What The Church Can Learn from Eutychus

This week on my YouTube channel, Views from Downstream, I talked about what Eutychus might teach us about sermons. If you are unfamiliar with Eutychus, he was the young man who sat in a window while Paul was preaching late one night (Acts 20:7-9). He fell asleep and tumbled out of the 3rd story window to his death. Paul immediately went and threw himself upon him and he came back to life.

It is an amazing story and the only one that I know of in the Bible that describes the length of a sermon (“on and on”). Obviously, it was so long that Paul began losing his audience, including Eutychus.

I have been on a journey over the past few years questioning how we do church in our country. Given that churches are in numerical decline and that 50%-80% of young people are leaving the faith after graduating from high school, there is strong evidence that what we are doing is not very effective. Yet, we persist in maintaining our approach, just as we have done for decades.

For the most part, worship services have become two-dimensional. Two elements take up the bulk of the time in a typical worship service—music worship and sermons. Other elements have gradually, and almost completely been eliminated, such as communal prayer and the sharing of what the Lord is doing individual lives. Why is this?

There are a couple of reasons. First, time priority is given to singing and preaching. Those combined leave little room for anything else. Not many people will tolerate a worship service that is over 90 minutes. If you add announcements and the offering, plus Communion, there is no time left. The second reason is the issue of control. Whenever a service is opened up for people to share testimonies or prayer requests, there is always the possibility that a few will be long-winded. Church leaders seem uncomfortable with that possibility, so they essentially make it impossible for that to happen on a Sunday morning.

But the question I want to ask is, how much are we losing in eliminating these elements from our worship services? I think quite a bit. The main thing we are losing is connection with one another as believers. All the time in the modern church service does not allow for significant interaction. It’s all passive. Even the singing of worship songs has become more and more passive as songs are sung that often are very difficult for an average singer to sing. This is because almost all of the current songs are written by professional singers and songwriters for the radio and performances, not congregational singing. Sermons are typically 30-60 minutes of monologue, which means there is no interaction between believers.

I cited the Eutychus story for two reasons. First, it is the only passage in Scripture that provides anything close to a time frame for sermon length. Where did we come up with the idea that the sermon should be 30-60 minutes long? Certainly not from the Scriptures. Secondly, the excessive length of Paul’s teaching led to him losing Eutychus’ attention (and likely that of others). If the only passage in Scripture that mentions the length of a sermon includes one in the audience falling asleep and to his death through a window, shouldn’t we be taking some notice?

The reality is our worship services are not creating the environment or experience of true fellowship. It is a self-inflicted wound that has been festering for decades. It’s time to begin the healing process by recognizing that body of Christ is not primarily an audience for the show we’ve created. They are not there to hear a monologue or see a concert. They are there to worship the Lord and that is best done when believers are interacting with one another through discussing the Word of God, through praying for one another, and through hearing what the Lord is doing in the lives of their fellow believers.

© Jim Musser 2025 All Scripture references are from the New International Version 2011