Why Does One Person Talk While Everyone Listens? An Argument With an Audience

The address is built on a text rather than on a topic, which is the structural feature distinguishing it from a lecture or a speech. A passage is read, its meaning is opened up, and its application to the hearers is drawn out, which gives the form a fixed starting point and a built-in constraint, since the preacher is accountable to what the passage actually says. Traditional practice divides the task into explaining what the text meant to its original hearers, establishing what it means generally, and applying it to the people present. That three-part movement, from text to principle to application, is taught explicitly in most traditions that take the form seriously.

Traditions approach the task in recognisably different ways:

• •Expository preaching, working through a book of scripture passage by passage
• •Topical preaching, addressing a subject and drawing on several texts
• •Homilies, shorter and tied closely to a set reading in a fixed calendar
• •Narrative preaching, which retells rather than expounds
• •Call and response traditions, where the congregation participates audibly
• •Extemporary preaching without notes, which several traditions prefer on principle

In societies where most people could not read and where few gatherings occurred regularly, a weekly address to an assembled community was an information channel with no competitor. Governments understood that and used it, issuing texts to be read from pulpits and requiring particular subjects to be addressed, which made the pulpit an instrument of policy as well as of religion. Political movements used it in the opposite direction, and preaching preceded several revolutions and reform campaigns. Printed collections sold in enormous numbers and were read aloud in households, extending the reach further. The decline of the form as a public medium tracks the rise of newspapers, and later of broadcasting, rather than the decline of religion itself.

A substantial body of these addresses survives in print and several are read as literature rather than as religious instruction. John Donne's are studied for their prose and their handling of mortality. Jonathan Edwards delivered one in 1741 whose vivid depiction of damnation made it the most anthologised piece of early American writing. Lancelot Andrewes influenced twentieth century poetry directly, with T S Eliot quoting him. Sermons by Black American preachers shaped the rhetoric of the civil rights movement, and the cadence, repetition and building structure of the best-known speeches of that movement come from the pulpit rather than from political oratory. Collections were a substantial publishing category for three centuries and frequently outsold everything else on a bookseller's list.

The form attracts objection consistently and the complaints are specific. One person speaking at length to a silent audience is a poor way to teach anything, since retention from listening alone is low and there is no opportunity to ask. The arrangement concentrates authority in whoever holds the pulpit and is difficult to challenge in the moment. Length is a perennial grievance, and the historical record contains addresses of two hours and longer that were endured rather than enjoyed. And the form invites performance, since a speaker rewarded by visible response is pulled towards what produces it. Traditions have responded with discussion groups, shorter addresses and lay participation, without abandoning the form itself.

The address is built on a text rather than a topic, which constrains the speaker to what the passage says, and traditional practice moves from original meaning to general principle to application. Where most people could not read, a weekly address to an assembled community had no competitor, which made pulpits an instrument of government policy and of reform movements alike. The standing criticisms concern retention, concentrated authority, length and performance.