Week 1 is done! My core class focused on “Preaching as Performance” and how there are things that all preachers can learn from theater, not necessarily to make things more dramatic or showy or less authentic, yet to enhance the presentation of the message during worship.
One of the areas we worked on was the warm up prior to worship. I need to say that the choir might need to be warned about a few exercises I might ask them to help me with in the fall. We did all kinds of things to loosen up our facial masks and our voices to make them fuller and more engaging. Some of the exercise we learned are called motor boat, Ing-ga; Me, May, My, Mo; tension relievers; and many others. It was great fun to watch us do all these crazy things that I know relax our bodies so that we can be more present in the moment and make us sound better as we do it. It was also really cool to hear the difference between a tense jaw and the sound after a jaw release.
I think one of the pieces that I’ve often let slip along the way side is my care for and dependency on my voice. I mean we all know that I talk a lot in general, yet just think about how difficult it would be to preach with a voice that hasn’t been cared for over time. Or what it would be like to be a preacher without a voice! In many ways as a mechanic has wrenches and other tools that they use to fix and maintain our automobiles, one of my main tools for preaching is my voice and it needs to be maintained and care for just as a mechanic looks after theirs.
Our voices – such a simple thing – yet ponder how different our lives would be without them!
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