What follows is a blend of the funny and the serious, what some call “peanut butter and jelly,” the PB for nourishment and the J for delight. Please bring a sense of whimsy and expect to receive no sermon ideas from this! Thank you. –Joe
In the January/February 2015 issue of Preaching, executive editor Michael Duduit (and my longtime friend) tells of a fellow in Florida who carved out a slot in the Guinness Book of World Records with a sermon that lasted 53 hours and 18 minutes. Well, actually, it was 45 of his old sermons stitched together, not just one. Michael says the guy used 600 PowerPoint slides and basically covered the entire Bible, from Genesis to the concordance.
All of that tickled Editor Michael’s funny bone, as oddities in the ministry usually do. This started him thinking, “What other record-breaking attempts could be made by preachers?” After relaying his suggestions–with some parenthetical notes from moi–we will have an idea or two of our own.
Okay. Michael suggests the Guinness people might want to look at:
–The most fried chicken consumed at a church supper. (As a growing teen, I was perturbed by the way the church women would put the food away before I finished eating. So, determining to eat nothing but fried chicken–true story–I consumed 14 pieces by the time they were closing up shop. We never did learn my actual capacity.)
– The most irrelevant stories packed into a single sermon. (I’ve done this. Once I used a story from a granddaughter who is a twin. Then, I said, “As you all know, Abby and Erin are sitting here listening to this. I’ve told a story about Abby, and now need to tell a story about her sister Erin. So the following story has nothing to do with this sermon…..”)
–The most “and finally” references included in a message before actually stopping. (I plead not guilty on this one.)