LOUISVILLE, Ky. (ABP) — He once was considered by many the best preacher in the country. But it wasn't until he fell from that pinnacle and began selling funeral services door to door that Joel Gregory says he learned “that most people are living a life of quiet desperation and marginal existence.”
“I found out what I didn't know, and that is most people are barely making it. It has changed my preaching and my life.”
“It's a pitiful thing to confess that I spent 25 years preaching not really understanding that I was preaching into people's battles,” said Gregory, former pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas. “I'd like to go back and undo and redo some preaching in that regard.”
“I used to look at people as the same kind of driven overachievers that I was,” Gregory said during a one-day preaching seminar at Broadway Baptist Church in Louisville, Ky. “I came to find out that most people are barely making it and life is a daily battle for basics.”
Urging pastors to “blow the trumpet” in the pulpit, Gregory cited Paul's admonition in 1 Corinthians 14:8: “If the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare for battle?”
Noting that he began preaching at age 16, Gregory said that over the years he has viewed preaching as everything from an intellectual exercise in exegesis to an esthetic art form to an oratorical performance.
“We preach in the middle of a battle,” he declared, “and if we don't understand that, it diminishes our understanding and it turns us into homiletical dwarfs, ministerial midgets, Lilliputians of the library. Preaching blows the trumpet in the middle of the battle.”
Gregory abruptly walked away from his high-profile position as pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas more than a decade ago. In recent years, he gradually has returned to the pulpit from his self-imposed exile. During the Oct. 27 preaching workshop, sponsored by Georgetown College, Gregory recounted both the public prominence and private pain he experienced.
Recalling his acclaimed sermon at the 1988 Southern Baptist Convention and his 1990 call as pastor of the Dallas church — both while he was in his early 40s — Gregory noted: “Very few people in Baptist life ever got more promoted or over-promoted than I was until I walked out of what had once been the strongest Protestant church in American history after resigning on a Wednesday night.”
In news reports at the time, Gregory cited a power conflict with longtime and legendary senior pastor W. A. Criswell. “The ultimate agenda is the prolonging of the incumbent's ministry rather than the enabling of the new pastor's,” Gregory told the congregation at the time. “In light of these circumstances, I immediately and irrevocably submit my resignation.”
“I had been elevated from one level to the next but suddenly, by my own volition, I went from notoriety to anonymity,” he told workshop participants. “I went from a national television presence to hiding in a little apartment in Fort Worth. I went from preaching in George Truett's pulpit to selling funerals door to door.”
Gregory, who also went through a divorce the next year, chronicled the ups and downs of his life and ministry in the 1994 book, “Too Great a Temptation: The Seductive Power of America's Super Church.” During the past few years, he has been involved in magazine publishing and has begun leading preaching seminars throughout the nation.
In addition to addressing individuals' battles, Gregory said, “we are preaching today in the battle for the soul of the church.”
“What is the church going to be?” he asked. “Are we simply going to pander to the most popular way to give people whatever they want just as long as we can get a crowd? … Somewhere in between the church that simply reflects the norms of contemporary culture and the church that reacts by entrenching in a denomination that is gone and will never come back, we need to blow the trumpet with an authentic canonical word.”
The nation also is in a battle, Gregory emphasized. “I think that preaching post-9/11 cannot be the same,” he said. “I believe a day will come when people will not want to know the pabulum of the talking heads on CNN or the fiction of Fox network or the latest insight of Dr. Phil. We may be in a world where they will turn back in a last gasp of secularism and say, 'Is there a word from God?'”
Noting that the trumpet has changed little as a musical instrument over the centuries, Gregory said, “There also is a changeless quality in authentic preaching. … Don't trade your trumpet in for the kazoo of pop culture or for the tin whistle of pulpit entertainment or for the turkey call of mere human observations.”
Other qualities of a trumpet — and authentic preaching — are that it is a solo instrument, a penetrating instrument and a wind instrument, Gregory said.
“Trumpets make no sounds by themselves,” he pointed out. “It's only a piece of metal silent, mute, unmusical. It is only the blowing of wind through a trumpet that makes its sound.”
“So also is preaching,” he explained. “There is an element of mystery in preaching that is deeper to me than it's ever been. Absent the breath of the Spirit, I am nothing but a trumpet on the table. … I wish I had known that so much earlier in my own ministerial life and career.”
Citing his increasing opportunities to preach, teach and lead preaching seminars, Gregory said, “Once you really take up the trumpet, you can't put it down.”
“I tried to put it down. I wanted to put it down. In fact, others have even tried to take it away from me and have said, 'Don't pick it up again.'
“I am painfully aware that I have stumbled with the trumpet,” he concluded, “but I still haven't put it down until the day is done and the race is run.”
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