A TimesOnline artilce explores what people in the pews want in a sermon. Here are some highlights:

Evangelical Christians looked forward most to sermons — hardly surprising in a movement begun by the preaching of John Wesley and spread to a new world by the urgent sermons of the American Great Awakening.
Roman Catholics were most keen on sermons that educated rather than challenged them. Baptists wanted sermons to convert them, Anglicans wanted to be entertained and members of the new, independent evangelical churches wanted to be challenged and encouraged.
Baptists and Catholics were also more enthusiastic about the Bible being mentioned in sermons than were Anglicans and Methodists.
The ideal length of a sermon also seems to divide the denominations. While many Anglicans wanted less than ten minutes — although up to 20 minutes was fine if there was no “waffle” — some Baptists wanted to sit through at least an hour and a quarter. Catholics, by contrast, wanted their homilies to be completed within ten minutes.

Hmmm . . . . “Anglicans want to be entertained.” Does this mean I need to develop my balloon animal routine?

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Matt: I discuss this sort of thing in my new blog:http://afmclavier.wordpress.com/2010/01/19/i-get-grayhairs/

Original post here.

One Sunday my senior warden came up after the 7:45 am service and told me that I had preached for 23 minutes.  I looked at him and asked how he knew.  He told me he timed my sermons.  I asked if he did this all the time (I had been there for five years at this point) and he said he did.  So I asked boldly why he told me the time of the sermon this particular morning and he replied, “This is the first time you went too long.”

So 23 minutes is the max and I tend towards 15-18 minutes, being a minimalist sort of person.  Preaching is like fishing, you gotta hook em, let em play on the line for awhile to establish that they are hooked and then reel them in.

There are many interesting facets to explore here: What is the purpose of a sermon? If one of the purposes is to convey information,the nature of the audience in part determines the constraints on the nature of the sermon.

I like the fishing metaphor. It suggests that there is more than just information transmittal going on. Being reeled in means being changed in some way. This would include the ways we think, but would also include the ways we act.

Entertainment has become a standard pejorative to level at a number of things, especially worship. Maybe there is such a thing as “mere entertainment” - practices that dull the mind and harden the heart. But more broadly, entertainment is the practices that “gain our attention.” Every good teacher knows that entertainment MUST be a part of teaching, for if you do not have your classes attention, they will not learn from you.

As a part of the liturgy, how is the sermon actually itself worship? How can the act of listening be worship?

Time limits for sermons are too funny! I have sat through sermons where 5 minutes was too long! And I remember sitting at a talk (not a sermon, but same principle) by Martin Marty that probably lasted over an hour, but seemed like seconds. I can imagine that there have been times when I fidgeted through a sermon while others were held spell-bound, and vice versa.

And of course we forget the shock value of Jesus’ parables (sermonettes?). “There was a man who had two sons, and the younger son said to him, ‘I wish you were dead.’”

[Fr Matt, please post your balloon animal routine on YouTube!]

When I was a young priest my mentor and teacher on preaching was Dick Lucas of St. Helen’s Bishopsgate.  He used to instil into me that “in the sermon heaven comes down.”

As a part of the liturgy, how is the sermon actually itself worship? How can the act of listening be worship?

Charlie - How cannot the sermon be worship? 
I need to be upfront about what I believe a sermon to be:
The verse on my old pulpit quotes “Sir, we would see Jesus.”  We so preach as to bring Jesus to people and people to Jesus.  Nothing less.
Preaching is a prophetic utterance.  Prayed over, struggled over as we listen to what God tells us MUST be said to the congregation. 
The sermon must be in the power of, and inspired by, the Holy Spirit.
The sermon is to move people closer to Jesus.
The sermon is to be transformative, of the moment and change us before we leave church to live differently and for Christ..
The sermon is to be biblical, expository and life changing - “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” said another great preacher.

Phillips Brooks book on preaching begins with the view that the sermon is Truth through personality.
This to me gives permission for passion in the preacher that will connect with the passions of the listeners.

How I long for the spontaneous amens and alleluias from the congregation that used to characterize preaching in Kenya when in Anglican churches there.

IMHO - Not entertainment but involvement and passionate response as we come to Jesus, the Cross, God’s throne of Grace - there to be fed, nourished and built up as the body of Christ.

I have said enough!  I love preaching in a Latin country - WOW

Blessings - Ian

I second Charlie’s call for Matt’s balloon animal sermon video!

I am glad the fishing image snagged you Charlie, it is a JBC (Jesus based Concept) after all.  In our present world I think the most important thing preaching does is to build a bridge between the world of the scripture and the world of the hearer.  Like you said five minutes may be too long for some and an hour too short for others. The purpose of my sermons, underneath, is to energize the connection people feel to God’s “working his purpose out"seeing more clearly how their own lives are part of that as children of God.

But I have to tell you that the most potent element of my preaching manner is preaching without a manuscript. To be able to stand among the people and preach puts them instantly in the boat with you. The sermons are often taped but never transcribed, it is an aural event.  Even medicore content (a woofer of a sermon) is more favorably received when the preacher is not behind a manuscript.

In the end, however, God makes sermons useful. One of the great graces in my time preaching has been that even when I have preached a sermon I thought was not to my usual standard, someone will come up and say, “That was just what I needed to hear.”  Then I thank God and go home for my nap.

