How Fast Should a Preacher Preach Words if a Preacher Could Preach Words?
A longtime church member came through our office door just as I was leaving for a meeting. We didn’t have time to chat then, but the church member informed me that he “only understood half of my sermon because I talked way too fast.”
I nodded and said, “Thank you for saying that.” Then I added, “Someone else told me that same thing the other day.” During the greeting time at church a few weeks ago, someone did. A different member said she liked my preaching but that I need to slow down.
“Welp,” I told the member standing in the doorway, “Thanks, but I’ve gotta go.” I went to my meeting, but I’ve been pondering this feedback for weeks.
Looking at the last three sermons, apparently I’ve been preaching at a rate of 150–170 words per minute (wpm).
If you want details, the relevant numbers from my last three sermons are as follows. The first sermon that received the comment about preaching too fast, had 4,827 words and lasted 30:02, resulting in a rate of 161 words per minute (wpm). The next sermon had 4,508 words and lasted 30:24, for a rate of 148 wpm. The most recent sermon, which prompted the comment while I was standing in the church office doorway, had a whopping 7,062 words and lasted 44:02, for a rate of 172 wpm. (Preachers can see the note below on how I gathered the numbers.)
To give some context, a rate of 150 wpm parallels the rate of audiobooks on the normal setting, so my low-end is not objectively crazy fast for spoken words. However, preaching ain’t an audiobook. Preaching is a conversation, even if one in monologue form, and therefore should have moments with heightened pace and intensity, times when you raise your voice. But preaching, like conversations, should also have time for pauses and slower moments, time for ideas to simmer and settle, time for questions and convictions to form in the hearts and minds of the congregation. Preaching over 170 wpm doesn’t allow time for any of this. I suspect the church member who told me he “only understood half my sermon” spoke in hyperbole. But his point wasn’t wrong.
One of our associate pastors always seems to bring a word count to the pulpit larger than any of the other pastors, yet he manages to preach in a way that doesn’t make the congregation feel like we’re watching a Formula One race. Another pastor at church, however, says that he would preach for well over an hour to get through the same word count. It’s funny how the personality and temperament of each preacher can influence how others experience a sermon, whether as too slow, too fast, or the Goldilocks just right.
Anyway, that sermon of over 7,000 words had way too many words for me and for our congregation. Had I preached it correctly paced, the sermon should have lasted 55 minutes, not 44, well outside our norms. I typically aim to preach for 32–34 minutes and rarely go over 38 minutes.
The late British pastor and author John Stott has helpful insights on the ideal sermon length that go something like, “How long should a sermon be?” he asks. “A sermon might be longer or shorter, but it should feel like 20 minutes” (paraphrased from memory from Stott’s book Between Two Worlds). For me, when I preach for about 35 minutes, it seems people experience the sermon as only 20 minutes, if you know what I mean. Better preachers than me can preach for 55 minutes, and it feels like only 20. Others preach for 20, and, oh brother, it feels like 90.
With the recent lengthy sermon, I felt too close to my sermon to figure out how to shorten it. By “too close,” I mean that on those weeks when I end up writing a sermon late in the week and through the weekend, and my nose still touches the manuscript on Sunday, it’s hard to have the necessary macro perspective on which elements matter most and which matter least.
Early on that Sunday morning, I had an idea for making the sermon shorter—and better—but the cuts seemed too complicated to do effectively so close to gametime. I considered cutting my long opening illustration and replacing it with a key illustration from the body of the sermon. But then, I wondered, what would I do with the hole created in the body of the sermon? Safely amputating 500 words from an introduction while simultaneously operating on the body of the sermon requires time for pre-op, surgery, and recovery, none of which is available an hour before church starts and greeters have started to arrive.
When I was younger and first started preaching regularly, I paid closer attention to these pacing numbers, partly because I didn’t know how long my sermons might last but knew I needed to learn this part of preaching. From what I recall from those early days, I spoke at about 115 words per minute, with weddings and funerals closer to 90 words per minute, since those require a different tone and pace.
So why am I speaking faster now? Why have I been stuffing an extra 50 words a minute into my preaching? It’s hard to say for sure. I’m mulling over at least two answers.
First, the pressures from an already-too-full service affect my pace. A few weeks ago, when I looked at what we had planned, I saw we stuffed our two worship services tight, and I could tell my sermon length threatened to make it worse. Perhaps, I thought, I could make up for a few minutes by preaching, well, faster. This is dumb, I know. There’s a certain college cross country coach I’ve learned from, and he was once asked about his strategy for a national championship race. He used a car driving metaphor, replying his race strategy was, “Gas, gas, gas.” That might work for a race strategy for elite runners, but gas gas gas makes for a poor preaching strategy. The rapidity of my preaching probably made our service feel fuller than it actually was.
The second reason I could be preaching faster is that over the past few years, I’ve been listening to more sermons than I did before. On the weeks I preach, I might listen to a dozen sermons, often while lifting weights in the mornings. On weeks I’m not preaching, I listen to audiobooks or use the Speechify app. And during all of this, I never fail to crank the speed. Clearly this must be shaping (malforming?) my sense of normal.
In the end, I don’t know if there’s a universal answer to how fast a preacher should preach, any more than to the question of how long a preacher should preach. I do know the truth of the saying, “Faithful are the wounds of a friend” (Prov. 27:6a). I’m thankful that those in our church love me and our church enough to risk wounding one of their leaders.
I wonder how much better I would be as a preacher—how much better any preacher would be—if loving feedback from friends in the pews met humility and teachability from preachers in the pulpit. I’d like to spend the rest of my ministry finding out.
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A note for preachers: In case you’re curious about how I gathered the numbers, I have manuscripts of my sermons, but I took the word count from the transcript generated by YouTube. If you’re a preacher who goes into the pulpit with a simple outline instead of a manuscript—and your church also uploads sermons to YouTube—you can get these numbers in just a few minutes. Just copy and paste the auto-generated transcript into a Word document, then divide by the total time. You’ll want to toggle off the timestamps first. For the sermon nerds out there still tracking with all this, I removed both the words and the time related to the Scripture reading before the sermon, which, as is our practice, is done by others. However, I did include my opening and closing prayers.
* Photo by milind bedwa on Unsplash
