How Long Does a Pastor Preach?

Thom Rainer surveyed pastors to find out how long they preach. Rainer writes:

Preaching is central to the worship services in most churches. Indeed most services are built around the message. The sermon is critical to the life and health of a church.

So I was curious. With the sermon being essential and paramount to the health of a church, just how long does a pastor preach each sermon? I went to Twitter to find out. Though a Twitter survey is not scientific, I was amazed at the quantity of the responses. Pastors began responding in great volume at almost the point I asked the question.

Of course, my methodology begs the question: Does a pastor really know the length of his own sermon? Though further research would be needed to provide a definitive answer, I do believe most pastors watch the clock rather carefully. In those cases on our Twitter survey where a church member and pastor from the same church responded, there were absolutely no differences in the length of sermon time each reported.

Most of the respondents gave me a time range. In each of those cases, I took the midpoint of the range they gave me. Here are the results, mostly in increments of five minutes:

Less than 15 minutes — 1%

15 to 20 minutes — 1%

21 to 25 minutes — 5%

26 to 30 minutes — 18%

31 to 35 minutes — 23%

36 to 40 minutes — 18%

41 to 45 minutes — 26%

46 to 50 minutes — 1%

51 to 55 minutes — 4%

56 to 60 minutes — 1%

More than 60 minutes — 1%

Here are some quick observations:

Read the whole thing here.