My Dad was a church pastor, so I grew up in the church system. I attended two services every week for most of my life and felt guilty when I didn’t. When I do the math in my head, I estimate that I have attended over 4000 church services.
That’s a lot of sermons.
But, I’ll level with you: I reckon that 3990 of those sermons made no difference to my life. That is not to say that I didn’t enjoy some of them, but as for lasting impact and change, and real personal, emotional, and spiritual growth, well… it’s sad to say that preaching didn’t really contribute much at all.
Later, when I went on to work for the Church, I preached 200 of my own sermons. I spent hours and hours of my paid time preparing a 30–40 minute oration for my congregation every week. I still have all those sermons on file — even though I don’t agree now with much of what I preached back then. I can’t bring myself to delete them because, well… they represent so many hours of hard work.
Whenever I had to preach a sermon, I typically spent a third to a half of my working week preparing for it. Sometimes I felt bad that the people in the church were paying me— in good faith — for my time, when it felt like I was spending it all producing content, more or less.
It got me thinking, is the amount of time a pastor spends preparing his sermon really worth it?
The cost of a sermon
So, how much does a sermon really cost? Let’s break it down. According to salary.com, the Median wage for pastors in the United States is $99,337, though some — particularly those who lead larger churches — would certainly be paid more than that. But, on average, that is a little over $1900 per week.
Now, how much of a pastor’s working week is spent on sermon preparation? When you do some research on some of the more well-known preachers going around, you find various answers. John Macarthur spends 10–15 hours preparing his sermon each week. Tim Keller reports that he spent an average of 14–16 hours. John Piper revealed that he would typically spend all day Friday and half of Saturday, and Matt Chandler even longer.
But what about your average, run-of-the-mill preacher? A poll conducted by Thom Rainer revealed that over 70% of pastors spent between 10–18 hours per week on sermon preparation.
Therefore, if you consider that a standard working week is 40 hours, then that means the average pastor spends between 25 and 45% of their working week preparing the sermon. Granted, many pastors would work longer hours than this and certainly wouldn’t be paid for their overtime.
That means that, on average, a church spends between $24,834 and $44,701 per pastor per year on sermons — which works out to between $477 and $859 per sermon.
Worth it or not?
The problem of sermons
Now, I would be the first to admit that $500 doesn’t seem too much to pay for a top-quality keynote speaker to deliver a memorable and impactful message. The problem is that most sermons are neither memorable, impactful, or all that useful — now that I think about it.
Don’t believe me?
Let’s do an experiment. If you are a regular church attendee — or even if you’re not — do you remember the point of the last sermon you listened to? If I were a betting man, I would say that you don’t remember.
And research supports that view. In fact, within hours of hearing the sermon, you’re likely to remember around 5% of what you were taught — about the same rate as for university lectures.
Christian Blogger, Thom Schulz, did an experiment where he interviewed church-goers on Wednesdays to ask them what they remember from the previous weekend’s sermons. It’s an older video now, but it displays — in quite a comical way — how most people simply don’t remember the last sermon they heard.
I have a confession to make. Back when I was a preacher, sometimes I would preach something and then quietly think to myself, “Man! That was fucking brilliant! Is someone writing this down!?” only to look up and see several people snoring away in their pews.
You get the idea. It doesn’t matter how profound and apparently life-changing your message is if your communication is well… enough to put a person to sleep. And that’s what sermons do. Here’s why:
Attention Span
A study by Pew Research revealed that the average length of a sermon in the Evangelical church is 39 minutes. What’s the problem with that? Research tells us that the average adult has about 10 solid minutes of focused concentration in them before they start to drift.
Actually, the assumption that you’ll get 10 minutes of solid focus in a generous one. Research from Barna shows that only a little over half (59%) of Millenials listen carefully during Sermons. 17% report getting distracted, and another 17% reported that they look at text messages, social media, and emails during the sermon.
I used to do that too — even when I was the preacher!
Synaptic Pruning
The human brain has to deal with an enormous amount of input from our five senses and our nervous system. Only a small amount of this information is ever retained in long-term memory; the rest is forgotten. That process is called synaptic pruning.
Think of the last time someone introduced to you by name a stranger who you knew you would most likely never see again — perhaps the friend of a friend or someone at a party. If you were asked to recall their name two seconds later, you couldn’t do it. It would be gone.
Your brain has made a choice for you without your conscious involvement. Your brain has said, “I don’t need to remember this,” and BAM! It’s gone! Instantly!
Now, you might sit and listen to a sermon like a good parishioner, but the fact of the matter is that once we start receiving a certain amount of information, our brain starts to get fatigued, and involuntarily some information is lost — despite your best efforts to retain it.
Lecture Style
Of course, certain things help to improve the retention of information. Information is more likely to be retained and acted on if:
- We are interested and actively engaged
- We receive it via more than one of our senses
- We discuss it with others to assist in processing it
- We speak it out to reinforce it
- We put it into practice immediately
- We teach it to someone else
- It engages us at an emotional level
But, given that sermons are typically delivered using a “lecture-style” approach, almost none of these strategies can be employed. Yet, Sunday after Sunday, pastors stand behind pulpits and employ this — the weakest of communication vehicles.
Back in the 1940s, Famous American educator Edgar Dale developed The Cone of Learning. I’m sure you have seen it before. His theory was that we retain around 5% of what is presented to us in a lecture style, 10% of what we read, and 20% of what we hear. But, we remember 50% of what we see and hear and 90% of what we do. This all points to the need for a multisensory and interactive approach as the most effective way to communicate to a group.
Yet, churches persist with putting a so-called expert behind a pulpit to spoon-feed a room full of dull and passive listeners. It makes no sense to use a method that is not suited to how our brains operate.
Effective communication is a two-way street
I concede that many churches are trying to be more creative, entertaining, and interactive in the way that they present their teaching. However, the fact remains: The prevailing teaching method in the church is the lecture-style sermon — the talking head up the front of a passive audience.
That is why if you were to walk into most churches during the sermon on any given Sunday and take a look around, you would most likely observe a common trend amongst the people there.
They are bored.
The sermon is a sacred cow that needs to be slaughtered. In fact, it’s not even all that Biblical. The original proclamation of the Christian message was a two-way conversation. When the oratorical schools of the Western world laid hold of the Christian message, they made Christian preaching something vastly different, and the dialogue between speaker and listener faded into a monologue.
So, does the cost-benefit analysis of the sermon stack up? Well, in my humble opinion, it’s an awful lot of money to spend on something that doesn’t change anyone or anything and will likely be forgotten in a few short days.
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This post was previously published on Backyard Church.
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