The Presentation Rehearsal Ancillary Lab at Bethany Lutheran Theological Seminary

When I was a vicar my bishop told me a story of a young pastor who was suffering terribly from anxiety related to the public speaking portion of his career. The head pastor of the congregation patted him gently on the back and reassured him, “Don’t worry. After the first year you stop throwing up before every sermon.” For some reason this story isn’t much comfort when I share it with the Seminarians.

The fact is that public speaking under any circumstances is pretty terrifying to begin with. It’s even more frightening when the subject matter is life and death, or in the case of Christian pastors: life, death, and resurrection. This is not a topic you want to fumble on! And yet, it is very difficult to train for various aspects of delivering a sermon.

Bethany Lutheran Theological Seminary is taking a novel approach to addressing this issue. Let’s begin by considering the problems associated with training public speakers to master delivery, and then look at some of the measures the ELS Seminary has taken to help.

Without question, the most critical aspect of a sermon is its fidelity to the Word of God and the accurate preaching of Law and Gospel. No computer is going to be particularly useful in measuring the degree to which Jesus Christ crucified for me was successfully communicated; humans are required and desirable for that. However, the manner in which this Word of Truth is delivered is likewise crucial. Our voices, speed, tone, and volume convey a range of emotions, compel hearers to listen, and lend appropriate weight to the message a pastor delivers. We want congregations to know that we are speaking to them, we want them to know that what is being said is meaningful, and we want them to take Scriptural truths to heart. This requires training in delivery, which includes everything from eye contact to dynamic energy. Traditionally, the delivery aspect of public speaking training is the most challenging part.

Arguably the foremost problem with training in public speaking is that rehearsal for delivery takes place only under the most intense circumstances. You can conduct a careful exegesis from the Greek or Hebrew text, write your sermon in advance, massage it until it flows just how you want, and commit the entire thing confidently to memory. All that preparation is great, of course, and well worth the effort. What that preparation does not include, however, is anything concerning the physical delivery of that sermon.

When practicing alone, the tendency is to focus on the words that are being said rather than how those words are being said. Attempting to get around this by speaking dynamically to an empty room takes a special kind of crazy that can be difficult to adopt and embarrassing when caught doing! Accordingly, there are a number of forces that tend to push toward rehearsing in a colder fashion. Seminary students are men who feel so strongly and passionately about the gospel that they have dedicated their lives to its proclamation, so having rehearsal options that push them toward a less dynamic presentation can be counter-productive.

The first chance a seminarian gets to preach the sermon in front of people is when those people are sitting there in the pews for church! Given the intensity of public speaking, this doesn’t constitute an ideal environment for learning to occur. After all, if mind-numbing terror was advantageous to learning outcomes we’d hold class in shark tanks. Needless to say, a situation in which students do not have a chance to truly rehearse in a reduced-anxiety scenario makes it far more difficult to train a future pastor to speak and speak well.

In seminary, you get to preach your sermon in public for the first time in front of your peers and professors. The chapel at Bethany Lutheran Theological Seminary is absolutely lovely. However, it is a small space, and filling every pew are the people whose opinions matter most to you and can be the most devastating.

Amplifying the tension of the experience is the fact that they are all recording notes on your performance. They are evaluating the content, they’re critiquing your delivery, they’re judging the degree to which they felt convicted by the Law and forgiven by the gospel. The professors are friendly of course, nodding when they need to nod, smiling when a smile is called for, but let’s face it: these are guys you want to impress and in that moment this is a near impossible feat to accomplish. The first time you preach in that chapel is an experience you never forget. I even remember what tie I was wearing that day (light blue with a kind of rough weave… but we digress).

Afterwards, everyone gets together over coffee and donuts and discusses how the speaker did. The only thing I remember from this part was the sound of my heart beating in my ears, but these reviews are always geared toward being positive and constructive. Despite this, criticism can be difficult to take, particularly from friends, peers, and admired professors. Dutiful notes are taken on the class’s feedback and you spend the rest of the day trying to mentally recover.

