A pulpit is a raised, enclosed platform, generally reached by its own short flight of steps, from which a preacher delivers the sermon to the congregation, its elevated position and often projecting sounding board above designed together to help the preacher's voice and visible gestures carry clearly across a nave that could hold a large standing or seated congregation before modern amplification existed. Positioned typically along one side of the nave, at or near the boundary between nave and chancel, the pulpit is placed close enough to the congregation to allow a direct, personal sense of address while remaining elevated enough that a preacher could be seen and heard even from the back of a large church, a practical requirement that shaped pulpit placement and design across a very wide range of otherwise different church traditions and periods.
Pulpits, like other prominent church furnishings, received serious decorative attention in many periods, carved with relief scenes, inscriptions or figures of the biblical authors and evangelists whose writings the preacher would draw upon, and some of the most elaborate surviving examples, particularly from the Baroque period in Central Europe, are treated as major independent works of sculpture in their own right rather than simply functional furniture.