The 20 min shibboleth!

In our part of the world, people are carved in stone behind the idea that preaching should only go for 20m. How you expect to grow a congregation in maturity at that length of time is beyond me.

Now I realize that it is important to get to the point and be crisp with the message, but 20 min works if you are an itinerant preacher who does a gospel presentation each week, I don’t think it is so effective if you really do need to preach ‘the whole counsel of God’.

How can you plumb the depths of a decent passage of scripture, linking the message of this particular passage into the themes of the book and then into the wider Bible, picking up the Systematic theology themes, the ethical implications for the Christian life, and then the apologetic necessities for the Christian’s world view in the face of a secular and atheistic society, while making it engaging to listen to in 20m?

It would have to be at least 25m ;)

And for some reason this 20m marker is hard to shake, but when you know you need to chop the sermon, you always chop the illustrations and other ‘fluff’, which I think tends to make the whole thing a poorer experience for the listener and more like a lecture. The ‘faithful’ but uninspiring sermon.

As I mentioned before Einstein proved time was relative, 10secs on a hotplate was a lifetime!! I suspect the length of preaching is not the issue, but the quality of the preaching is.

Sure you don’t have to, nor really can you do, ALL the things listed above every week, but our preaching would be of a better quality if we did, even if it meant 40m and the notices, and one song had to get chopped, for the sake of being faithful with time for our people over the whole service.

The integrated and ethical Christian life of worship is going to need more than 20m a week to explain and encourage in engaging ways. I suspect the predictable 20m 3 point effort, while it may be faithful, reflects ultimately a lack of confidence in the act of communication that is preaching, and panders to a dumbing down of Christianity in both the hearers and the preachers as well.