Hear, hear, Michael.  I began scripture-based preaching without notes many years ago, but only more recently have been coming down into the aisle (this started on Children’s Sermon Sundays…).  People now tell me they prefer it, even many of those who might be candidates for the Prayerbook Society.  The immediacy of the connection with people in the congregation is powerful.  I may often start in the pulpit, but only on particular occasions do I stay there.

Being on the receiving end I have to say that I find very few preachers who can stand away from the pulpit, without notes, and deliver an effective sermon week after week. What tends to happen is that what is said is unstructured, oversimplified, and rambling. Also, (and this is where I think people will really object) it seems to me that Episcopal liturgical style has come to love immanence and hate transcendence to excess. Of course it is all a matter of taste and as I have been told over and over apparently my taste is wildly atypical.

What Charles says is probably right in many instances, but IF the preacher is rambling, unstructured, etc., it is likely to be evidence that he/she has not done the necessary preparation. My observation as a priest who regularly sits in the congregation both in a seminary chapel and a parish church is that far, far, far too many preachers DO NOT DO THEIR PREPARATION, or if they do, don’t prepare with how to communicate with the congregation in their mind. One of the greatest privileges is to open the Word of God to the People of God, and if it is a sin to offer sloppy liturgical worship, it is also a sin to enter the pulpit unprepared, so unable to edify the People of God.

A second point is that too many preachers do not open the Word of God, but at best, filter it through their own perception of what they think it says. On more than one occasion my wife has had to hold me in the pew to prevent me from walking out of a sermon that lacks any Scriptural substance.

A third point is that while it is vital to make the content of the sermon digestible to the broadest swathe of the congregation there gathered, the trap which we then fall into is that of over-simplification… but it needs to be remembered that what might be over-simplification for some is for others something sublime and substantial.

Preaching is a sacred task. If it is undertaken without fear and trembling it will descend into the realm of the banal. Yet this doesn’t mean that it should not be engaging. I suggest to our students at Ridley Hall that they listen to a brilliant storyteller to see how to communicate profundity in a manner that folks will listen, lap it up, and respond to it.

I know that it is true for myself that what I can read from a text which I have written out will be far superior to what I can deliver without notes; my memorization is not so sound and I am now a bit prone to the kind of entertainment for which the Rev. Spooner gained notoriety. Where I’m going with this is that it seems to me that in this age of desperation the tendency is for clerics to read “preaching from the middle of the congregation is better” and substitute that for preparation, so that instead of working on the inadequate message they are already delivering, they believe that exaggerating the faults of their ill-preparation (by, for instance, going without notes) is going to make things better because (after all, they’ve been told this so many times) the medium is the message.

Charles Wingate - 21 January 2010 12:39 PM

I know that it is true for myself that what I can read from a text which I have written out will be far superior to what I can deliver without notes; my memorization is not so sound and I am now a bit prone to the kind of entertainment for which the Rev. Spooner gained notoriety. Where I’m going with this is that it seems to me that in this age of desperation the tendency is for clerics to read “preaching from the middle of the congregation is better” and substitute that for preparation, so that instead of working on the inadequate message they are already delivering, they believe that exaggerating the faults of their ill-preparation (by, for instance, going without notes) is going to make things better because (after all, they’ve been told this so many times) the medium is the message.

Thank God this is not a progressive/conservative issue!  The great bards of the world could deliver the Iliad and the Odyssey without a written manuscript and most likely, as studies of 20th century eastern Europeans bards has discovered, without memorizing it word for word.  I totally agree about preparation, people sometimes tell me how much they admire that I can preach extemporaneously and tell them that I am not preaching extemp.  Rather, what they hear is the result of hours of preparation.  I can and do preach extemporaneously at our midweek services and I would submit that preaching that way or the way I do on Sunday requires an immersion in the Word and its history that the text preacher cannot match in those instances where he or she is called on to preach extemp.

In the end preaching requires we do “convicted speaking”.  I do not know, but I cannot imagine, that Wesley and Whitfield stood on the byways with a written text before them. Nor did Jesus or Paul.  The Word of God was part of the habitus of their lives and they could reach their convictions at the drop of a mule’s rein.

I have excellent preachers on my staff who use a manuscript and shudder to think of preaching without one.  No shame or foul there at all.  But the text user must also be clear that he or she is creating an aural event, not a monograph.  So it must appeal to the ear and mind of the listener because they are not going to appreciate it as a literary text.  A great turn of a phrase in a text can be quite flat in the pews.

My favortie aphorism about preaching is from OC Edwards.  He used to say that, “If there is mist in the pulpit, there will be fog in the pews.”  I think he’s right whether the manuscript is written or not.

“The custodian was in the sanctuary cleaning when he noticed notes on the pulpit. He picked them up and started to read them. They were the pastor’s sermon notes. He saw several handwritten notes in the margins and one in particular caught his eye, ‘This point is weak - speak louder’.”

As a preacher, I generally start out with a manuscript. But it is composed in a much different “voice” than I would use to write an essay (or a blog post!); it’s an aural event event as it’s written. The discipline of writing it out allows me to hone the sermon more effectively. But my manuscript is normally completed at least a week before the sermon is delivered. That gives me time to live with it, to let it percolate in my mind and heart. By the time anyone hears it, I’ve delivered to an empty church at least twice. By that time, the script is no longer a script, but a series of cues. I don’t read from it as much as glance at it regularly to keep me on track.