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Waste of time?

How much preaching is a sheer waste of time? We pray, we study, we reflect, we craft a sermon, we illustrate it with stories, we deliver it with passion and integrity – but it has very little impact on those who listen to it. They are too polite to say so usually, but it did not really engage their attention, address their concerns or affect their lives. Some give up after a few weeks or several years and leave our churches. How many of the thousand people a week who have left British churches in the 1980s and 1990s did so because they were bored by our sermons? Others remain and listen to perhaps 100 sermons a year, but with what result?

Stuart Murray Williams

Comments

ogre said…
If all their church is offering them is a sermon, maybe that's not enough. Maybe more needs to be offered--and more needs to be asked. People come to church, generally, seeking something--a handle on the universe, for one thing, and a place in a community (we need others...) and a way to affect the world. My sense is that we most frequently fail in offering a way to be a lever on the world--and insisting that people actually try to live up to the ideals that they espouse.

If it's just a sermon... well, then the future promises far more convenience and perhaps better quality at the Church of Podcast.
4:44 pm
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