UNIDENTIFIED MINISTER: Give welcome to Dr. Gardner C. Taylor.
LAWTON: Reverend Gardner C. Taylor gets a celebrity's welcome when he takes the pulpit in churches across the nation. And at 88, he still shows the charm that has pulled in worshippers for more than six decades.Reverend GARDNER C. TAYLOR (Preaching): It's been a year and I must say you don't look a day older. Of course, I don't see as well as I used to!
LAWTON: During his long career, Taylor has been repeatedly honored as one of the greatest preachers in America. President Bill Clinton agreed and gave him the Medal of Freedom in 2000.
Rev. TAYLOR (Preaching): They marched on …
LAWTON: And Taylor is still at it, a frequent guest preacher all over the country, even though he is technically retired. He says preaching is always a tenuous endeavor.
Rev. TAYLOR: It is quickly lost. It's 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.
LAWTON: Professor Richard Lischer teaches preaching at Duke Divinity School. He says Taylor has set the bar high.
Dr. RICHARD LISCHER (Professor of Preaching, Duke University Divinity School): He almost single-handedly has elevated and made visible great preaching. He is one of the first whose influence crossed over into the realm of white homiletics and white preaching.Rev. TAYLOR (Preaching): My father, who was a pastor, said that the children of Israel reminded him of the people he pastored. Not you, but the people he pastured. They were always complaining.
LAWTON: Taylor was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1918.
(To Rev. Taylor) (Looking at Photos): Was this you?
Rev. TAYLOR: Yeah. I like that serious look on my face.
LAWTON (To Rev. Taylor): I know. You were very intent on being a cowboy, I think.
Early on, Taylor says, he didn't want to follow in his minister father's footsteps.
Rev. TAYLOR: I wanted to be a lawyer, but no person of color had been admitted to the Louisiana bar, ever. And when I told an old family friend that I wanted to be a lawyer, he said, "Where you going to practice, the middle of the Mississippi River?"
LAWTON: Taylor ended up at Oberlin College's School of Theology in Ohio, where he discovered he had his father's gift of speaking. Rev. TAYLOR: Both of my grandparents were slaves, and neither could read or write. But somehow he had this feeling for the melody of the English language, and I inherited it.
LAWTON: In 1948, Taylor and his wife, Laura, moved to Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn, where he spent the next 42 years, until his retirement in 1990. His eloquence and intelligence led to national prominence.
Rev. TAYLOR (Preaching): And, on Sunday morning, he came forth declaring, "All power is in my hands." My friend, that is the destiny of history.Dr. LISCHER: He manages to keep an enormous range of rhetorical skill under tight, disciplined control, so that when you're listening to a Gardner Taylor sermon, you feel like something is about to break out or explode.
Rev. TAYLOR (Preaching): John talks about the song of the Lamb: "I saw a new Heaven."
LAWTON: During the civil rights era, Taylor played a key role raising money in the North to support the Southern church's efforts. Together with Martin Luther King Jr., he pushed the black Baptist establishment to get more involved in the movement. When that didn't happen, the two helped found a new denomination, the Progressive National Baptist Convention.
Taylor and King were close friends, often vacationing together. But Taylor says King never really talked about his personal struggles.
Rev. TAYLOR: I did not realize -- I should have, I've felt guilty about that -- I did not realize the pressures this man was under. He was not universally supported by blacks.
Rev. TAYLOR: I think the church today in America partakes of the contemporary American disease of "Let me alone! I want to get along and I don't want to be bothered with too many things." And I think that's in the churches. When a pulpit becomes an echo of the pew, it loses, I think, almost all of its reasons for existence.
Rev. TAYLOR (To Student): I think you've got talent, but I think you want discipline. You just -- you wear people out. You don't want to do that. You want to carry them with you.
Rev. TAYLOR: I'm 88, and I lean much more upon the promises. Because I need them; I guess I always needed them, I shouldn't say that. But I feel the need of them more.
