WACO, Texas (ABP) — One of America's greatest preachers, Gardner Taylor of Brooklyn, N.Y., may be 88 years old, but he still has the power to preach.
Known for his preaching ability to reach across denominational and ethnic boundaries, Taylor is pastor emeritus of Concord Missionary Baptist Church, in Dallas, Texas. He recently delivered the E.K. Bailey Memorial Sermon at George W. Truett Theological Seminary's Black Preaching Conference, called “The Art of Black Preaching.”
Taylor still delivers sermons as a guest speaker in pulpits across the nation, but he considers it to be a fragile undertaking. He recently said on the PBS show Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly that preaching is “uttered, heard and sometimes lost. But it is the mystery of preaching that it survives, and that it has survived so much of our bad preaching.”
Despite the delicate nature of exposition, Michael Bell, president of the Baptist General Convention of Texas, said Taylor's preaching has proved strong enough to pioneer across bridges of race and ethnicity around the country. Bell is the pastor of Greater St. Stephen's First Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas.
“Taylor and Bailey knew each other and had served as pastors for the same Baptist church,” Bell said. “Bailey was a colleague of the late Martin Luther King Jr. and was the first African American to preach in many pulpits. Like Taylor, he saw the kind of impact that could be made cross-culturally.”
Taylor also received the Bailey Memorial Sermon award, which honors a legendary Concord Baptist preacher. The city of Dallas named the street beside the church “Pastor Bailey Street,” and Bailey's wife, Sheila, joined in the award presentation.
“It is widely considered at the time of his death that Dr. Bailey had exerted more influence on black expository preaching than virtually any other black pastor,” Joel Gregory, a professor of preaching at Truett Seminary, said.
“His annual conference on expository preaching held in Dallas has become a magnet for thousands of ministers, black and white, to learn the craft of biblical exposition,” Gregory said. “TIME, Ebony and the Baylor University survey named Taylor one of the greatest preachers in the English-speaking language.”
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