Rev. Gardner C. Taylor, considered one of the best preachers in America, died this week (April 5) at the age of 96. The longtime pastor of Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn, Taylor and his friend Martin Luther King Jr helped found the Progressive National Baptist Convention.
Kim Lawton profiled Taylor in 2006:
KIM LAWTON: He says preaching is always a tenuous endeavor.
REV. GARDNER 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: Looking back, he admits at times he may have been too involved with Democratic Party politics. But he also worries that many contemporary churches have lost their prophetic edge.
REV. TAYLOR: When a pulpit becomes an echo of the pew, it loses, I think, almost all of its reasons for existence.
(preaching): Sickness and sorrow and pain and death are felt and feared. God shall wipe away all, all, all, all tears!
