Speech of the Month, September 2022 - Justin Welby

Until the late Queen’s funeral, I don’t think I’d ever seen Justin Welby in full sermon action. I’d seen him on telly talking about social issues but never on an alter wearing a cassock. 

As the camera turned to him and zoomed in at the start of his homily, I felt for him. With over four billion people watching, now was not the time to fluff his intro, develop a throat tickle or give way to an inappropriate impulse, like blowing a raspberry. No. Now was the time to paint a piercing and radiant portrait of Elizabeth II while simultaneously delivering a message of hope. And Welby executed both tasks superbly. 

If you didn’t see his sermon – and I’d love to know what you were doing instead – then do take a look…

Besides capturing Queen Elizabeth and offering hope, there were a few other particulars that Welby did excellently. Let me enlarge…

He ended beautifully

In writing about peroration (a fancy Latin way of saying ‘ending’) Sam Leith says, ‘The peroration is where the orator can really have fun. This is the opportunity to end on a twenty-one-gun salute, to move the audience to tears of pity or howls of rage. It can be like watching Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band close a show with ‘Born to Run’ and belt the final chorus out four times in a row. 

But it can also be the place for a dying fall – where you bring the ship of your speech into the calm waters of harbour. Sometimes you want to leave an audience thoughtful rather than excitable.’

In ending his sermon, Welby went with the latter tack; steering his homily along standstone cliffs and then floating into the glisterning waters of Sydney Bay when he closed by saying, “We can all share the Queen’s hope which in life and death inspired her servant leadership. Service in life, hope in death. All who follow the Queen’s example, and inspiration of trust and faith in God, can with her say: “We will meet again.”

A peroration that reminded us of the late Queen’s service during WW2, the incredible span of her life, her Coronavirus message which ended with the same refrain and, of course, our own desire to meet our loved ones, in this world and the next, should it exist. 

The length of his speech was spot on

If you’re over 40, you probably won't have heard this old adage: a speech should be like a lady’s skirt: long enough to cover the essentials; short enough to hold interest. 

I know, it’s of its time and who’s to say that a maxi isn’t eye-catching? But you no doubt get the sentiment. And it was a sentiment that the late Queen shared. She couldn’t bear long services and was very clear that her funeral should last no longer than an hour. Good on her. 

I thought it was admirable that Welby kept his tribute to her somewhere between mini and knee-length. He could have easily waxed lyrical. And I think a lot of the viewing public expected him to. Maybe he kept it short out of respect to her. You imagine she’d have been embarrassed and annoyed by any unnecessarily gushing. 

He had a strong speech objective

I always encourage clients to be very clear about the objective of their speech or presentation before they start to prep it. “Write out your objective in one sentence,” I say quite a lot. 

If Welby had written out a sentence that would capture his speech objective then it would have been something like this, ‘I will persuade the audience that servant leadership is the most effective and enduring style of leadership.’ Every sentence he said supported that objective. And when he said, “But in all cases those who serve will be loved and remembered when those who cling to power and privileges are long forgotten,” did a certain person spring to mind? A person who was sitting on a nearby pew? Yes, I immediaately thought of Bozza too. 

And since Queen Elizabeth’s death, I have been asking myself this - ‘Did she cling on to see the back of Boris or was it meeting Liz Truss that made her think, ‘I can’t bear this anymore,’ and decided to move on.