In a recent post at his blog, Thom Rainer shares the results of his inquiry about how much time pastors spend writing sermons. He writes: “I recently conducted an unscientific Twitter poll to ask pastors precisely how much time they spend in sermon preparation. For this question I asked for the amount of preparation time for one sermon. Many pastors must prepare more than one sermon per week, so their workload to prepare to preach is even greater. Here are the results of the poll by three-hour increments:
1 to 3 hours—1 percent
4 to 6 hours—9 percent
7 to 9 hours—15 percent
10 to 12 hours—22 percent
13 to 15 hours—24 percent
16 to 18 hours—23 percent
19 to 21 hours—2 percent
22 to 24 hours—0 percent
25 to 27 hours—1 percent
28 to 30 hours—2 percent
31 to 33 hours—1 percent
Rainer says: “The results were fascinating to me. Here are some key points I found in the study:
• Most pastors responded with a range of hours. I took the midpoint of each range for my data.
• 70 percent of pastors’ sermon preparation time is the narrow range of 10 to 18 hours per sermon.
• Keep in mind these numbers represent sermon preparation time for just one sermon. Many pastors spend 30 or more hours in preparing messages each week.
• The median time for sermon preparation in this study is 13 hours. That means half of the respondents gave a number under 13 hours; the other half gave a number more than 13 hours.
• Most of the respondents who gave a response less than 12 hours indicated they were bivocational pastors.” (Click here to read the full article.)