Following on from yesterday’s post, I want to address the issue of “covering more.”  Here’s the question again:

In the Church today, we find that most preachers preach for 30-60 minutes on one topic or passage. Indeed, many will take a few verses and preach on them at length.

The examples we have in the bible of Jesus’ sermons show a very different way of preaching. He seemed to cover many topics in every sermon. For instance the ‘Sermon on the mount’ covers a range of things but preachers these days tend to just take one section of it and preach for an hour on that section.

Is there any validity, in your opinion, to the idea that we labour points too long and actually ought to cover more in our sermons?

Peter M responds:

Preaching on one passage – Expository preaching does not require a preacher to stay in one passage. It is possible to have an expository sermon that goes to several passages. Yet to deal with each passage as one should tends to make the process overwhelming. I always encourage preachers to deal with one passage more fully, rather than skipping around unnecessarily. There are reasons to refer to other passages, but for some preachers it seems this is a standard practice. I suggest it is usually better to stay put in one place.  This does not mean boring preaching though.  The preacher should be as engaging and interesting as possible.  It takes some skill to demonstrate the relevance and interest in a passage.  It is better to develop that skill than to hide the lack of it by jumping around the canon.

The example of NT sermons – We can learn a lot by analyzing the sermons recorded in the New Testament.  There are different sermon forms used, clear awareness of differing audiences, and so on.  Yet it is important to remember that while the written form represents the original accurately, it is not an exhaustive transcription.  I suspect Peter preached for longer than a couple of minutes at Pentecost, and Jesus’ “sermon on the mount” was probably not delivered as it stands in our Bibles.  So it might not be wise to try to recreate the Sermon on the Mount. At the same time recognize that it is not as random as many suspect.  What seems to be one subject after another, may actually be one illustration or application after another.  For example, notice the repetitive pattern in Matthew 5:21-48 – do we have five new subjects or five specific applications of the same principle?

Amount of content in a sermon – I am not an advocate for “dumbing down” sermons or “salad preaching” (no meat).  A message should have an appropriate amount of content at the right level of weightiness for the listeners present.  Yet the goal is to communicate the main idea of the passage in order to achieve the purpose of the message.  The goal is not to impress people with content (sadly, for some preachers, this is their goal).  This wrong goal is often encouraged as some listeners tend to affirm dense preaching despite their own inability to take it in!

Some preachers should cover more, others would do well to cover less.  There is no standard rule, but the passage and the audience are both significant factors in determining how much content, both breadth and depth, should be covered in one message.