Is Religion Asleep at the Wheel? (Inside the Church Sleep Epidemic)
Week in Review (June 10-15)
Most days I check religion news headlines. Sadly, many of the top reported religion stories are dire - religious animosity, hate, and violence. I have covered some of these stories in Substack articles, such as my recent article on religious trauma and the LGBTQ+ community. But this morning as I perused religion news stories, a few of them struck me as quite humorous. I decided to share one of them in this week’s Week in Review. I decided to have a little fun with it to lighten things up on the weekend.
The Church Snooze Epidemic
Catholics Asleep in Church
This week the Vatican was forced to confront an alarming trend among Catholics - they are dosing off in church. Pope Francis addressed this widespread problem by telling priests they should keep their homilies to less than eight minutes. The Pope did not restrain his criticisms of lackluster priestly preaching, “People fall asleep, and they are right. Priests sometimes talk a lot and you don’t understand what they are talking about.”
Ouch!
A homily is traditionally known as a commentary that follows a reading of scripture, giving the public explanation of a religious doctrine or text. The General Instruction of the Roman Missal (GIRM), the official document governing the celebration of Mass, states that:
65. The Homily is part of the Liturgy and is strongly recommended, for it is necessary for the nurturing of the Christian life. It should be an exposition of some aspect of the readings from Sacred Scripture or of another text from the Ordinary or from the Proper of the Mass of the day and should take into account both the mystery being celebrated and the particular needs of the listeners.
In Protestantism, the term often used to identify a public teaching is “sermon”, a religious discourse or oration, given by the church pastor. In Christian practice, a sermon is usually preached to a congregation in a place of worship, either from an elevated architectural feature, known as a pulpit or an ambo, or from behind a lectern. In more progressive or contemporary Christian churches, the sermon might be presented with a wireless mic and no podium at all.
The relative importance of the homily or sermon differs. There are seven sacraments in the Roman Catholic Church. One of them is the The Eucharist or Holy Communion, which is practiced at the weekly Mass. This is one reason why a devoted Catholic would attend Mass, regardless of how they might grade the priest’s speaking ability.
However, in Protestantism, particularly Evangelicalism, more emphasis is typically placed on the weekly sermon. For example, the hallmark of virtually every Evangelical megachurch is a charismatic and compelling speaker. When you think of the most compelling religious orators, people like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Billy Graham come to mind. In the 1730’s and 1740’s the powerful preaching of George Whitefield, John Wesley, and Jonathan Edwards, sparked the First Great Awakening. Today, the largest Protestant church, Lakewood Church, attributes much of it’s success to the persuasive personality and teaching of Joel Osteen.
The Church Sleep Dilemma
The sleeping-in-church epidemic is partly an extension of the overall sleep deprivation crisis. Sleep, the bedrock of public health, is eroding. The CDC says that in order to address other health problems, poor sleep in America needs to be treated like a public health crisis. The CDC estimates that one in three American adults is not getting enough sleep. Nearly one in five Americans use sleep medication. "Sleep tourism,” where people are now going on vacation just to get a good night’s sleep is a rising trend.
People who can’t afford a sleepcation or a holisleep, may have to settle for a Sunday snooze in church. Church is often the perfect scenario for catching a power nap. Research shows there are primarily five reasons why people fall asleep in church:
Tradition - parents who allowed their children to sleep in church become adults who are more prone to associate church with sleep.
Physical Condition of the Church - in the midst of an overly comfortable church atmosphere, a person can be lulled into drowsiness.
Personal Factors - sleep deprivation or staying up too late on Saturday night.
Spiritual Factors - there are many people who go to church as a duty or form of routine and aren’t interested in engaging the experience.
Boring Sermons - poor speaking skills or ho-hum messages often put people into dreamland.
Notable Christian pastor, preacher and author, Chuck Swindoll, said about sleeping in church:
“We preachers can be guilty of not organizing our material clearly and concisely. This leads to rambling and mumbling unnecessary details not essential to the message. A failure to present the Word of God with genuine enthusiasm accompanied by fresh, specific illustrations and set forth in an unpredictable yet appropriate manner can cause boredom. A monotonous voice only adds another dose of Sominex to those fighting the battle of the eyelids. In all honesty, the messenger can be as guilty as the hearer, sometimes more.”
There are many who have strived to address the church sleep predicament. The topic of how to stop sleeping in church is a common Reddit theme. The consensus for combating church dozing includes:
Drink coffee before church (and during church if possible)
Eat snacks during the service.
Stand up or move around occasionally.
Take notes during the sermon.
Go to bed early the night before.
Pray to be delivered from the spirit of slumber.
A completely different approach to the church sleep problem is to make sleeping a spiritual discipline. Spiritual disciplines are regular practices that a religious person commits themselves to for the purpose of spiritual growth and development. Some common spiritual disciplines are prayer, Bible study, meditation and fasting. Add a new one to the list - sleep. In this article, How to Love God by Getting More Sleep, Joe Carter writes: “Sometimes the godliest thing you can do in the universe is get a good night’s sleep.”
