The following report was created with data gathered from nearly 100,000 sermons posted to sermons.faithlife.com since 2019. Faithlife sermons integrates with sermon writing tools in Logos Bible software and Proclaim Church Presentation software.
Each week 1,000-1,500 new sermons are published to sermons.faithlife.com. Pastors can publish a new sermon from Logos Bible software, Proclaim presentation software, or directly on the website.
Roughly 75% of sermons published include topic tags created by the sermon author that describe an idea, person or theological concept covered in that sermon. The most common topics since 2019 are God, Jesus, Love, Faith, Power, and Glory. However, there are nearly 200 different topics represented in at least 100 sermons, including topics like loneliness, friendship, contentment or leadership.
We analyzed data from 2019 and 2020 to gain insight into recent sermon trends using these topics.
We identified 30 sermon topics that increased in popularity during the spring of 2020, including Church, Sickness, Fear, Hope, Prayer, Power, Government, Eschatology and Injustice. Topics are identified by comparing sermons preached from March 15 - May 31, 2020 to their popularity over the trailing year (beginning March 15, 2019). Many events have transpired in the last few months, beginning with the global covid-19 pandemic and the shut-down of most in-person Church services, Easter Sunday (April 12, 2020), and most recently the nationwide protests following the death of George Floyd, which coincided with the weekend of Pentecost on May 31, 2020.
Trending topics are shown in alphabetical order below. Under each topic, the trend line shows the percent of sermons that are tagged with a topic. The time interval starting at the beginning of March 2020 is shown in dark green.
Initially, we see quick increases for the topics Fear, Sickness, Prayer, Church and Comfort. Church, and prayer continue to rise later in April and May, and are joined by topics Hope, Service and Family, while fear and sickness trend back down.
Church, and what it means during this season of social distancing, continues to be a popular topic of discussion in sermons. This includes Church fellowship and also sacraments traditionally performed at church services such as the Lord’s Supper.
Holy Spirit, Power and Reverence increased in usage during Pentecost Sunday, as expected, but also Injustice, Sacrifice, Service, Submission, Government and Eschatology.
Sermon topics on sermons.faithlife.com that increased in popularity during covid-19 shut-downs (shown as dark green beginning mid-March, when social distancing came into affect in the USA). The trend lines show % of sermons including each topic. Topics are self-assigned by Pastors. The topics shown above all increased in usage during covid when compared to the trailing year (light green). The timeline above shows usage back through March 2019. Easter Sundays are indicated by dashes on the bottom of each chart, and the minimum and maximum usage for each topic are labeled for reference.
Many sermons are also tagged with scriptural references. The table below shows the 100 most common scriptures associated with the 30 topics above.
Hover over each scripture reference to see the Biblical text, or search to filter by a sermon topic.
As expected, Easter Sunday (April 12 in 2020 and April 21 in 2019) had a large impact on sermon topics. Below we compare the top 30 sermon topics for Easter 2020 to their popularity during Easter 2019. Topics on the top with arrows to the right were more popular in 2020 vs. 2019, while topics on the bottom that point to the left were more popular in 2019. Topics near the middle were popular for both years, and did not show much change.
We saw above that there has been increased popularity of the topic Church during covid-19, and this was true during Easter as well (this topic increased by 8% on Easter Sunday 2020 vs. 2019). The topics service, suffering , prayer, sacrifice and love were also more popular in 2020, which correlates with the above analysis. We see that the death and resurrection of Jesus was emphasized rather than the more generic topics Jesus and God in 2019, but this doesn’t give us much insight into how the sermon content was influenced, or if was rather merely a shift in sermon tagging behavior.
