It has been our experience through trial and error, that acrylic is great to use on the top of a podium, but an acrylic podium is not so good.
In the early days, we made prototypes of them. The problem is, acrylic has a low strength to weight ratio, so on an acrylic podium, you need a lot of acrylic (= lots of weight), to get a little bit of strength. This means that it will need to be heavy in order to be strong enough for basic use.
This is fine if there is a set position in the church for it, however if it requires moving, an acrylic podium will often need at least 2 people to lift it. This makes moving it difficult, and this leads to another issue. Because of the difficulty of moving, the pulpit may easily be bumped or knocked in the process. This is particularly bad, because an acrylic podium will generally have glue joints, and these glue joints are particularly brittle.
So from a stage management point of view, an all acrylic podium may not be ideal. So where does this leave you?
Perhaps it may be worth considering one made from stainless steel AND acrylic.
