A 31-year-old Mount Dora pastor pored over more than 200 pages of notes and 600 Power Point slides as a cheerleading squad chanted and a handful of onlookers equipped with water guns squirted the exhausted man on stage.
His feat: 53 hours and 18 minutes of preaching 45 sermons from the Bible, which surpassed the current Guinness World Record for the Longest Speech Marathon.
Pastor Zach Zehnder of the Cross Mount Dora set out to break the record for longest speech of 48 hours and 31 minutes to raise money for a new nonprofit that offers free alcohol and drug-addiction treatment services.
“Well, if we’re going to do a fundraiser, let’s think of something really creative,” Zehnder said Monday. “We don’t want to do a car wash or a trivia night. Let’s do something really memorable.”