D vvv ==ear brothers and sisters in Christ bless you in the new year.
i would like to hear your opinion on when a preacher is preaches.
Sometimes i experience when im a service the preacher repeating himself example the first 15 minutes are really good the message he trying to pass on is good.
But then he repeats himself on and on the message is the same but the words are different.
I think that when you have said your message there is no need to say the same thing again. When your a preacher you must be prepared and also guided be the Holy Spirit.
Firstly, the study of preaching is generally known as Homiletics, for homily is basically another word for a sermon. I myself like to use the words homily and homiletics because they come actoss less, if you will forgive the pun, preachy. This is also of course because I am a part of a liturgical tradition. This has an impact on preaching style, because liturgical worship through the virtue of the specific prayers, hymns and scripture lessons taken from a lectionary such as the Revised Common Lectionary or the older traditional one year lectionaries used by Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist, Catholic and other traditional churches (I prefer the latter, because there are parts of Luke, Matthew, and Mark, but especially Matthew and Luke, which one should not have to wait a year for, whereas in most lectionaries, Mark is traditionally read during Lent as it lends itself to a recapitulation of key points of the Gospel in advance of the Paschal resurrection while retaining a certain oo
Repetition of certain phrases and keywords within a sermon or any kind of public speaking along with following a coherent structure that the congregation understands, so that one might have the best chance of understanding, is a common practice, and it can work very well.
this is of course in the context of a single service which has a homily or sermon. Typically this will include the Sunday Eucharist or morning prayer (unless the liturgical office, such as Orthodox, Lutheran or Catholic Matins or Anglican Morning Prayer is integrated into the main liturgy; this is almost universal in the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox churches, rare in Lutheranism and Roman Catholicism (except at Roman Catholic catherdral services), and also was at one time standard practice in Anglicanism (Morning Prayer was followed by the Litany and then Holy Communion or Ante-communion; this pattern is now extremely rare, outside perhaps some cathedrals and of couree, the Anglican monasteries).
Where it could be more of a problem would be if the sermon was effectively the same or similiar every Sunday. The common details which should always be present are included in most liturgical churches in the liturgy itself, whereas preaching from a lectionary, which in many liturgical rites such as the traditional Western Rites, the Roman Missal, and largely, the Revised Common lectionary, in which the Old Testament lessons provide a prophecy or theme that leads into the new, followed by an Epistle such as tho which provides an exegesis of the Gospel lesson, which in traditional liturgy is read or chanted according in a beautiful manner which was doubtless inspired by how the Torah was and still is read in the main Rabinnical Jewish lectionary (which is similiar to the lectionary used by the Assyrian Church of the East, the Ancient Church of the East, the Chaldean Catholics and Syro-Malabar Catholics, known as the East Syriac Rite, which is interesting because the principle lectionary of Rabinnical Judaism is that contained in the Babylonian Talmud, which was compiled in the same place (Csestiphon and later Baghdad) as the Church of the East was headquartered in).
The benefit of such a system is that lectionaries promote the use of expositional preaching based on the appointer scriptures and other propers such as prayers ane hymns for the day, which in turn ensures that the content of a sermon aligns with the specific liturgical occasion, and thus each sermon should be different from the preceding one. A similiar effect is also obtained through the use of Lectio Continua, reading the Bible end to end, which is practiced by some Protestant churches mainoy in the Reformed and Evangelical communities, such as the Calvary Chapel, and also, I think the Reformed Presbyterian Church also known as Covenanting Presbyterians.
This however taken to an extreme has an effect I personally dislike in that it can lead to the four canonical Gospels not being directly read or adequately venerated liturgically (I strongly believe that at least one of a minimum of two lessons at every service be from the Gospels), and also it can result in under-commemoration of the liturgical occasion if it is a feast such as Christmas or Easter (which did not bother Covenanting Presbyterians or Puritan Congregationalists, but it does bother me). However, this is based on my own liturgical preferences.
The important thing to avoid is lectio selecta, because this places an extreme burden on the clergy to select relevant scriptures. Many churches, including one of my favorites, Park Street Church in Boston, use a form of lectio selecta, and Park Street pulls it off, but Park Street is a venerable and extremely well-funded church dating back to the 18th century, located on the Freedom Trail, and benefitting from much love in the community despite also being the last traditionalist theologically conservative of the historic Congregationalist churches in Boston (all the others are now a part of the UCC or worse, there is the group that broke away in the late 18th century along with Harvard to form the Unitarian church).
In most speeches, teaching, or sermons it is customary too reiterate your bullet points in effort to get the message across. Your wrap-up should be concise in effort to leave your audience …not just with food for thought, but a hunger for more…. but many people do not know when to stop. And thus, trigger snooze mode in the audience.
And being a sandman, if anyone knows how to trigger snooze mode or avoid triggering it, or alternately stop Runners from fleeing Carousel, it would be you
@sandman 
.
At any rate, if you will forgive the Logan’s Run joke, I do agree with your post entirely, in that snooze mode is all too common a risk, particularly, if I might quote another 1970s film, Clint Eastwood in Magnum Force, “A man’s gotta know his limitations.”
Specifically what leads to the problem you refer to is an overly ambitious plan for the talk, and this goes for any form of public speaking. I know of only a handful of clergy who I could listen to for more than half an hour, for instance, Dr. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church and Archbishop Fulton Sheen, both of blessed memory. Among current clergy, many of the best preachers I come across are Coptic Orthodox, specifically the Coptic Orthodox, as opposed to Orthodox clergy in general. This is surprising because most married Coptic priests have degrees in engineering or finance, and their theological training consists of spending forty days learning the liturgy at a Coptic monastery, and the remainder are monks, and at monastic liturgies in Eastern and Oriental Orthodox churches sermons are not a given. (This being said an increasing number of Coptic priests are attending Eastern Orthodox seminaries that also welcome the Oriental Orthodox, like St. Vladimir’s).
So in the absence of really engaging homiletics which few people can do, I think brevity is important. Several of my favorite clergy, such as the current rector of St. Thomas Fifth Ave. in New York, are more engaging when preaching otherwise remarkably brief sermons.
Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, memory eternal, said that he was taught when being ordained a priest, that each sermon should have exactly three points, no more, no less. Techniques like this, or my preferred approach of targeting a fifteeen minute length, about the length of a good quality educational video on YouTube from one of the more successful science or engineering channels, seem to be effective, since unfortunately we cannot all be St. John Chrysostom or St. Ephraim the Syrian.
I once heard a speech formula that was then attributed to Abraham Lincoln: Tell them what you are going to tell them; then tell them; then tell them what you told them.
Maybe that's what it is with these preachers.
Well the difference seems to be that Abraham Lincoln could hold an audience better.
Also, returning to the issue of liturgical churches, I would argue that in liturgical churches, one reason why the rector of St. Thomas Fifth Ave is that being an Episcopal Church with very traditional liturgics, it, like an Orthodox or Catholic or Lutheran or Assyrian church, or other churches along those lines, to a large extent, the story of creation and salvation is included in the liturgy, particularly in the Eucharistic prayer, for example, in the Divine Liturgy of St. Basil, or its two relatives in Rite II of the 1979 BCP, Eucharistic Prayer D, a derivative of the old Egyptian form of St. Basil very similar to Eucharistic Prayer 4 in the Roman church, and Eucharistic Prayer C.
