Short sermon, please, vicar

Make it snappy, vicar!

This Christmas, Ysenda Maxtone Graham is praying for a short sermon

Which of these two lines, if you came across them on a church noticeboard, would entice you more? 6.30: Evensong or 6.30: Evensong with sermon.

For me, there’s no contest. I’d be tempted by the first, and repelled by the second.

I’ve sat through thousands of sermons, and the best moment, in my experience, is always the moment when they end.

‘Please can this be your final sentence?’ I plead inwardly, but it hardly ever is.

There’s a moment’s silence, but it turns out just to be the end of a paragraph. Another sheet of A4 to go. When, at last, the preacher says, ‘Amen,’ I feel an ecstatic sense of relief.

Our late Queen was far too tactful to say such a thing, but I have a feeling that, deep down, she felt the same. She did mention that she didn’t like a sermon to go on for any longer than 12 minutes.

At the 8am Eucharist at St George’s, Notting Hill, on the Sunday after her death, the Rev Peter Wolton dialled that length down even further, saying the Queen liked sermons to be five minutes maximum. Yes, please!

The Archbishop of Canterbury empathetically preached a five-minuter at her funeral, and the whole world was grateful.

Please can shorter sermons be one of the Queen’s legacies? Prince Philip, too, according to the former Bishop of London Richard Chartres, ‘was at home with broad church, high church and low church, but what he really liked was short church’.

It was not that he disliked sermons; on the contrary, he found them fascinating and provocative, and took notes.

But he was impatient. I think many of us are. We have lives to get on with, and we do not need to listen to a preacher repeating himself, very slowly, at intervals throughout a ponderous 15-minuter.

The sermon is an innately padded form, and society has outgrown it. We’re literate.

We no longer need to have the key words from today’s New Testament lesson repeated to us again and again, ‘unpacked’ in a long-winded way by someone relishing his or her moment in the sun, or flaunting etymological factoids picked up at evening classes at St Mellitus College.

Nor do we need to be reminded that the preacher is an ordinary human being just like the rest of us, who naughtily admits to enjoying the occasional glass of sherry.

There’s a gulf between how much the preacher thinks we want to listen to him or her droning on, and how much we actually do want to.

Just after the sermon in the Eucharist service, the congregation is supposed to stand up to say the Creed.

But it’s at that very moment that my faith has drained away, dulled to oblivion by the tedium of the last 15 minutes. I’m often sleepy by this time, and can hardly stand up, so weirdly soporific are the endless abstract nouns and the slow oratory.

Sermons tend to be an ordeal, like when you’re stuck at a red traffic light or, worse, a traffic light on an A road in Surrey with a three-mile tailback leading up to it. Things grind to a dispiriting halt while the satnav adjusts the estimated time of arrival.

If sermons boldly adopted the convention of ‘five minutes maximum’, it could single-handedly save the Church of England. We might actually be able to drag a child or a teenager along.

Whenever I try to tempt a nonchurchgoer to come to a choral service with me, I feel bound to warn them that there’s going to be a sermon. And they baulk. Why can’t it just be a homily – a crisp three or four minutes, as the Roman Catholics have?

Any sermon could be reduced to that length with a bit of disciplined trimming. Even Thought for the Day on Radio 4 can seem long-winded at three minutes – and that’s just a quarter of the length of most sermons.

Fifteen minutes is brief compared with the length of evangelical sermons. Thirty minutes is typical at St Helen’s, Bishopsgate, or an hour at the Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California.

Sermons in village churches have (thankfully) halved in length since 1922, when P G Wodehouse wrote The Great Sermon Handicap. In that masterpiece, the Rev Francis Heppenstall ‘fairly took the bit between his teeth, and gave us 36 solid minutes on Certain Popular Superstitions’.

The shortening trend needs to continue. If we were reliably in and out in under an hour for Eucharist, and 40 minutes for Evensong, we’d be flocking to church.

And no one needs a sermon at Midnight Mass this Christmas. Please, dear clergy, consider your audience of tired grown-ups and over-excited children, up long past their bedtime.

Vicar of Dibley: brevity is the soul of wit