My church bought a new pulpit this year. Gun-metal grey, portable, yet solid, the design offers an understated utility. Suited to the contemporary ambiance of our architecture and worship style, the new pulpit is intended to provide minimal interference to the communication process while still offering preachers a handy place to rest their notes.

I don't like it. Give me the old oak pulpit, oiled by fist pounding and stained with preacher sweat. Give me "the sacred desk" or give me nothing at all. None of these acrylic, see-through podiums for me, thank you very much. Give me the "furniture of authority" or else let me wander free like Whitefield in the country. Maybe that's even better! Perhaps you should let me loose to walk among the people, just like Jesus, communing and communicating with the people without the barrier of pulpit furnishings.

Last Sunday I was invited to preach in a recently planted church. They offered a fine wooden pulpit. It looked a little odd set in the middle of the high school gym were they met, yet I was sure it would provide a perfectly good place to rest my Bible and hide my knees should they commence to knocking. "To use or not to use?" that was the question. On the one hand, the people obviously expected me to use the pulpit. Even in the short space of that church's history, the people were accustomed to hearing their sermons from that particular spot.

Would I somehow be diminishing the power of the preached word by moving away from the symbolic authority of the furniture? Would I cause too much disquiet by upsetting the traditional expectation? Would I draw too much attention to myself by placing my person front and center without the discreet covering of the pulpit? On the other hand, was the pulpit at all necessary? Wouldn't it just get in the way? Couldn't I communicate more effectively by eliminating the barrier and adopting an intimate, face to face posture among the people?

The History of the Pulpit

There are no pulpits in the Bible, at least not as we picture them. Ezra preached from a raised wooden platform (Neh.8:4), but that wasn't really a pulpit. Somehow, Jesus managed without a pulpit in his Sermon on the Mount or any of his other discourses. Even in the synagogues there is no evidence that Jesus, Paul or the rabbis would have used anything approaching our contemporary conception of a pulpit.1 Of course the early church met primarily in homes. It was not until the third century AD that Christian congregations began to build and furnish structures intended to house the worship of a local congregation.2

The first reference to a pulpit is found in a letter of Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, in the mid 3rd century. Cyprian makes several references to ordination as it relates to the pulpitum of his church building.3 In fact, this is one of the first references to any sort of formal development of the building of churches. Michael White, says,

The term seems to refer to a slightly raised dais or platform at one end of the assembly hall where the clergy sat. In one instance the honor of ordination is symbolized in ascending the pulpitum "in the loftiness of the higher place and conspicuous before the whole peoples. The phrase "to come to the pulpitum even is the technical term for the ordination of a reader in the church at Carthage.4