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Six Feet Above Contradiction

By Hedgehog.

I confess to having mixed feelings about pulpits, in spite of having demolished one (with the permission of the Church Members’ Meeting, I hasten to add!) with an axe and sledgehammer on one occasion. That one was an ugly Victorian monstrosity which totally dominated the front end of the church building and prevented anything else from taking place there!

More recently, I had the privilege of preaching from Hugh Latimer’s pulpit in a Wiltshire parish church and the sense of ‘connectedness’ with its first occupant was almost tangible.

I’ve preached from pulpits which were clearly designed for someone at least 7 feet tall - on one occasion I was asked ‘how many platforms would you like?’ to make me visible - and from those equally designed to be occupied by midgets. Some pulpits are essential for the visibility of the preacher, while others actually make it impossible for the preacher to have eye contact with more than about half his or her congregation. Some are so high that one needs ropes and oxygen to scale their dizzy heights, while others are so low, one wonders why they are there at all. One I remember, thankfully now consigned to the scrapyard, was like an inverse form of Dr Who’s ‘Tardis’ - huge on the outside, but tiny and cramped on the inside.

I guess pulpits date from a time when the only way to amplify the preacher’s frail and failing voice was to raise him above the congregation, but in these days of good quality amplification systems, that’s hardly necessary - with radio microphones, one can hear the preacher even when he visits the loo!

Perhaps too there was once a need to emphasize the preacher’s authority, and what better way than to raise him six feet above contradiction. I’m told that it is still an offence in law to interrupt a sermon, even though there are plenty of sermons that should be put out of their misery within a few seconds of starting.

But I can’t help thinking that the day of the pulpit is gone. Platforms are fine - in a large building, it is important, especially for those who have some hearing loss, to be able to see the speaker clearly. And if there are pillars in the building, let the platform be as wide as possible so that the preacher can move around in order to be seen from behind the pillars.

And sermons are fine, too, provided they are well prepared and preached. Indeed, I have no problem with the Reformer’s notion of a reading desk with an open Bible on it as a key part of the symbolism of our buildings.

But it was Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones, no less, who, when he went to Westminster Chapel, removed the curtains from around the rails of the central platform so that his whole body could be seen, transforming the platform from something which hid the preacher into something which allowed the preacher’s personality to become much more effectively the vehicle of truth. Locking the preacher into a raised box is surely a symbol for the imprisonment of truth, not its freedom. Set the preachers free, says Hedgehog!

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