According to the thematic progression model of Janikowski (2011) religious texts can be used at the early stages of interpreter training. The reservations against such placement of allegedly stylistically sophisticated texts are scrutinised in the following paper by means of (1) developing a set of features of spoken religious discourse and (2) empirically testing their frequency in a convenience corpus. The results do show an unexpectedly high level of metaphorical saturation of spoken religious texts (1.4 per minute of speech), but they also show that only 8% of these metaphors were unconventional and that speakers sometimes employed special means of facilitating metaphor processing. Additionally, the appearance of other markers traditionally recognised as elements of religious style (intertextual allusions, markers of higher register and other figures of speech) was only marginal. Thus, the results support the use of religious texts as the second stage in thematic development, however, with a set of recommendations.