Was reading an article recently which talked about how much the church spends on sermons each week. So i did the maths myself. They say there's 300,000 congregations in the USA (american article) and that the average pastor (on $40,000) spends at least 20 hours a week on the sermon.
So, for the USA alone...
Weekly total: $115 million
Annual expenditure: $6 billion
Why do we do this? Particularly with many churches following a lectionary. Why do we have hundreds of thousands of pastors spending half a week coming up with a sermon practically identical to that of the pastor in the next suburb?
I'm sure it was important in the 1800s and early 1900s to have a local theologian in every village - when the only forms of communication were talking and letter writing. But in this day and age, it's surely a luxury that is looking more and more self-indulgent.
I've been fortunate enough to be in worship times that use various material from DVDs, youtube and Christian media websites (eg WHM). Some of these people spend maybe a week putting together something that goes for 5-10 minutes.
At first glance it seems time-consuming, but if one 10 minute clip gets played in just 1% of those 300,000 congregations, that's the equivalent of 500 hours of sermons (ie. 25 years of one pastor preaching). There's other advantages too - including production quality and capacity for repeat viewing.
So why don't we do it? Why don't we take greater advantage of technology? Why do we lock our pastors in their study for days? Why do we prevent them from being able to spend more time leading Jesus' mission in their local communities?
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