The more heavy-handed religious approach is to condemn church sleeping as a grave offense against God. There are some who say that dosing off in church is an attack of Satan and willful sin. The Bible verse often used is 1 Peter 5:8, “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.” The idea is that Satan uses comfort, idleness and even church drossiness to obstruct a person’s relationship with God.
In the article, So, You Are Falling Asleep During Church, it states:
“Satan knows to use your naturally bent tendencies to be self-oriented to keep you from glorifying Jesus to the fullest. His tactic of convincing you that it is hard to stay awake because the pastor is boring and not entertaining enough is effective.”
Some consider sleeping during a sermon in church to be sin or evil practice. In the Bible, Acts 20:9 describes a young man named Enrichus who fell asleep during a sermon and fell to his death from a third-story window. Using this passage, this preacher delivered a 50-minute sermon to his congregation titled, The Danger of Sleeping in Church, and points out:
“To this young guy falling asleep let me state the obvious while he slept and before he fell he missed all the important things that the Apostle Paul was saying. Clearly his physical sleeping led to a dangerous end when he fell out of the window.”
In defense of Enrichus, coffee had not yet been discovered. The first legends of the coffee bean originate from Ethiopia and came 10 centuries after Jesus lived. Coffee beans didn't make it to the Middle East until the fifteenth century CE. It’s rarely mentioned how extraordinary it was for Jesus to have pioneered a religious revolution without even one cup of coffee. Given the current church sleep epidemic who knows how many people would have fallen out of that same third-story window, though most churches today don’t offer window ledge balcony seating.
The United Church of Sleepy People
We’ve all heard terms such as “Bedside Baptist” and “Pillow Presbyterian”. They describe a church that someone attends in their dreams without leaving the much-needed refuge of their own bed. It is a light-hearted way of saying that someone is not attending a physical church, and instead, they are staying in bed on Sunday mornings.
Though this phenomenon could impact church attendance and tithing numbers, Swiss psychiatrist, psychotherapist and psychologist, Carl Jung, would likely praise the sleep-and-dream church option. Jungian dreamwork (or Jungian dream analysis) is based on the work of Carl Jung. Jung believed that dreams are a way for the unconscious mind to communicate with the conscious mind. Jung wrote, “We have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions.” He also said, “The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul.”
With all this in mind, attending Bedside Baptist could have these benefits:
More sleep
Dream work
Reduction of carbon emissions into the environment
Managing excessive caffeine intake
In The Odyssey, Homer wrote, “There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep.” You perhaps could sum up the church sleep crisis with: too many words and too little sleep. Bedside Baptist could be a solution.
Or, you could simply listen to the Pope - keep the homily or sermon under eight minutes, and let everyone go home a little early to take a Sunday nap.
The Guinness Record For The World's Longest Sermon was 53 hours and 18 minutes, delivered by Pastor Zach Zehnder in 2015 at Cross Church in Mount Dora, Florida. The 31-year-old pastor delivered this marathon sermon with the help of 200 pages of notes and more than 600 PowerPoint slides that began on Friday, Nov. 7, and ended at 12:18 p.m. on Sunday. It was said this was a “sparkling example of congregational faithfulness”. But just think of all the sleep these people could have caught up on, had they remained in bed and not attended the sermon.
In the Guinness Book of World Records there is listed the shortest sermon ever preached. It was given by John Albrecht, an Episcopal priest in Michigan. The sermon was this statement only, “I am as I love.”
In America, sleep deprivation is increasing and church attendance is declining. Is the cause-and-effect interpretation a false correlation of the gospel truth? You decide.
Getting Better Sleep
If you’re interested in exploring the subject of getting better sleep, some useful resources would be:
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker
The Sleep Solution: Why Your Sleep is Broken and How to Fix It by W. Chris Winter
The Sleep Prescription: Seven Days to Unlocking Your Best Rest by Aric A. Prather
In Summary
The Pope delivered a message from God about the length of church sermons.
Could the rise of sleep deprivation and decline of church attendance be related?
The fast growing church in America might be Bedside Baptist.
Good sleep is a bedrock necessity for overall health and taking this seriously could transform your life.
The longest sermon in history is 53 hours and 18 minutes, but perhaps the best one is the shortest, “I am as I love.”
“Sleep is the best meditation.”
– Dalai Lama
Here in the north of England in the 17-18th. centuries there are various Quaker minutes appointing people to gently awaken sleepers in Meeting for Worship. One has to bear in mind that Quaker meetings lasted for hours, with some spoken ministry, but long periods of quiet, and the worshippers were often farm labourers who had spent long hours in physical work.
Today we talk about "the ministry of sleeping"
I do like Pope Francis as far as popes go but God getting involved in the timing may be a bit much for me. One advantage of growing up Catholic…15 minutes of sermon. Then there is the Satan and falling asleep part. Deliver me please