The Missing Pulpit

Author and professor David Wells, speaking on the White Horse Inn, on October 5, 2008, had the following to say about the significance of the absence of the pulpit the evangelical Church today:

In this last book I wrote, The Courage to be Protestant, I talked about the transition from the Pulpit to the Plexiglas stand to the Barstool. And nobody, none of us, would say that the Word of God is chained in its delivery to a pulpit...Of course the Word of God can be preached outside a pulpit. But I think the importance of this transition has less to do with the thing that has been abandoned (i.e., the pulpit) and much more to do with the internal change which has happened. Because the preacher is now orienting himself to the congregation in a relational fashion, whereas the pulpit symbolized the preacher’s orientation toward God in a theological posture. That’s what the pulpit was saying in traditional churches. It was elevated because the Word of God is elevated, as it were, over the congregation. And the preacher stood before God to deliver that Word. So there is an internal posture that was intended to be symbolized by that pulpit. That internal posture before God, and the whole theological frame of understanding that, has disappeared in many churches today. And, therefore, what you have as a consequence is the rearrangement of the church to adopt a nightclub atmosphere, or entirely religiously neutral atmosphere, so you have no religious symbols, and so forth.