The sample

The participating churches were assessed by a researcher in the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches (FIEC) and were judged to be ‘mostly evangelical’. The sermons were preached by a total of 9,500 different preachers, so this is a very fair sample of sermons, with an average of 13 sermons per preacher. However, one feature was immediately noticeable – over two-fifths of sermons, 43%, had no specific text which was being explained, so were presumably talks on particular topics rather than expositions. It would have been very interesting to have had an analysis of the 55,000 topics preached upon, but the website doesn’t give this. However, that still leaves 72,000 sermons taken at random, which is a good sample.