This is a kind of follow on post from the royal wedding. Millions of people would have seen Curry preach that sermon. However a quick trawl of you tube for the wedding sermon shows the three top hits of the whole 13 minute sermon were that CBS had 620k (split across two videos) BBC had 900k views. Then a few days ago Chris Pratt did the above speech which so far has 1.9m views on the MTV you tube site alone.

So there are some sound bite and length things, context driven things and audience issues, but a few observations. As a piece of public speaking it for me it captured the balance of fun and points well, it was challenging in an inductive way, provoking more questions of the post christian audience than it provided answers.

As I was reflecting on Pratts talk a Church Times article also popped in my news feed which suggested that even brilliant sermons like Currys would fail to draw in a significant number and I don’t think Chris Pratts style would either. Culture has shifted, if there is still a place for public speaking, thats now the podium (public square) rather than the pulpit.

I know the arguments for the pulpit is that people need teaching, but the evidence is that learning is most effective when not upfront, talk driven. Perhaps the argument is exhortation, but isn’t this more effective if people shared what they had done that week and encouraged one another, built in accountability and wrestled with their own discipleship. We have to accept that the culture has shifted and stop hanging onto the pulpit like some sort of holy cow.