Sermon one from the special revival speaker comes to an end at about seven minutes into the first video and then the pastor decides it’s time for the second sermon — while everybody is forced to stand.
43 thoughts on “Second Sermons – A Video Example”
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I always hated the “2nd sermon”. Especially since you had to stand for tha all time, never knowing when it was going to end. These guys really love to hear themselves talk.
Also love statistics board on the wall. “Todays Offering” was $1504.09. “Last Weeks Offering” was only $238.00. I am sure there’s a sermon on tithing in their future.
The “special revival speaker” was not wearing a jacket, so this church is obviously in apostasy. Further evidence of this is found in their displaying of the ecumenical “christian” flag.
@John….He may have asked permission to remove his jacket after he presented himself with it on. That would be acceptable then. 🙂
Where is this “pea patch” that they keep talking about? (or is it “pee patch”?)
Wow. Just wow.
the pea patch is probably this one:
It was a favorite illustration in southern fundy circles when I was growing up because it involved a single man standing against the enemy and defending his humble “pea patch.” That plays well to the Scots-Irish honor culture of the South.
On that last, I distinctly remember someone in a fundamentalist church in South Carolina singing the following lyrics as a special number before a sermon on the above text:
Get off of my pea patch
Get off of my ground
Get off of my pea patch
Don’t want you hangin’ around
I’ll read my Bible and I’ll pray for you
And if that don’t hit you, I’m liable to
Classic.
I suppose “Lentil patch” doesn’t have the same “ring” to it.
I hated 2nd sermans at my old church, we would stand there for what felt like forever and my mother(who was recovering from kemo therapy at the time) got too tired and had to sit back down while the paster was still talking, we got a parade of dirty looks from everyone around us.these looks increased when I sat down to make her not feel so bad. You could hear people wispering about how her sitting down meant she was not honed in on gods strength and power and blah blah blah. Made me sick becasue my mother is a saint, she enarly cried every time she had to sit down during 2nd sermans for that reason.
How utterly insensitive! Didn’t those people know she had cancer? How dare they give her the evil eye? That just burns me up! 👿
Oh, I always hated these! Just when you thought you were done and able to leave, you get pulled back in and are forced to listen to more. It was usually excruciating because it was usually inane, and just meant to keep the congregation “on their toes” literally…
These “second sermons” are necessary for two reasons- 1) the Holy Spirit didn’t have any Word to work with in people’s hearts and 2) many people are bored to death during the first sermon; a nice background music, the onset of bloodflow in your legs and a preacher’s hypnotic call should either make you feel guilty for falling asleep or should make you run to the altar so your family could eat dinner on time.
It makes perfect sense.
I think this all has to do with ego. The visiting evangelist usually preaches a “hell-and-brimstone” type service full of the ancetodel stories and examples, jokes and plenty of yelling. The church pastor cannot let this visiting preacher take the limelight away from him so he feels it necessary to make sure everyone knows “who is in charge”. Lest the people will crave for these visiting types all the time. Hence another 10-15 minutes of the alpha dog re-establishing his territory.
“Lentils?!? Only those #$%^ A-rabs eat lentils! My heathen brother lives in the city and eats at those furrin’ rest-runts, and everything is made from lentils in those dens of iniquity. We’re Amurrrcans here. It’s PEAS you one-world socialist sinner! ”
But seriously, my sister’s wedding had 3 preachers from the family in attendance (grandfather, father, and local pastor). I thought I’d NEVER get to eat cake that day….so many sermons….sooo hungry….
/I know, stereotyping southerners….just having a laugh and I couldn’t resist.
Anyone who has been there knows that the WORST second sermons are at BJU during Bible Conference, by the current chancellor. EVERY SINGLE TIME! Especially during the night service. And depending on how much he disagreed with the person speaking directly correlated to how long he spoke. Also, if the message didn’t have ANYTHING to do with salvation/rededication/surrender, etc, it would get back to that so that we could have an invitation. 🙂
It’s also an insult to the visiting preacher. I remember a Brazilian missionary…that is he was himself a Brazilian who had married an American missionary…did an excellent sermon on John 3:16. The pastor did the 2nd sermon when he got up to handle the invitation. Sure the speaker had an accent, but he was perfectly understandable. And… he was preaching to the choir anyway. I felt embarrassed for guest speaker.
This is hard on the pianist, too. You sit there thinking “When’s he going to start? When’s he going start?? Will it be Just as I Am tonight or Have Thine Own Way, Lord?” To keep your brain from getting atrophied you surreptitiously look up all the possible invitational song choices and stick your fingers in each place. After five minutes your arm is about ready to go to sleep, so you switch to your left hand. Two good things about being the pianist in revival services: 1. you got to remain seated 2. nobody wondered about your spirituality when you didn’t troop with the other lemmings to the Old Fashioned Altar because you had a job to do for the Lord, don’t ya know.
