worship: prayer, silence, meditation, Scripture reading. In lieu of these things we instead sing and preach about them. How many sermons have you heard mention silence as important to worship? How many times has your own church been silent? How many times have pastors preached the necessity of Scripture reading? How many times has your own church read Scripture at any great length (more than a whole chapter)? Preaching far outweighs doing in most Protestant churches.
Using the motto lex orandi, lex credendi (what one prays is what one believes) as our measuring stick, we should look at the worship service as a microcosm of how we want the local church to worship. The goal of every church is to have a congregation that reads Scripture, prays, meditates, spends time in fasting, in silence, in wonder, sings, preaches, teaches, and fellowships with one another. Yet we don’t model the right way of worship in our own worship services. We are not modeling what you pray is what you believe. We are really showing our congregations that true worship is active only in song and passive in everything else. We have taught our congregations that beyond singing and talking around a cup of coffee we are to let others do all the heavy lifting of Scripture reading, preaching, prayer, and silence.
The sermon is the linchpin to a successful return to a balance in worship because it is the facet of worship that has ballooned to swallow up the other facets in terms of time and importance.
Here’s a list of sermons from throughout early church and Protestant history that illustrate the point quite effectively:
Early Church
Augustine "Sermon 84" 2,024 words; "Sermon 185" 342 words; "Sermon 241" 462 words
St. Thomas Aquinas "Sermon on the Feast of St. Nicholas" 2,563 words
St. John of Chrysostom "Homily 1 on 1 Corinthians" 2,842 words; "Paschal Sermon" 528 words
Reformation
Martin Luther "The Wheat & The Tares" 1,474 words; "Christ Our Great High Priest" 1,768 words; "On Faith and Coming to Christ, and the True Bread of Heaven" 3,489 words
John Calvin "Justification is by Grace Alone" 5,844 words
American Protestantism
Jonathan Edwards "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" 7,200 words; "A Divine and Supernatural Light" 8,475 words
John Piper "All the Prophets Procliamed these Days 3,260 words; "Manhood and Womanhood Before Sin" 2,958 words; "Sustained by Sovereign Grace—Forever" 3,099 words
John MacArthur "4 Marks of the Man of God" 8,289 words; "4 Marks of a Hell-Bound Man" 5,213 words; "The Significance of Jesus’ Baptism" 7,555 words; "Jet Tour Through Revelation" 12,254 words
John Maxwell "The Benefits of Lifestyle Stewardship" 6,742 words; "Fruit That is Never Out of Season: Self-Control" 3,739 words
Wayne Cordiero "God’s Prodigies" 6,717 words
Jerry Falwell "Priorities, Principles, and Purpose" 4,500 words
The sermon has become more and more verbose as the Reformation brought forth American Protestantism. And from the elongated sermons of Jonathan Edwards we find ourselves at the stage where one of John MacArthur’s sermons on Revelation is 23 times longer than St. John of Chrysostom’s Pascal sermon, one of the most famous sermons of all time. (Further, the fact that MacArthur calls that book of a sermon a "Jet Tour Through Revelation" attests to his severe irony deficiency).
The Enlightenment has caused all of us to seek refuge in information instead of authentic worship, and this has led to the supremacy of the sermon above all other modes of worship. It is the climax of every Protestant worship service. Thankfully, someone like John Piper, who Out of Ur referenced today as believing in the supremacy of preaching, makes it meaningful by putting preaching in its proper place: his sermon length is very close to the early church’s longer sermons.
One of the most frustrating aspects of this dilemma is that preaching has become information dispensing instead of storytelling and story-living. Preachers are the re-callers of God’s Story in our world, the interpreters and minstrels of God’s gospel, and the verbose andoverweight sermons found today severely detract from this chief purpose of the preacher. Every good story teller knows less is more, yet the preachers keep on writing long argumentative essays instead of bringing us into the presence of God’s story.
There is hope though, as we’ll soon find out…
(Case in point: This blog post is 218 words longer than St. John of Chrysostom’s Pascal sermon).
This series is also reposted on EvanCurry.com
Wow! Well done, Thomas! Very thought-provoking. As a person who preaches every Sunday, I am anxiously awaiting part 2!
Richard Jones
My most recent sermon, “Welcoming the Outsider’s Gift,” 1959 words.
Great job Chris! If you have a link to it put it in the comments box.
Hi – I’m a Christian woman who has spent many years going to church whenever the doors were open. My experience is that “the sermon” has typically been the center of our worship gatherings. In recent years I have come to think that we might do better to only have a sermon about once a quarter as I believe that other environments (silence, conversation, scripture reading, meditation, singing, and creative settings that allow participation) are more helpful. I believe that a variety of worship experiences help us stay more present and more aware, that the sermon is one of the least helpful ways for us to learn more about God and be transformed by God, and that our present arrangement encourages the hearers to become lazy and elevates the one delivering the sermon each week to a position that is unhealthy for everyone (the one delivering the sermon weekly and the hearers). I would also like to add that I do not believe that “preaching” and “sermon” are the same thing – I believe that delivering a sermon is just one way to preach
Spot on (though I would still have a sermon each week, not quarterly).
As one who cares about precise language I do think you are keen to point out that a sermon is always preaching but preaching doesn’t always mean giving a sermon (like squares and rectangles!).
Here’s the sermon … thanks for asking.
http://www.lutheranzephyr.com/main/welcoming-the-outsiders-gift.html
I’ll admit that I’m not convinced by the small sample set of your argument, but I’m waiting to see your follow-up post … Thanks!