It feels like a mercy, therefore, that this only occurs once per year during Seminary, but that in itself can present a problem. The lack of an opportunity to practice regularly or at will in front of a large group makes improvement more difficult. Traditionally this challenge has been addressed by having seminarians fill in for area churches, and this is tremendously useful. But it does tend to allow for certain coping mechanisms to become habit, and feedback from these travels is limited and universally positive (and God bless you, area churches, for that).

In the end we have a situation where, if seminary students wish to improve their delivery, they have limited opportunities to improve, receive limited feedback, and are forced to practice in environments that are not conducive to learning. Although these challenges have never proven to be insurmountable, and the ELS has a proud tradition of engaging, thoughtful, and faithful pastors, the ability to use technological innovations to assist with the training of delivery is exceedingly valuable. It was with this in mind that BLTS established the Presentation Rehearsal Ancillary Lab (PRAy Lab).

The presentation lab at the ELS seminary employs virtual reality to simulate a nearly realistic speaking environment. When the student puts on the headset, he is conveyed into an auditorium populated with virtual avatars who watch and follow the speaker as he delivers his message. These avatars mirror typical audience behaviors: they can become distracted, look at their phones, get up and leave to use the restroom, cough, whisper to one another, etc. All of these variables can be programmed in advance by either the student or the homiletics professor. Audiences can be created with varying levels of formality, distractedness, attention span, level of interest, and hostility (a circumstance I hope our pastors do not encounter too frequently!).

The student stands behind a virtual pulpit to which their notes can be uploaded and used, and a screen for visual aid presentations can be included to the side. As the student speaks, the program listens and analyzes his vocal patterns to assess how interesting and engaging his delivery is. Inflection, volume modulation, vocal modulation, pitch, and speed are all recorded and assessed along a timeline. This way a student can identify areas of the sermon in which things may have either dragged or been too dynamic for too long.

Additionally, because the student is wearing a headset, eye contact with various areas of the audience can be measured, and a “heat map” produced showing where he looked too often or not often enough. Time spent looking down, looking away, or focusing on notes can be measured and assessed as well, allowing for free delivery to be taught and encouraged.

This computer feedback, recorded and delivered in private and without judgment, can be exceedingly useful for rehearsing, improving, and internalizing some of these public speaking fundamentals. Students have more frequent opportunities to rehearse in realistic environments that nevertheless do not carry the same level of tension as speaking before mentors and peers. Resources for improvement in particular areas are also immediately available, allowing students to focus their efforts on those areas that most require attention. Interestingly, this allows students to actually “see” their progress, as their improvement over time is noted in the scores the program assigns in its report.

Despite the tremendous utility of the program, it is, at the end of the day, still just a computer. This would be perfect if our congregations were made up of PCs and Macs (sheep and goats?), but we tend to fill our pews with the flesh, blood, and souls of living children of God. The computer can look at the markers that are generally indicative of interesting, engaging speech, but in the end it is always useful to have a real human put some context on the machine’s output. The speeches can be recorded and reviewed by the students or their professors, so the feedback provided by the program can have meaningful context.

Some tech-specs:

Our specialized hardware is an HTC VIVE Cosmos (mainly because it was put together during the pandemic and this was what was immediately in stock). Software is a program called Virtual Orator. We’ve converted a classroom to house the new lab, because it affords the space for larger functions as well. It's not technically a dedicated space, since there is a class that gets held there three days a week, but it's close.

The Seminary was able to build the entire thing out of pocket in conjunction with some other modernizing efforts to meet COVID challenges. The entire setup of Virtual Orator ($300), Vive Cosmos and powerful computer to run it all cost about $2250. I consider that good value for the money.

It is a privilege for the ELS and its seminary to send forth workers into the harvest field, and we thank the Holy Spirit for the faithful ministers we produce. Bethany’s new Presentation Rehearsal Ancillary Lab is a strong new contributor to this honored tradition.