Oh the memories this evokes. I remember a pastor from Romania who came to be our keynote speaker for our missions conference in 1992. (He was so easy on the eyes too, I know that has nothing to do with this topic but well, I do remember that!) He preached for only about 20 minutes or so and then Mr. Windbag (our pastor) felt that wasn’t long enough so he went on for about 40 minutes more to top off the Romanian pastor’s message. This irked me and I could see the Romanian pastor sitting there on the platform looking rather irked. There could be several reasons for this being done by the pastor, like someone mentioned, the pastor had to reestablish WHO was the REAL AUTHORITY there, not some visiting pastor or evangelist! It was HIM! And the other thing is even worse, he felt the Holy Spirit couldn’t possibly have spoken to anyone’s heart with such a short message, it HAS to be at least 45 minutes long to be worth anything, the Holy Spirit needs Mr. Windbag to preach that long before He can begin to work!
Oh this is so annoying! There were so many times, so many, that the Lord spoke to me within the first 10-15 minutes and if they’d have finished then I’d have gone to the altar. But when it just goes on and on and on and on and on… well that just annoyed me so much when he finally finished I did not go to the altar.
These guys are so in love with their own voices, that’s for sure. 👿
@Brandon
my thoughts exactly
I got 31 seconds into the first one before I was just done. No mas! 🙂 Truly bizarre (usually a numbers at the altar drive) fundy phenomenon.
@Brandon and sarah–Right on. I actually looked toward Bible Conference with dread for that very reason.
Don’t forget those wonderful prayer sermons, where the person praying uses his prayer to preach another sermon and/or go through the plan of salvation. Ah, the things I DON’T miss about fundamentalism!
@Amanda: brilliant! “lord, we just… we just come before thee, lord… we just, lord, we just thank thee that we are not like the southern baptists, lord. and lord we just, we just thank thee for thy word, where thou toldest us clearly to come out from among them. and lord we just, we just ask that everybody would turn in their bibles…”
@Reader Mo: LOL–Don’t know how many prayers I’ve heard like that.
Darrell, that might be a good post. Stuff Fundies Like: Using “Lord” as Prayer Punctuation.
@Reader Mo….good one. I always got uncomfortable with all the “justs”. Very creepy.
I don’t remember any scripture verses that said “just sayeth the lord”
this time of Holy Invitation is needed as a re-pitch to the Holy Spirit- He obviously striked the fundy preacher’s first ball…
@Tony the Holy Spirit misses a lot in fundyland! You’d think being a co-equal member of the truine God that he could handle his end, but not so much. 🙂
of course it wouldnt be a fundy revival service if the large women of the church didnt give hysterical testimonies afterwards. jeez.
I always hated the sermon prayer. There’s the prelude (the preached prayer before the main sermon), the offertory demand (You won’t sit down until you’ve heard the entire history of all fundy giving), and the post-sermon recap immediately following the 24 verses of Just As I Am.
@Amanda
Those made me so uncomfortable. “Dear Heavenly Father, help us to remember my point A, which I will summarize in case you weren’t listening to my sermon. Help us also to heed my point B, conveniently summarized again. Please change the hearts of those who disagree with my point C. I know that if they don’t change their hearts, they will suffer the consequences I outlined in sub-points 1) and 2). Amen.”
It was so obvious they weren’t talking to God, I remember sneaking peeks through my eyelashes to see whether we were still supposed to have our heads bowed.
The evangelist has a voice like Kenny Rodgers, especially when he got teary eyed . That one song kept coming to mind- You got to know when to hold them… I think it’s called “The Gambler”. It’s uncanny how the guy sounds just like Kenny Rogers.
The crying baby reminds me of that commercial with the guy interviewing with the stain on his shirt, where every time he speaks the stain starts talking jibberish over top of him.
@Brandon, Sarah & JMP: Were you all there during the Bible Conference when they had the “OH GOD!” prayer? It was one of the morning sessions when they would have several students pray in succession (while the rest of the student body caught up on their sleep).
Someone finished praying, and then there was this lengthy silence, longer than normal between prayers. My friend and I were half asleep, and just as we were becoming aware of the weird silence, but before we had become fully conscious, this really tall guy who must’ve had his mouth right on the mic says in a very deep, very loud, very breathy voice, “OHHHH GAAAAAWWWWWDDD!!!”
We both about jumped out of our seats and looked at each other with the same thought: “Holy crap, Legion is on the stage of the FMA!” because it seriously sounded like 1000 demons, with that guy’s voice, his being right on the mic and his exceedingly passionate “OH GOD!” to begin his prayer.
