>In Christian churches I am least impressed by a sermon that talks about how marvelous heaven is going to be at the end. To me that's not the message of Christianity. The message is about how to live now, not that we should live in some particular way because there's going to be pie in the sky some day. The end means almost nothing to me. I am glad it's there, but I don't see it as much of a motivating force, if any.…
That's a preface to what I really wanted to say, which is that having been in various kinds of evangelical-like churches for the past 50 or so years, and having heard a lot of sermons both good and bad (and by "bad" I mainly mean boring, only occasionally something wrong), I've never heard much about heaven or hell; in fact, I can think of precisely one sermon that really gave the topic of heaven much thought, and none that talked about hell. I'm at a loss to explain why your experience and mine are so different.
BTW, if you've read C.S. Lewis's Voyage of the Dawn Treader, I have always thought that the monopods (duffers) were a congregation, and their chief a pastor who is constantly preaching boringly obvious things: "And what I say is, when chaps are visible, why, they can see one another." And such like.