Does anyone know how popular reading is? Kind of a nebulous concept, but I decided to take stab at it. Many people say that Harry Potter has re-energized the world’s passion for reading. Kids everywhere are reading more, and the adults are following. So, researching the first Potter book should give me a good answer to my question, right?
i was kind of shocked at what I found. Do you know how many people in the U.S. alone have read any one Harry Potter book? I remember once that a really popular book will see one copy borrowed and read for every copy sold. So, take the sales of a book, double it… and you should have the number of people reading that book. So I did that for the first Potter book, and then doubled that number (because it is really popular for kids to check it out and read). What percentage of U.S. do you think I came up with? 50%, 60%, 80%? Not even close. Turns out that even with my generous estimate of readership, the first Harry Potter book has probably only been read by less than 20% of the U.S. population.
Contrast that with movies. If you had a big budget Hollywood movie that was only seen by 20% of the population… you would have a huge box office bomb.
Yet in the Church, how to we usually set up learning opportunities? Book reading clubs.
Studies show that up to 80% of the people who don’t go to church would go if invited. The notion that people in the U.S. just hate churches and that we are losing ground because we are chasing people off just doesn’t hold weight to the evidence out there. People rarely get invited, and when they do… they run in this weird event that they just can’t understand.
Why do we have sermons after all? I still can’t figure that one out. I like them myself frequently… but I am still not sure why we have them. In fact, if I think back on the times and events that shaped my spiritual life, not a single one of them involves a sermon. I can barely remember any of them, come to think of it.
That is natural for humans. Hundreds of years of educational psychology have told us that we will only remember 10% of what we hear. The sermon has never been educational valid (but for that matter, neither has the lecture), yet we still keep doing them, over and over again.
I ran into this article that sheds some interesting historical light on the topic:
The Godfather of Christian Media: Exploring the Sermon
Turns out, the sermon is a relatively new blip on the map of human history, something that has its roots in pre-Christian Greek society. It is interesting to note that the modern-day equivalent of this ancient Greek practice would actually be a movie theater, not a church sermon.
Here is one of the most convicting quotes:
“The original proclamation of the Christian message was a two-way conversation… but when the oratorical schools of the Western world laid hold of the Christian message, they made Christian preaching something vastly different. Oratory tended to take the place of conversation.”
And we wonder why people are leaving the Church? They want a conversation and we give them a sermon.
Matt,
Very interesting research and insight into this. I haven’t quite come to the point where I’m abandoning preaching, but I agree that it seems we are often spending a majority of our time and energy on what gets the least return. I am very interested in transforming preaching, and making it effective. I have some ideas, but I have a lot to figure out.
My problem is that I actually like to listen to sermons, making it harder for me to figure out what needs to change. But I also can’t really explain how they are overall beneficial in the long run. Sounds weird. I really enjoyed your sermon this last Sunday. It is just kind of hard to figure out how to fix something you like.
One my students in class this week was asking about something he didn’t understand in the book, a comment about what learning is. The problem that he could understand was when the book stated that learning is typically permanent. He talked about how hard it is to recall what the professor said last week, so how can learning be permanent? My response was that some people would argue that learning never happened if it wasn’t permanent. If you can’t remember it later, then there never was any learning going on. The example (which is kind of sadistic if you think about it) that people always use in learning is of the child that burns their hand on a match and learns that fire is dangerous. But if the child keeps burning themselves all the time – then they never learned the dangers of fire. In other words, learning has to be permanent in order to be learning at all.
That is the challenge we have with the Church in general – we need to be concerned with learning and doing, not sermons and visitors. The great commission is to go and make disciples, not converts or happy visitors. To do this, I think we need to teach educational psychology instead of homiletics to our pastors, and get instructional designers involved in planning church instead of ministers. But maybe that is just my occupational bias coming out 🙂