If you’re thinking about visiting a new church, its denomination might give you a hint at exactly how long you can plan to be there. A new study from the Pew Research Center has revealed the median sermon length — calculated from a compilation of church websites — to be 37 minutes long.
Between church traditions, though, the sermon length varies quite a bit. Catholic sermons are the shortest at 14 minutes, followed by mainline Protestant messages at 25 minutes. Next up is evangelical Protestant sermons at 39 minutes, compared to historically black Protestant messages at 54 minutes, which is the longest.
This Pew Research Center analysis harnesses computational techniques to identify, collect and analyze the sermons that U.S. churches livestream or share on their websites each week. The survey included data collected from 50,000 sermons preached at 6,431 churches delivered between April 7 to June 1 of this year, including Easter.
The survey also found that across all major Christian traditions, most preachers are much more likely to teach from the New Testament (90 percent) than the Old Testament (61 percent). That pattern is particularly prevalent among Catholic and mainline Protestant churches.