Don’t Overestimate Your Congregation
Most pastors I know live for Sunday morning. They can’t wait until the congregation shows up and all the singing is done so they can stand up and share with the church all they’ve learned in preparing for the sermon. They want to tell the congregation about the uniqueness of the verbs used in this passage and how the ancient context informs the subtle nuances of the text.
Their congregations, on the other hand, just want to make it until next Thursday.
Congregations and pastors show up looking for very different things from their Sunday morning experiences. Most pastors are looking for a moment of transcendence. They want to bring a little bit of heaven into the Sunday morning experience. The music should be bold and dramatic, more like a camp preparing for war than a congregation waiting on the Spirit. The pastor will then step into the pulpit with a rallying cry to change the world.
Our congregations, on the other hand, are looking for something to help them put their lives together. They are trying to hold their marriage together. They’re trying to find the meaning of their lives. Parents are praying to understand their adolescent children. Some are trying to understand their parents. Their worlds are overwhelmed and frantic, moving at speeds so fast they can’t fix one thing before something else breaks. Like a submarine pinging their surroundings, our people scan their environments searching for any glimpse of anything true and/or helpful. This includes social media, conversations with friends, commercials, discussions on cable news and … sermons.
Our people have very limited attention spans. The attention span of adults is measured in seconds, not minutes. Congregations are usually polite enough to extend their attention to their pastor, but unless the pastor engages them in the first few minutes of the sermon, they will drift away. For those who will tell me that the great pastors preached for forty-five minutes to an hour, I will remind you they preached before the time of cell phones. No one pays attention to anything that long anymore.
Simply put, our congregations will take one thing – and only one thing – from our Sunday morning sermons. Good news is we can usually decide what that one thing is. In preparing a sermon, determine what it is you want your congregation to walk out with. Then, pound that one thing on Sunday morning. Leave no doubt as to what you wanted your congregation to know and make sure they hear it.
I know it’s disappointing to hear that. I know you wanted to be able to construct an entire Christian worldview and then, press your argument from that worldview, but that’s not reality. I’m determined to live on planet reality, and the reality is most of our congregation will take away one thing from the sermon.
