You can find more good stuff at the Decker Communications blog and web site. Decker would encourage you to get off the manuscript, not because it makes it easier to listen to your speech, but because it is easier for people to believe that you believe what you are saying, and therefore they listen more closely. (His book is entitled You Have to Be Believed to Be Heard.) Other factors like eye contact and body language also play a role.

The chaplain corps is not really the work of a parish pastor. Based on my experience, those who do not conform to the banal sense of generic, utilitarian theism meet with harsh resistence and resentment. For the faithful Christian (both pastoral and lay), it has more of the feel of a missionary or evangelist than parish life… which becomes more extreme during demployment.

The chaplain corps is where many people consider Mormons a christian sect and you can have a Christian Scientist as your Chaplain supervisor who is the co-head pastor of the post’s protestant service. Many times, a faithful Lutheran finds he has more in common with the Roman Catholic chaplain than anyone else (which is not ideal to say the least).

There is good reason why people do not want to enter the chaplaincy. I have witnessed first had what a trial by fire it is. Most of the mainline denomenations, Lutherans, and Roman Catholics are woefully under-represented… for a good reason! And yet, the reasons why it is so tough are exatly the reasons why faithful, stalwart chaplains are so badly needed.

When something is well done, we do not complain about its length. … When we experience a thing that is well done, we get caught up in it, become lost in the moment, and lose any sense of the passage of time. When a public speaker has something important to say, and says it in a well-organized manner that enables the audience to perceive its significance, the reaction is similar. People do not look at their watches, clear their throats, stretch, and do a number of other nervous exercises indicative of their boredom. But if that public discourse is litless, rambling, disorganized, without clear purpose, and uninspiring, ten minutes seems like an eternity … People may very well have a reduced attention span, but even so, they have no difficulty giving attention to a discourse they deem important and well organized … Sermon length is not measured in minutes; it is measured in minutes-beyond-interest, in the amount of time the minister continues to preach after he has lost the interest of his hearers (assuming he ever kindled it in the first place).

T. David Gordon, Why Jonny Can’t Preach (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2009), 28-31

I group up in a place where the majority of the congregation were ‘working class’ and smallholders — people from modest educational backgrounds. But they had been brought up for generations on meaty preaching and devout, orthodox piety. It would be rare to hear a sermon under 30 minutes, occasionally they would exceed an hour. But the preaching was of a high quality, well prepared, textual law & gospel preaching that spoke to each man & woman in the pew. No one ever complained, not even this (then) teenager. Had the pastor stopped after 10 minutes for fear of losing the people’s attention, then they would have complained — they had waited for a whole week to hear a sermon, some had travelled some distance for it, so they didn’t want Sermon-Lite. I still don’t.

If you can, don’t use a manuscript. The sermon will be far more engaging and memorable for the congregation. Your outline should be the appointed text for the day. Preach the Word–God has made great promises about its effectiveness!

I’d be curious about average sermon lengths. The 6-8 suggestion above wouldn’t work for me. I use about that much time offering a theological/historical introduction to the text. My sermons average 23-25 minutes. Luther advises not to exceed 30 minutes.

If I could have one wish about the church granted, it would be this:
Pastors will have so much faith in the Word that they will preach it unadorned, plain, and simple, believing that it will do its work if they simply preach it because it is God’s word and not the word of man.
I was converted to Lutheranism because I read Luther’s explanation of the the Word of God. If I had attended some of the local Lutheran churches–where pastors are as likely to preach Rick Warren and the latest football game as the Word of God–I would never have become a Lutheran.