Bishop calls for shorter church services

Friday, July 8th, 2011

Shorter church services on Sunday are an important consideration if churches are going to attract prospective non-regular church-goers according to Church of England Bishop of Lichfield, Johnathan Gledhill.

“Clergy should aim to keep the time of worship to no more than 50 minutes,” Gledhill said, opining that worship has become “too complicated, leaving people who are not regular churchgoers feeling confused and excluded.”

“One of the reasons for our recent decline in churchgoing is we are not making the occasional worshipper feel welcome.”

“You have got to be quite tough to come to some of our services if you are not a regular attender. We’re praying for longer and we’re singing for longer.”

Most religious leaders say Sunday morning church services already have to compete with shopping, lying in bed, or taking the day off, and the idea of spending two hours dedicated to worship is not very appealing in today’s society.

One blog reported that people who are in favor of longer church services frequently use the argument that “we need to give God the time that he deserves. If we can make time for everything else, we can make time for God.”

“In my opinion, being in service for 3 hours on Sunday is not a badge of honor. It means that there are a lot of people in your church that waste a lot of time during service,” said Clifton Holmes, a Christian writer for the Gospel Blog.

“There is no point in any of us bashing people for how much or how little time they spend in church on Sunday. If you really want to score points and find favor with God, then focus on how much time you spend with him outside of the walls of your cathedral, worship center or sanctuary.”

Research conducted over the last year by anonymous worshippers for the church website Ship of Fools found some Anglican clergy are preaching for as long as 42 minutes. Throw in songs of praise, fellowship and prayer and the worshipping public spends about two hours in church.

Bishop Gledhill said there had been a tendency to devise “more and more intricate and beautiful services for our own use, forgetting those who might come if we made things simpler for them to start with.”

He said that clergy need to make sure that their sermons are not too long, arguing that people’s “attention spans aren’t what they used to be.”

Last year the Vatican told catholic clergy to keep their sermons under eight minutes to cater for people who found it hard to concentrate for long periods.

Sources