Protestants spend $4.5 billion a year on sermons. What’s our return on investment?

For five centuries, Protestant believers have gathered for a weekly worship service. And the centerpiece of that gathering is the sermon.

Pastors and churchgoers invest an enormous amount of time, attention and money preparing and watching these weekly teaching and preaching sessions. No other thing we do comes close.

So what’s the bottom line? Are we getting a return on this huge investment? Let’s look at the numbers:

Time

Pastors spend about a third of their work hours each week preparing and delivering a sermon. Here are the numbers:

• A 2021 survey from Lifeway research found that evangelical Protestant pastors spend an average of 13.8 hours each week preparing a sermon. Add in 30 to 120 minutes of preaching time (depending on how many times he speaks on a weekend) and we arrive at an average time expenditure of about 15 hours a week.
• According to the U.S. Religion Census in 2020 there were about 356,000 churches in America. Most of these are Protestant churches. Based on this number I can confidently say about 300,000 sermons are prepared and delivered each week in Protestant churches America.
• 300,000 sermons x 15 hours means Protestant pastors spend a cumulative 4,500,000 man-hours in sermon prep and delivery each week.
• Multiply this by 52 weeks a year, and we get 234 milion man-hours a year to prepare 15.6 million sermons.

Attention

Protestants spend anywhere from 40-70% of their gathered worship time listening to a sermon. It’s not uncommon for a megachurch to offer a 70 minute worship service with a 40 minute sermon. (Sermon = 57% of the service). This translates into a lot of attention:

• According to a 2023 survey from Gallup Research 30% of Americans attend church weekly. That means 100 million Americans will hear a sermon in a typical week.
• An analysis of 50,000 sermons posted online found that the median length of a Protestant sermon is:
  • Mainline churches: 25 minutes
  • Evangelical churches: 39 minutes
  • Black churches: 54 minutes

For simplicity’s sake, let’s average these at 40 minutes, giving us the following totals:

• 100,000,000 viewers times 40 minutes watching sermons each week means Protestants are devoting 66 million man-hours a week to sermon viewing
• Over the course of a year, that’s 3.43 billion hours.

Ironically, as attention spans have gotten shorter, sermons have gotten longer. During the high point of U.S. church involvement (around 1960) a typical sermon in a Protestant church was about 20 minutes long vs. almost 40 minutes (and rising) today.

Money

What do these sermons cost?

• According to Zip Recruiter the median salary for a U.S. pastor is about $50,000 a year.
• Pastors work an average of 50 hours a week (a conservative estimate) which works out to $19.23 an hour.
• $19.23 x 15 hours of prep/delivery time = Churches pay $288 per sermon.
• Multiply this by 300,000 pulpits, and you get a cumulative total of $86,500,000 spent for sermon prep and delivery each week.
• Multiply this by 52 weeks and you get a total expenditure $4,500,000,000 a year.

Bottom lines:

• Protestant pastors spend almost a quarter of a billion man-hours each year to prepare 15 million original sermons.
• Over the course of a year, Protestant Christians will spend a cumulative 3.4 billion man-hours watching sermons.
• Protestants invest $4.5 billion a year in sermon preparation and delivery.

What are we getting for our $4.5 billion?

Sermons were effective tools through most of the 20^th century. Religious identification and church involvement stayed fairly steady until the turn of the century, when the trend lines began heading downward.

Around 2009, sermons stopped working. That’s when we begin to see rapid declines in church attendance, religious identification and volunteerism. About a quarter of the church simply disappeared between 2009 and 2023. The number of religious “nones” almost doubled. And for the first time, the number of people who never attend church outnumbered those who attend at least monthly.

A company that sees a downturn like this one would quickly ask two questions:

• What’s our key product?
• Why did people suddenly stop buying it?

Based on time, attention and money spent, it’s clear that sermons are the Protestant church’s key product. It’s our most important outreach and teaching tool.

And people have suddenly stopped buying it. We continue to preach the gospel, but fewer and fewer people are responding.

Why did sermons stop working in 2009? The marketplace of ideas and values shifted – but sermons didn’t.

In my next post (click here to read it) we’ll take a trip to the shopping mall to see why sermons worked in the 1960s but are failing to impact the culture today. And I’ll show you three steps pastors can take to make their sermons more watchable, memorable and shareable in this new marketplace.