A 31-year old fourth generation pastor, Zach Zehnder of The Cross Mount Dora in Florida hopes to get a place in the Guinness book of world record for the Longest Speech Marathon after preaching a sermon for 53 hours and 18 minutes from 7am on Friday, November 7, 2014, through 7:32 am on Sunday, November 9, 2014.
This is against the previous record of 48 hours and 31 minutes by Vickrant Mahajan in India between September 19 and 21, 2014.
Speaking with The Christian Post, he said he made the effort in a bid to raise funds for a nonprofit organization that offers free alcohol and drug-addiction treatment services.
Zehnder who preaching the gospel runs in his lineage revealed his great-grandfather, C.R. Zehnder, started a Lutheran congregation in Florida in the 60’s and his grandfather was in the ministry for over 65 years while his dad currently pastors a church in Omaha, Nebraska.
“The Idea was to break the Guinness world record for the longest speech ever and I’m a pastor obviously, and so I chose to speak on the Bible and kind of cover the entirety of the story from Genesis to Revelation,”Zehnder said.
He was only allowed a five-minute break every hour and he skipped about 5 out of the 50 sermons which he prepared in a sequential order thereby preaching a total of 45 sermons during the days in order to achieve the feat.
He said, “My goal of the whole sermon was to talk about God’s ridiculous commitment to his people, even though we give up on him that he never gave up on us and kind of trace that theme throughout,” “I tried to keep that theme throughout the 50 sermons.”
Although the congregation was not stable during the sermon, he was able to make it through in order to qualify to break the record.
“The people moved in and out, but we had a lot of people that stayed 20 plus hours, even a handful probably up to a dozen people that were there just about the entire time with me,” said Zehnder.
According to the pastor, between 400 to 500 people showed up through the duration of the sermon and more people trooped in to witness the rarity as they rounded up.
Zehnder who had previously told his congregation and public that “church is not a scary place,” eventually succeeded in raising money for Eustis-based Powerhouse Recovery rehabilitation program.
Zehnder further said, “The main reason why we did it was not just to preach so people could hear God’s word which is a great thing in and of itself, but actually to raise money for local charity,” “We actually raised over $100,000, we met our goal for a recovery house, for residents to come and change some men’s lives. These are guys that have struggled with alcohol and addiction and we just opened a program [with] the money [raised from] this speech.”
While expressing immense gratitude to the people who sacrificed to watch him preach, Zehnder urges other pastors to take up the idea of raising money for necessary things while spreading the gospel.
He said, “I would love it if more pastors took on this idea to raise money and preach God’s word at the same time,”
“I hope they finish a couple minutes shy of what I did, but we wanted to set the record high enough to where it would be hard for someone to break.”
