… and on this occasion I mean the lectern in my local church, last Sunday morning. 
Maybe it makes me a bad person who’s going to go to hell, but there were a couple of things I picked up from the service on Sunday which had less to do with God and more to do with my work as a presentation skills trainer. The first was to do with pitch and the other was to do with volume.
Volume first.
Long term readers will know that I attend St Bart’s Church in my hometown of Newcastle. (Please forgive the website!) and this Sunday was a Baptism. Great. Lovely. One baby who – I noted early on – had an excellent ability to project his voice down the full length of the church. As the water was poured over his forehead for the first time he gave fair warning of his intension and by the third pouring he was in full flow. No surprises there.
What was more of a surprise was that he continued to protest about the way he’d been treated for quite a while. Still, that was fine, wasn’t it, because we could all hear the rest of the service because we’ve got microphones and so on?
Wrong.
The score, for a few minutes at least, until the magic effect of a loving mother smoothed things over, was
Child without mic but who instinctively knew how to make a loud noise – 1 : Priest who thought the microphones were magic – 0.
I don’t know how else to say this except to bash it out again and again and again – most microphone systems in churches (and other places!) aren’t intended to be used to replace voices, just to augment them. There’s a world of difference! (Actually, even for systems which are intended to replace the natural voice, it does no harm to speak into them as though they’re just giving your voice a bit of a boost.)
Even if you successfully make yourself heard from a loudspeaker, the sound of your voice comes from the ‘wrong place’ (that is, not your mouth) and this can make it harder for an audience to get to grips with what you’re saying to them. Every ounce of effort they put into hearing what you’re saying is gained at the cost of understanding what you’re saying. Make it easy for them.
I’ll cover the pitch stuff next time….
I agree with the orginal post actually. Although it sounds a but controversial, it is actually something that a lot of people these days beleive in.