Jamin Bradley

I’m 38 years old, and I’ve been going to church my whole life without hardly missing a week. Let’s say I started paying attention to Sunday sermons around the time I was 14. That would mean I’ve heard around 1,248 sermons (and that doesn’t include the countless other messages I’ve sat through at youth groups, college chapels, conferences, and so on).

Now let me tell you about the 50 best sermons I’ve ever heard.

No, wait… I can’t do that. That’s too many.

Let me tell you about the 20 best sermons I’ve ever heard.

Uh… hang on.

Let me tell you about the top 10 sermons I’ve ever heard.

…

It turns out it’s hard to recall speeches and lectures the way we recall a favorite song, artist, book, or movie. (Heck, how many of us can recount what was preached to us two months ago? A month ago? How about last Sunday?)

We can recall moments in a sermon, be it good analogies or stories, but not the entirety of the message. A specific statement (sometimes good, sometimes bad) will linger with us for the rest of our lives, but not the rest of the content that the message belonged to. This has something to do with the way we learn. Sermons are a slow burn of sorts, where the pastor’s teaching disciples congregants as things set in over time. This conundrum isn’t necessarily the pastor’s or the sermon’s fault; it’s just a part of the process. A good sermon will be remembered longer than a bad one, but much of it will fade away in time. If we’re lucky, its fading comes from integration rather than forgetfulness.

This is not to say that sermons don’t matter and that we shouldn’t work to create good sermons, but it may have something to say to the pastor who has come to believe that the sermon is everything. A pastor in the biblical sense is not simply a teacher (that would be the role of a “teacher” in the Bible). The pastor has much more to do than preach, and some of the deeper discipleship they can offer will likely come outside of the pulpit. Jesus is more than the knowledge we can pass along on a Sunday.

The Sunday message is an important part of pastoring, but it can become an idol. In an effort to craft the greatest or most engaging sermon ever, we can eat up the time that is better spent elsewhere.

We all land in different places here. Some of us need to work harder on our sermons. Some of us need to rethink our preaching style. Some of us need to reassess the goal of our preaching. Some of us need new writing strategies that help us craft sermons faster. And as strange as it sounds, some of us may possibly need to put less energy into our sermons. Some of us may need to learn that it’s okay to settle for a good message instead of a perfect one.