Bishop Michael Curry Royal Wedding Sermon – Introduction
There’s been rave reviews for the sermon given by Bishop Michael Curry at the Royal Wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex formerly known as Prince Harry and Megan Markle. Here’s five things we can learn from the sermon to help improve our pitch.
Number one repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition… Bishop Michael Curry says the same word up to 50 times do you know that what that word is?
It is Love. Love. Where true love is found.
How does it get away with saying the same word so often well if we were writing an essay or a letter we would be criticized for saying the same word so often but this is not the written word this is the spoken word we can afford to repeat ourselves indeed we must repeat ourselves in a pitch to get the message across.
Number two
Humour. Bishop Michael Curry is a pretty humorous man as evidenced by this.
Fire makes it possible for us to text and tweet and email and Instagram and and Facebook and socially be dysfunctional with each other.
Should we put humour into our pitch? Answer yes if it works. If it doesn’t it’s a disaster. If it works it’s great! When we’re humorous it says not only we are we attractive because most people value humour but also it says that we are in control.
Number three
Note Bishop Michael Curry looks at every single individual in the room he scans around pulling everybody in, in our pitch we should not just focus on the boss man the person that we think is the decision maker we must acknowledge everyone in our audience in that room.
Number four
Bishop Michael Curry gives a fantastic sermon but does everybody in that venue look at him? No. Some people indeed look away they look down they look up, they perhaps even may talk to the person next to them. During that sermon does that affect the way that the bishop gives his sermon? No. When you deliver your pitch once you’ve committed to it drive through regardless of whether or not you think your audience are listening.
Number five
I leave my most important point to last and that is that Bishop Michael Curry shows true emotion just check out how steady and calm at the beginning of the sermon.
Bishop Michael Curry:
Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm. That love is as strong as death, passion fears as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame many waters cannot quench love. Imagine business and commerce when love is the way! Imagine this tired old world when love is is the way! When love is the way unselfish, sacrificial, redemptive, when love is the way then no child will go to bed hungry in this world ever again!
So you see Bishop Michael Curry has got a very steady tone of voice, command to really quite excited individual who starts to speak much more quickly, so he starts to speak much more loudly like this and, his exaggerated gestures are all over the show really helping the audience sense that this man is excited about what he’s talking about and, he’s asking the audience to become excited too!
Whenever we’re pitching we must show an emotion it doesn’t necessarily need to be one of enthusiasm but typically if we are presenting a solution to our audience if we want them to buy into it yes we would be enthusiastic about it. Don’t just be enthusiastic inside you’ve got to show it on the outside. But! There’s a danger. There is a danger in becoming too emotional and in the moment and Bishop Michael Curry suffered from exactly this.
Mistake
I’m going to leave you with a video interview done with Bishop Michael Curry after the wedding where he explains exactly what I mean.
Bishop Michael Curry:
I was shooting for six to seven minutes it took a little bit longer because what I had really I should have thought but what I really hadn’t anticipated there are moments of pause and there also there’s a number of non verbal interactions that happen in a sermon when you actually deliver it. That actually take up time and so it ended up being a little bit longer than I planned on. Originally the manuscript is six, maybe seven minutes.
Radio Interviewer:
I think we clocked you in at 13 minutes 44 seconds. Thank you so much for doing that!
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