How long should a sermon be?
In my experience the number of answers to this question are equal to or even greater than the number of people participating in the conversation.
How long are sermons preached in America?
According to a Pew Research Center analysis of nearly 50,000 sermons preached earlier this year (2019) the median sermon length of American congregations is 37 minutes. This number, however, varies widely based on the tradition of a given house of worship:
- Catholic: 14 minutes
- Mainline Protestant: 25 minutes
- Evangelical Protestant: 39 minutes
- Historically Black Protestant: 54 minutes
My Experiences
I’ve served 9 Mainline Protestant congregations over the last 20 years, and am currently a member of two such congregations in the Dallas/Fort Worth metropolitan area.
To compare my experience with the findings from the Pew Research Center, I reviewed fifteen sermons from three congregations.
- Fort Myers Congregational United Church of Christ (Fort Myers, FL) – the last 15 sermons I preached while serving as their Interim/Transitional Pastor in 2015
- First Presbyterian Church (Fort Worth, TX) – sermons preached from September 1 through December 8, 2019
- Cathedral of Hope United Church of Christ (Dallas, TX) –
sermons preached from September 1 through December 8, 2019
Results
The congregations I’ve been a part of in recent years all have sermons that are significantly shorter than the median Mainline Protestant sermon.
- Fort Myers Congregational UCC – 15 minutes
- First Presbyterian (Fort Worth) – 18 minutes
- Cathedral of Hope UCC (Dallas) – 22 minutes
So What?
Without doing extensive research, I feel certain that all of the Mainline Congregations I’ve been a part of during my adult life had median sermon lengths that were shorter than the 25 minute median of Mainline Protestant tradition.
There are not a lot of different kinds of messages people hear live or watch online. Interestingly, TED Talks have been limited to 18 minutes. According to TED Talks curator Chris Anderson, this length is “short enough to hold people’s attention, including on the Internet, and precise enough to be taken seriously. But it’s also long enough to say something that matters.”
- How long was the sermon in your congregation last week? How does that compare to the median sermon length according to Pew Research Center for your congregation’s tradition?
- What do you think is the ideal sermon length? Why?