Taking the pulse of preaching
Preaching is alive and well online, and in church the Mystery Worshipper project shows sermons remain significant, too
John Wesley, the preacher who crisscrossed Britain in the 18th century on a never-ending sermon tour, arrived in Deptford in 1739. He was hardly off his horse before he was preaching to a crowd jammed into the local hall.
Predictably, the floor collapsed.
"But two or three days before," Wesley coolly wrote, "a man had filled the vault beneath with hogsheads of tobacco. So that the floor, after sinking a foot or two, rested upon them, and I went on without interruption."
Wesley was a revolutionary preacher who knew how to improvise in a crisis and was unembarrassed by tobacco lending support to the gospel. He took preaching out of the church pulpit, where it had been stuck for centuries, and into the halls, markets, streets and fields – wherever ordinary people would give him a hearing – or pelt him with rotten fruit.
He accidentally recast preaching as an entertainment, which disgusted the clergy of his time but was seized on by the revivalists, huckster preachers and televangelists who followed him in the next two centuries.
Today, Wesley's spiritual heirs are running virtual churches, where you can park your pixelated bottom on a pew in Second Life and watch an avatar dressed as Elvis deliver a sermon in scrolling lines of text. Or slightly less bizarrely, they are physically preaching sermons before large crowds and posting them on YouTube.
Preaching is very much alive and well there, rubbing shoulders with Lady Gaga videos, bungee jumping and Snowball the dancing cockatoo. One 58-minute mega sermon by US evangelical preacher Paul Washer has clocked up 1.5 million views, while shorter "sermon jams", where mashed-up messages are set to hip hop and slideshows, are also clocking up decent hits.
The gaffe-loving spirit of YouTube is never far away, though. Caught on camera was a youth pastor attempting to preach about a Bible character who had "pitched his tents" next to Sodom and Gomorrah. To his own astonishment, the words fell out of his mouth as "pinched his tits" and he almost lost control of the audience.
But how is the traditional, pre-Wesley sermon doing in the churches of real stone and stained glass? Ship of Fools, the online magazine and community, runs a project called the Mystery Worshipper, where volunteer reporters visit Christian churches worldwide, sit in a back pew, complete a 20-point questionnaire and file a first-timer's impression of the service.
They answer the questions that anyone who goes to church really wants to know. How long was the sermon? How hard was the pew? How warm was the welcome? How cold was the coffee? Their answers are by turns critical, appreciative, awed, amused and irreverent. One of the final questions, "Did the service make you glad to be a Christian?" elicits answers ranging from "No, just bored" to "Not half!"
It's clear from the reports that preaching remains a significant event in services, especially in Protestant churches. In 2010, some 20% of Mystery Worshippers homed in on preaching as the one thing they took away from the experience. The average length of the sermon during the year was 17 minutes and 41 seconds: the shortest, two minutes, the longest, a coma-inducing 90.
And the qualities of preaching are what you would expect from any orator: good eye-contact, humour, warmth, solid preparation, spontaneity, conviction, insight, empathy, and not reading too closely from your notes.
It's a sermon, not a lecture. Cardinal Mahoney of Los Angeles was praised for leaving the pulpit to "walk about in front of the altar as he spoke, looking in all directions so as to include everyone".
That was fine, but too much departure from traditional delivery into flat-out entertainment plays badly. One pastor "came over more like a stand-up act than a preacher", said an unhappy Mystery Worshipper. "Not that I didn't appreciate his message, but in terms of content it was light as air, like the froth on a cappuccino."
Despite the pioneer spirit of their online brethren, offline congregations prefer their preaching as it's always been done: someone stands up and speaks with wit, passion and eloquence and knows "when to make an end", as Martin Luther said. Too much technology can simply get in the way of good local preaching, as one Sunday morning worshipper discovered: "At one point during the sermon, a message flashed up on the jumbo screen: 'Deborah Montgomery to Live the Adventure please.' I wondered just what adventure it was that Deborah was expected to live, but learned later that it's what they call their children's church."
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