Is 20 minutes enough for a Sunday sermon?

Pastor Ed Young of Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Texas, shared his thoughts in a Sept. 28 video about the duration of most contemporary sermons and says he might have found the sweet spot.

After finishing the second service at Fellowship’s Frisco campus, Young, 64, appeared to have an epiphany of sorts on how long is too long when it comes to sermons. “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.”

Young, who's known for his colorful, highly stylized sermons, including a controversial 2012 sermon on marital intimacy presented as a “bed-in” with his wife Lisa, said he believes he and other pastors are guilty of going too long when it comes to their sermons.

“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 disorder]. 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.”

“I mean, I'm going through the book of Romans,” he added. “Twenty minutes, are you kidding me?”

A 2019 Pew Research Center survey found sermon lengths varied widely across denominations, with historically black Protestant churches averaging sermons nearly four times as long as those delivered in Roman Catholic settings.

The study, which used data from nearly 50,000 sermon transcriptions posted online by more than 6,400 churches during the Easter 2019 season, found the median length of all sermons was 37 minutes.

With a median of about 14 minutes, Catholic sermons were the shortest, while Mainline Protestant congregations clocked in at around 25 minutes for an average sermon. Evangelical sermons, meanwhile, had a median length of 39 minutes. Historically black Protestant churches had the longest sermon lengths at around 54 minutes.

As part of the study, researchers noted that while both Evangelical and historically black Protestant churches have similar sermon lengths by word count, the latter was found to be 38% longer in duration. The difference, according to researchers, might be attributed to longer periods of time in sermons delivered at historically black Protestant congregations when the preacher is not speaking, “such as musical interludes, pauses between sentences or call and response with people in the pews.”