I was uploading last Sunday’s sermon MP3 onto church’s website this morning, and had a little fun plotting this graph:
It is the length of Joshua’s Sunday sermons in number of seconds, since February this year when he started preaching the Proverbs mini-series. The big dip on 5 March was when the talks changed from Proverbs to John. However you can see what the general trend is — it is on the way up!!!
Good that we are taking a break from the Gospel of John.
LOL, this is a good one! although I personally think Josh’s preaching content is worth the length of the sermon :P
LoL!!!
No wonder why lately I fell asleep during the sermon. Not that I plan it or anything.. not even intentionally!
However, the truth is my concentration span (or any other humans) are limited to it’s effective range of 30-45mnts :)
This is fabulous. I’ve been wondering when we could ever have such statistics. Can we have the statistics for a full year? I am interested in observing any pattern in the sermon length. I notice the sermon in the first week of March is much shorter. This is perhaps to accommodate newcomers at church. Interestingly, the following weeks the length jumped by 50% (1000 seconds). And it has been steadily increasing.
I don’t think we expect to see any decline until around Winter and Summer. During these periods, normally sermons are delivered by cathecists.
Scott, I don’t think the sermons are getting shorter when we switch from John to Ephesians. Joshua has done lots of works on Ephesians. I once heard that he set one year long Bible study series on Ephesians in his youth group.
The sermon lengths are definitely rising strong, like the inflation rate and RBA interest rate :p
It would certainly be more interesting to have such statistics over a longer period of time.
Different preachers also have significant impact. We always have shorter talks when MTS and catechists are giving talks. I would expect Ephesians to be long talks as well. However, I think I figured out that the length of Josh’s talks might not necessarily correlate to the difficulties of the passage — I think it is related to how much time Josh has left and how many illustrations he came up with…
could be a lack of spiritual concerns to be concerned about such things
and the reason our spiritual attention spans are so brief is because we
are to worldy. We can endure worldy things for much longer with great joy.
Let us all examine ourselves and let the word work in us – In Christian love.