Initially reformers focused on the furniture, replacing the central altar with a pulpit as the locus of significance. The protestant pulpit of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—huge, intricately carved, and looming high above the main floor of the church—improved hearing and served as visual statements of top down clerical authority. In Luther’s time, these elaborate desks often incorporated three levels—the highest space for preaching and the lower two for reading of the gospels and the work of the precentor—were elevated several feet above the heads of the congregation. A massive soundboard loomed above, projecting the minister’s voice out over the audience rather than upwards into the rafters. In converting older basilica churches for Protestant services, congregations placed the new pulpits to one side midway down the length of the nave. Seats were then turned sideways in the nave to face the pulpit. As Protestant church building began, reformers generally favored rectangular plans that were less narrow than the earlier basilica, and they placed the pulpits on a longitudinal axis with the door. In both the converted and new churches, the large elevated pulpits only aided the projection of the minister’s voice but also provided visual interest and a focal point for the service, which was nevertheless primarily and aural event.
Jeanne Halgren Kilde | When Church Became Theatre: The Transformation of Evangelical Architecture and Worship in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 2002), 12.
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