My wife attended a week-long mediation training course last month in order for her as a judge to effectively mediate settlements among adversarial parties to reduce trials. She shared a very interesting statistic regarding church that came up incidentally in her training. During one of the sessions the instructor was discussing the notion that people have certain biases that influence their future behavior. For example, people are conditioned with certain (usually negative) attitudes towards police or lawyers based upon a prior personal experience or what they see on TV. So a good mediator should recognize that people may come in to a settlement conference with pre-conditioned attitudes.
The instructor opened up the discussion by asking the class if anyone could give an example of a circumstance where people are already pre-conditioned to act a certain way. Apparently someone raised their hand and half-jokingly answered “church.” Surprisingly the instructor said not only was it a very good example, but he went on to add surveys have shown that church was the most frequent response. In other words, church service is the number one place people are most often conditioned to TUNE OUT! When my wife told me that it made me just shake my head. Gee, I know pastors will occasionally make a self-deprecating joke that no one may be paying attention when they preach but I didn’t realize the actual harsh reality of it.
I’m not offended or upset about it. I assume most people by and large are actually listening. I may be a little frustrated but if some people are tuning out during a sermon, we as pastors need to at least acknowledge this dynamic without getting judgmental or condescending. Many seminaries now train their students on contemporary church issues such as this. As a culture we are in a post-modern age of mass communication and information. Internet, smart phones, tweeting/texting and Facebook are all common media by which we divert most of our time and energy. Our attention spans have been reduced to short sound-bite snippets of information and then we’re quickly on to the next thing. Prolific online sermons of famous pastors and Bible studies place even less emphasis on the local pastor. We are therefore conditioned to receiving information in a very condensed impersonal manner. Studies have even been conducted on the human brain confirming that the average attention span is about 10 minutes. Needless to say this does not lend itself well to a pastor standing in front of a Sunday congregation and preaching to them face-to-face for 45 minutes.
So where does this leave us? As a congregation apparently some of you are already eyeing the door (or your smart phones) by the sermon opening before the pastor even feels like he’s just getting going. You may even be reading this column while I’m preaching today’s sermon. sigh.
Your response to all of this might be that people would be willing to stop and listen and respond more if the pastor was simply better at preaching and teaching. I agree the spiritual gifting will vary from pastor to pastor and that some may have a greater ability to preach than others. But my frustration in all of this is that it seems a tad unfair for this one-way judgment to always be pointed towards the pastor. I know I have a relatively short experience in the pastoral ministry and a much longer experience as a lay congregation member. But my (kind and gentle) pushback as a pastor is that God forbid, no amount of entertaining bells and whistles that the media world feeds us ought ever distract from a Gospel message that sustains, comforts and provides with eternal gifts of Love and Faith. Perhaps wishful thinking on my part, but the Sanctuary could be just that- a safe harbor sanctuary of peace and communion with the Lord, free from distractions of this world. Amen to that.
From Pastor Mark’s Heart
May 26, 2013