I planted a church in the past where we experimented with one full sermon a month, and the other weeks the pastor would instead give a short talk and then the congregation would break up into smaller groups to dialog and “teach one another” over the scripture passage at hand (the short prep talk would prepare them for their dialog by giving some background info on the text, reminding them of the context, etc.).
Essentially we had decided that most of the time we would teach one another, and once a month the pastor would take the role of teaching the whole congregation (and in that environment there was a lot of congregation dialog even during the monthly sermon). The once a month allowed us to have some sense of where the text was going and for lessons we were all learning to be applied to the whole.
The problem was that when people visited and they didn’t get a sermon, they didn’t quite understand that, or like that. Ultimately we didn’t have enough growth to give this experiment time to fully play out – for the dialog groups to really come together in their effectiveness (ie. so that people really felt that “teaching one another” was actually effective and provided them enough “nourishment”), and pressure’s mounted for the pastor to give more sermons. So maybe we should have waited until we had an established congregation (with a weekly sermon) and then slowly tried this new way.
This design was part of the originating vision for the church so we had started with it – now I feel that was a mistake. But I still long to be in a congregation that lived this way – where most of them time we were teaching one another, and occasionally we let gifted teachers teach us all.
Jeff, I think that your idea was a good one, but sometimes good ideas just don’t always work out. One of the important things about the early church I think we miss out on is that many of Paul’s letters were read in churches. The teaching of outsiders is imperative to a healthy church, I think. When it is the same voice always teaching a power develops around that voice that diminishes the roles of other voices within the community. On this point I think the Quakers and Plymouth Brethren handle the task of sermons and teaching better.
My parishioners are the ones who tell me how important good preaching is to them. But I agree that preaching does well to be modest — I seldom preach longer than 15 minutes, or about 1200 to 1500 words. If something isn’t necessary, it’s eliminated.
Longer sermons can be effective if they’re done well; black preaching is a good model here. Sermons in black churches are much more than simply someone reading an essay aloud. Done well, they are powerful and healing experiences.
I liken a sermon to a painting in an art museum. The canvas may be small or large — what matters is that the picture catch our attention and feed our souls.
Peace to you.
Wait a minute. Hold on just a hemidemisemiquaver.
Simply counting the number of words is a somewhat facile standard for comparison. What about what those words actually say? What sort of God-human relationship is envisioned? How the words position the preacher and hearers? What is asked of the hearers? What sorts of theological/ecclesial challenges undergirded or undermined the particular sermons? And so on.
Preaching has been a part of the liturgy since synagogue days (and before), either as commentary on the meaning of the scriptures, or as a direct word from Jesus/God through the words of the preacher. The sermon has always endured the temptation to reduce it to mere advice, or lovely stories, or simple ranting. But at its best it is a timely reminder of who we are, and a reorientation toward God and God’s values. The sermon locates the activity of God in our time and place, enlists persons such as us into God’s ongoing saving activity, and nestles within the praise/prayer/empowerment context of worship (the Table feeds us for the task).
More than counting words as indicator, maybe we could take a look at how the sermons count on the Word to create strong agents of God’s saving activity.
Robert, part of counting the words is that the more of our words get thrown in the less God is speaking to us thru other spiritual disciplines like prayer, silence, confession, fellowship, and so on.
Also, this is only part 1. I look more at how "sermons count on the Word to create strong agents of God’s saving activity" in part 2.
This is about re-thinking the sermon, which is a process. I am not trying to re-do the sermon, which is to start over from scratch. I just think we got a bit off the trail in some respects, and only some of us.
There will be (hopefully) many more parts to this conversation.
I agree. Longer sermons done in the African American style of worship usually have a more decentralized approach: the congregation responds, there are more than one preacher in the church, etc.
What worries and frustrates me the most about the longer sermons is that one voice is being heard above all others. The role of the pastor is to be a shepherd, and this is accomplished in several important ways, not just through the sermon. How many pastors are turned away or removed because they cannot deliver the "wow" factor in sermons but they are amazing at visiting the poor, the sick, and at one-on-one discipleship?
The sermon cannot continue to be the one and only barometer of church and pastoral health.
Perhaps we have become far too accustom with BAD sermons. As Protestants, our liturgy has been consumed by the sermon…and mainly bad sermons, and in some part betrayed by our theological heritage. For the most part Protestant history erased much of the color, texture, stained glass storytelling, and images that broadened the experience and understanding of worship. The sacraments were boiled down to baptism and communion…and for some, confirmation. Something as powerful as confession now has been morphed into a reading that hardly offers the healing that is so needed. We are fighting our own theological heritage and this I am afraid, takes some time.
As a side, I wonder whether our emphasis of the spoken Word, or in other words sermon, is an entirely practical issue. I mean it is hard enough to stay engaged with a sermon let alone a long period of silence of a scripture reading that spanned two chapters.
Thanks for listening and I am in the fight with you.
I will have to ponder that one for a while, that we have become accustomed with bad sermons that don’t challenge us in any spiritual way that leads to healing and growth.
Maybe most people like bad sermons because it’s easy to learn trivia and hard to make change.
I have been attending a sacramental church for the past four years. The sermons are short and sometimes dull depending upon who preaches. Only a few have pierced my heart with conviction, but that is the work of the Holy Spirit not the pastor. I miss the worship music, but use of scripture encourages me as I concentrate on the Words. And since I am no longer looking for a pleasing experience, I find Christ.