View from the Pew 3

Yesterday I began to look more closely at the VftP survey results.

 I was contacted today by someone from the Sunderland Echo who had picked up on the whole business of sermons being entertaining. She had been phoning some of her church contacts in the North East and asking them for some pleasant anecdotes.  Unable to get hold of David Wilkinson, principal of St Johns and formidably good preacher and general raconteur, she came to me and I was so glad that she didn't ask me for any preaching stories.  I am not sure I can just recount them like that...But she did want to talk about whether we were surprised at the positive results of the survey.  I talked through my blog from yesterday and she thought that was much more understandable.  But then the entertainment stuff came around again...I note as well that Church Mouse picked up on this - Are Anglicans Having a Laugh?

The thing is that the figures about entertainment are pretty marginal in the survey results.  Respondents were asked what they wanted a sermon to do and also what they thought preachers actually did.  The top results across all denominations for what congregations want were:

Challenge    77.4%

Encourage 74.2%

Motivate 66.8%

Educate 44.7%

Entertain 12.1%

When we asked them what preachers actually did the numbers shifted a little:

Challenge 67.9%

Encourage 76.1%

Motivate 52.2%

Educate 53.8%

Entertain 25.5%

What's going on here?  Apparently, three quarters of respondents felt that preachers manage to encourage their congregations, with a similar number challenging them.  However, despite 2/3rd of respondents expecting sermons to motivate them, only about half think that this is achieved.  As for entertainment, the figure doubles from 12% to 25% and in the freeflow answers in the focus groups, entertainment became a much more common theme.  We wondered in our discussion whether congregations felt bad about the entertainment theme - they don't list entertainment as a high priority in what sermons should do, but a quarter of respondents admit that sermons do actually attend them, and when you get people into conversation, lots of people want sermons to entertain them.  Is there a guilt about being entertained by preaching?  A number of people link standup and preaching these days...and clearly you need to have a good stage presence to capture the imagination and attention of an audience.

When it comes to denominational differences, Anglicans want to be entertained the most with a 22% rating - but this still comes below 'challenge' (81%), 'motivate' (72.4%), 'encourage' (65.5%) and 'educate' (39.7%), whilst Baptists definitely didn't want to be entertained (0%).  I'm less convinced that this can be extrapolated to mean that Anglicans are having a laugh. What is absolutely clear is that people across the denominations want challenging, provocative preaching that encourages them and moves them on.  If they can be entertained as they receive this, then all the best.  Of course, those of us who attend worship regularly know that those are the best kind of sermons in any case and so these results won't come as a shock to anyone within the Church.  Well, I hope not.

I need to come back to Phil Ritchie's comment from yesterday but that will have to wait for tomorrow.  Indeed, it may have to wait a day or two...despite my keeness to blog, I am off to do some speaking for Scripture Union on Bible and Mission and must get the talks done for that first...but I'll try!

Cheers

Pete

   

Comments

[Benita Hewitt]

Hi Pete, thanks for sharing these extra figures with us. The research begins to make more sense now that we don't have the cherry picking from the media!
Could you write something for our Christian Research members, for the next edition of our bi-monthly newsletter, Quadrant?
Thanks,
Benita