Uninterrupted listening

Sometimes people have the idea that sitting quietly and listening to an uninterrupted sermon is a modern invention foreign to Scripture and the ancient church.

Comes Eusebius, describing the gatherings of a heretic con artist Paul of Samosata.

"Some fail to applaud or wave their handkerchiefs as in a theater or shout and jump up as do the disorderly men and women who are his partisans, listening instead in orderly reverence, as in God's house."  (Church History, 7:30)

Here we see that the way we listen to sermons today is not overly academic traditionalism, or just the way some too-conservative churches worship, but reverence for the Word which the church had from the beginning.