Its my most vivid memory from 4 years of Bible Conferences. 🙂
I don’t remember that, Nate. We went from four services to three per day for Bible Conference while I was there. But that would be hilarious.
My personal favorites would be listening to BJIII (definitely a non- or anti- Calvinist) get up and explain what Ian Paisley (most definitely a Reformed Calvinist) had just said (b/c if you sat out there, you didn’t understand him).
I do remember Ian Paisley! He would always preach from “Sam” something-or-other. The BJ/IP relationship always puzzled me. BJ seemed to separate from anyone for almost any trivial reason, but they let a guy with significant doctrinal differences be the featured speaker at Bible Conference year after year. My best guess was that he got an exception for being a politician and having an accent.
For the record, Bob Jones Jr. and Paisley were great friends and BJ Jr. learned from Paisley that Calvinists were not what they had pictured to be by the Pelagian leaning IFB’s. BJ Jr. was instrumental in the establishment of the first Free Presbyterian church in the US and the second in North America.
At church of the open door in westminster md we had bible conferences. 1st preaching was at 7 pm and 2nd preaching was supposed to start at 8pm. there was a second sermon after the first sermon and a second sermon after the second sermon. i am not sure how the math adds up but i think we sat through about 8 messages. (and all 4 verses to just as i am) we probably felt that way because the topics were all over the place.
I remember that Shelton Smith (former pastor of church of the open door, now editor of sword of the lord)made us sing twice through just as i am because he couldnt believe that no one was coming forward.
Fundy preachers hate it when no one comes forward. They cant handle the fact that their congregation is doing so well. They must say to themselves “come on, i know some of you are involved in heinous unrepented sin. I know my preaching isnt working this good. ive done nothing to prepare.”
@Tyler- It’s true. I live in fundy small town southern America and while I am Presbyterian I hear similar things all the time…especially from my fundy family.
I had to stop listening. I lived this too many times and the memories are painful. I was victim many many times to the ” second sermon followed by does anyone else have anything to add because we didn’t really get the reaction we wanted during the first and second sermon so we’re going to stretch this out as long as possible to see if we do” and you are standing there praying that no one says anything so it’ll all finally be over and everybody is quiet and the preacher’s mouth is beginning to form around the closing words and just as you see the light at the end of the tunnel, you hear the voice of the most long-winded member of your church say “Preacher, I’ve got something I’d like to say” and you know it’s all over because hearing him speak will compel others to as well and you struggle against that audible groan that is trying to force it’s past your lips because you know that you have another half hour of church on your feet to go and you look at the door and sigh and lapse into a daydream of all the things you can do when you are finally released. It was an awful experience.
@various I’ve got to say that I loved Bible Conference week at Bob Jones. I worked on the stage, and we “listened in” while we took the entire week to tear down the set from the spring play. Most mornings Mr Stratton (father to Dick of the accounting faculty) would bring in a few dozen Krispy Kremes and gallons of milk for us. Somehow our breaks seemed to coincide with the musical portions of the show. I expect that we were more truly blessed than anybody who attended in person.
I always think that the second sermon is just an insult to the preacher. It screams “you didn’t conclude this right, so I’ll do it better.” Not cool, not cool.
Bob III is awful at these…
Second sermons are common in Latin America. You can get to the invitation and remain seated for four or five or six verses of whatever, plus exhortations, and then proceed to the STANDING invitation with another five or six or seven verses plus exhortations and another sermon. I actually taught an entire Bible story to a large group of children during an evening church invitation, and had time to give my own invitation!
Awwww….both first and second sermons were pretty horrible, but I felt some sympathy and empathy for the congregation. They are obviously sincere and invested in their church. It reminded me of back in the day when the sermons were horrible and overdrawn, but the people were very touching in their responsiveness and sincerity 🙂
2nd sermons are the worst. If you didn’t get it all out before the prayer, then it must not have been God’s will. HAHA! If you opened your mouth and just let it fly out from God, then He didn’t want it said.
In my old church in Michigan the first pastor we had (we had three while I was there) had another annoying habit. You always stood for the first song and then they would pray after that and then let you sit down. But instead of praying right away he’d launch into some long winded spiel about the weather, leading to what he did yesterday and this and that and sometimes it was 15 minutes before he finally prayed and we could sit down! That would annoy me no end, he’d do it on Wednesday nights too and I knew there were people there who had worked on their feet all day and didn’t need to be standing for that long mess! Why didn’t he pray, let everyone sit and then launch into his long winded spiel? Oh no that would’ve been sensitive. I think sometimes they did this because they were jealous that the members could sit while he had to stand behind the pulpit! 👿