I recently read where Ed Young, pastor of Fellowship Church near the DFW airport, has argued that we who preach are doing it far too long. He wrote:

“The first service I preached 36 minutes. Way too long. The second service I did it in 20 mins and 43 seconds,” he said. “And guess what? The second message, the 20-minute message, was better than the 36-minute message.”

The shorter message may have been better due to the topic or text on which the sermon was based. In any case, I hardly think a pastor can articulate and apply the glorious truths of God’s Word in such a short span of time. But as I hinted, perhaps Young doesn’t preach verse-by-verse through books of the Bible. If he doesn’t, his people are the ones left starving for biblical truth.

Said Young:

“Preachers, we preach too long, I guarantee it. Just look at yourself,” he said. “I preach too long. Once a sermon gets past 25 minutes, I'm so [attention deficit disordered]. I lose it.”

After admitting he “started boring” himself during his first service, Young urged his fellow preachers to “keep it tight, and everything will be alright.”

“Boring”? The inspired, inerrant, life-changing, hope-giving Word of God? Are you kidding? I’m not saying that Young can’t be boring, or any other pastor for that matter. I’ve actually never heard Young preach, so whether or not he’s boring is something I don’t know. But to preach the glorious, Christ-exalting, Spirit-empowered Word of God in a boring fashion is nothing less than sinful.

Scripture, notes Geoffrey Thomas, “is the breath of God; every sentence and every phrase is the sigh of Jehovah. . . . It is not their perfect reliability that gives the Scriptures their unique authority. It is not even their complete truthfulness. The Bible is powerful because it is the Word of God; what it says God says” ("Powerful Preaching," in The Preacher and Preaching, 371). Bryan Chapell concurs:

“Without the authority of the Word preaching becomes an endless search for topics, therapies, and techniques that will win approval, promote acceptance, advance a cause, or soothe worry. Human reason, social agendas, popular consensus, and personal moral convictions become the resources of preaching that lacks 'the historic conviction that what Scripture says, God says'" (Christ-Centered Preaching, 23).

How long, then, should a sermon be? I can’t dictate this to anyone else, but how can a pastor unpack, explain, illustrate, and make application of a single text, says, Romans 8:28, in only 20-25 minutes? And what then of preaching a longer paragraph? I’m not advocating for a monotonous lecture of one hour, but I find it almost painful to restrict myself to less than 45 minutes. If I can’t engage the hearts, minds, and attention of people in the pew during 45 minutes of digging for treasure in a biblical text, I should abandon ministry and go flip burgers.

The Scriptures, as you undoubtedly know, are the product of the creative breath of God himself, and “are profitable [not boring] for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16-17).

I fear that if pastors start preaching short sermon-ettes, our churches will soon be filled with Christian-ettes. Poor, exclusively topical, boring, short sermons are a sure-fire way to breed spiritual pygmies. God forbid!