Long Winded

This post starts with two disclaimers that you'll understand better once you've read the whole thing. First, I like our pastor. We've only been at this church a year and I haven't spent lots of time with him, but he seems to be a nice guy with a good heart who's a genuine follower of Jesus. Second, I really enjoy preaching. Much of my adult life was spent working in the church and every chance I got to get in front of a group of people and talk was fun...for me.

With that out of the way, let's talk about how ineffective the traditional sermon is. This is a topic I've blogged about before but worth mentioning again since hundreds of thousands of pastors will be doing it again this weekend. And it will be fun...for them. I was going to write about this Monday, but I didn't get around to blogging Monday. Ironically Seth Godin, one of my favorite bloggers, did and kind of stole my thunder. Apparently the sermon isn't the only "long talk" communication form that doesn't work anymore. Here's a snippet from his blog for those that don't want to read the whole thing:

Here’s my point: In our scan and skip world, in a world where technology makes it obvious that we can treat different people differently, how can we possibly justify teaching via a speech?

Speech is both linear and unpaceable. You can’t skip around and you can’t speed it up. When the speaker covers something you know, you are bored. When he quickly covers something you don’t understand, you are lost.

Our pastor said some good things on Sunday. It took him forty minutes to say them and he repeated his points in different ways a few times. I agreed with everything he said, though I couldn't tell you exactly what it was he said only three days later. During the message I looked around the room at the 300 or so folks sitting passively, facing forward and wondered why they were there. There are few places in our world today where people go and sit in front of a single speaker for a long speech voluntarily. School is mandatory, and increasingly ineffective.

The more we learn about how people learn and engage, the more we are coming to understand that sermons are about the least effective method we could use. If the goal of the church is to show Christ to a dying world, one person just talking about him and his teaching incessantly on a weekly basis seems like the worst possible way to accomplish this. But, in our culture, it is still the most recognizable form to both church goers and non-church goers alike. Unfortunately the latter of those two groups is the one that's growing most rapidly. I'll finish with a bit more from Seth:

If marketing is the art of spreading ideas, then teaching is a kind of marketing. And teaching to groups verbally is broken, perhaps beyond repair. Consumers of information won’t stand for it. We’re learning less every time we are confronted with this technique, because we’ve been spoiled by the remote control and the web.

If it’s worth teaching, it’s worth teaching well. If it’s worth investing the time of 30 or 230 or 3330 people, then it’s worth investing the effort to actually figure out how to get the message across. School is broken. Legislative politics are broken. Linear is broken.

Amen.