Preacher: King or Politician?

Colin Wright argues that Elders ought to get to sit down for preaching in his interesting article Restoring the Idea of the Throne to Christian Preaching on The Kuyper Foundation website.

Though we might find some things to quibble over, Wright has some worthwhile reflections about how thrones might benefit preaching, for example, making it more like authoritative teaching than histrionics or haranguing.

Here’s a taste:

In this essay I want to put forward an idea that will seem novel. It is not really novel, but its neglect for centuries by Christians will make it appear so. The 'novel' idea is this: That preaching - preaching in church, that is - should be done from a seated position and not from a standing one. It should nearly always be preaching from a throne and rarely preaching from a platform.

This flies in the face of centuries of tradition, in Reformed and non-Reformed churches alike. It is the pulpit that has been the arena of the preacher. Interestingly, the word pulpit is derived directly from the Latin pulpitum, whose definition in a standard dictionary is,

. . . a staging made of boards, a scaffold, platform, pulpit, for public representations, lectures, disputations; and esp. as a stage for actors.

This idea of the pulpit is now sacrosanct, and any attempt to tamper with it will be ill-received - especially by those who preach. Nevertheless, I believe there is a good biblical warrant for abandoning the idea of the pulpit in favour of that of the throne. If we are to truly follow our motto as Reformed Christians - ecclesia reformata reformanda est (the reformed church is always reforming) - then we must be open to reforming even the most cherished of traditions.