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GARDNER C. TAYLOR

Case Study in Crossover Preaching

The believer standing where Jesus stands is not someone who can only be “at home” in a specific bit of this worldly territory. He or she has become a person at home everywhere and nowhere.

Rowan Williams, Christ on Trial

The venue was Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York in 1960; the gathering was a regional Baptist Ministers Conference; and the occasion was a fundraiser for the Martin Luther King Defense Fund. White and nonwhite clergy and laypeople gathered there because they wanted to raise $10,000 to cover expenses for King’s legal defense in Alabama. Dr. Taylor, knowing that some in the audience had pockets deep enough to cover King’s legal fees, aware that King’s name was well known and widely regarded, took the podium and said the following to those gathered for the fundraiser, “I feel like a mosquito in a nudist colony. I know what I’m here for, but I don’t know where to start.” The place erupted in laughter, and the financial goal was met.

This story provides a brief snapshot into what makes Taylor a unique case study in crossover preaching: his attunement to space, attentiveness to listeners, capacity for humor, and rhetorical timing. But the actual claim of this book is that Taylor was more than just a good joke teller or public speaker. His contemporary significance to homiletics centers on two proficiencies in particular that mark him out as a forerunner, a harbinger of preaching’s future: improvisational proficiency and intercultural proficiency. These proficiencies are not only neglected in historical-homiletical assessments of Taylor but, of greater import to homiletics, they are the same proficiencies that preachers and homileticians need now more than ever to serve a church with an intercultural future here in the United States.

At least two questions are worth considering at the outset of this chapter: Why choose Gardner C. Taylor? and Was Gardner C. Taylor really a crossover preacher?

As to the first: Is studying a preacher from a bygone era worth so much time and energy, especially if the aim is to chart a course for the future? Perhaps an analysis of Taylor’s preaching is better suited to an honorific entry in an encyclopedia of preaching or a journal entry in a church history periodical. Moreover, is not the setting for his preaching ministry anachronistic? A number of signs point to this conclusion. Gone is the age of building neo-Gothic church cathedrals. Generally speaking, congregations in the United States no longer build cathedral-like structures as Harry Emerson Fosdick did when he built the Riverside Church with John D. Rockefeller’s money, or Taylor did when his congregation rebuilt the Concord Baptist Church of Christ in Brooklyn. While congregations still build large structures today, these buildings look nothing like the neo-Gothic architecture that once exemplified Western-establishment Christendom. Likewise, gone is the heyday of the nationally and internationally prominent radio preacher. Although some preachers today have successful radio ministries, their listening audiences do not rival the national and international audiences who listened to Taylor and other preachers on the NBC National Radio Pulpit or The Art of Living in the mid-twentieth century.1 Gone also is the golden age of preaching in New York City—the 1940s and 1950s—when preachers such as Harry Emerson Fosdick, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Sandy F. Ray, George Buttrick, Ralph W. Sockman, and Paul Scherer were household names in the city and, in some cases, prominent at the national level.2

To be sure, the pulpit prince, the neo-Gothic church cathedral, the nationally and internationally prominent radio preacher, and the national preaching circuit that Taylor traveled are long gone. So too are the days of Jim Crow–era segregation, white numerical hegemony, and mainline liberal Protestantism at the controlling centers of US society.3 So then what does a preacher who belongs to a bygone era contribute to an intercultural church with an intercultural future? The answer lies not in what marks out Taylor’s time period as a product of the past; rather, it lies in what distinguishes Taylor in the present from the other pulpit princes of his day. Taylor was an improvisational-­intercultural preacher who lived ahead of his time, a harbinger of crossover preaching proficiency.

This leads to the second question—Was Gardner C. Taylor really a “crossover preacher”? Did he engage with and account for difference? Do not the data suggest otherwise? How can one claim that Taylor was an improvisational-intercultural preacher who crossed borders of racial and ecumenical difference when Concord Baptist, the church he served for forty-two years, was more than 98 percent African American during his tenure there? If Taylor was both improvisational and intercultural, then why wasn’t Concord more racially and ethnically diverse when he was pastor? Wouldn’t a preacher with a racially and ethnically diverse congregation be a more suitable alternative? If we confined the list of candidates to New York City, more recent names would come to mind, such as James Forbes during his tenure at the Riverside Church, or Jim Cymbala at the Brooklyn Tabernacle Church. These two churches are more diverse than Concord was, and these two pastors were and are committed to diversity and inclusion. Is Taylor the best person on whom to confer the crossover preacher designation?

Another problem arises when we use crossover language and decouple it from the contexts in which Taylor crossed over. When one considers examples of crossing over such as Taylor’s broadcasts on the NBC National Radio Pulpit, his involvement on the board of education in New York City, his presidency of the local chapter of the National Council of Churches, and his delivery of the Beecher Lectures at Yale in 1976, all of which were predominantly white organizations at the time, Would these data support my claim that Taylor crossed over boundaries of difference, or would they support a counterclaim that predominantly white organizations crossed over boundaries of difference in reaching out to Taylor? Who is doing the crossing over, and why are they doing it? Is it predominantly white organizations, Taylor, or both? Who was being improvisationally and interculturally proficient: an African American preacher deciding to participate in predominantly white organizations, or white organizations asking an African American preacher to work alongside them?

The question as to whether whites embodied improvisational-­intercultural proficiency is indeed a fascinating one. Perhaps the answer is yes. Perhaps no. How can we know for sure? Do we know the motivations among whites at NBC, the NCC, the New York City School Board, or at Yale? Can we know? Were their motivations guided by a desire for friendship, veiled forms of racism and tokenism, or a combination of both? Are there data that support or refute a conclusion in one of these directions? Other questions arise concerning majority/minority power differentials, giving and receiving hospitality, and structural and systemic change. Although an investigation into these questions and others would no doubt be beneficial, it is also beyond the scope of this project. The question under consideration for this book is not whether white organizations were embodying improvisational-intercultural proficiency, but whether Taylor was. Likewise, the question is not whether the crossover preacher designation can be applied to other preachers besides Taylor, preachers like Forbes, Cymbala, or others; it is whether the designation can be applied to him. The answer to both of these questions is yes. To answer the latter question, the data will be our guide.

As this chapter unfolds, it will become clear why crossover preacher is a more-than-apt description for Taylor. This designation will reveal new dimensions to understanding Taylor’s preaching, dimensions that have not been previously considered, and it will also frame his contemporary significance to homiletics. If Taylor was an improvisational-intercultural preacher who lived ahead of his time, then an analysis of his preaching not only sheds new light on past understandings of Taylor’s contribution to preaching; it also illumines a path for the future of preaching.

To support my argument and authorize the crossover designation, we will answer three questions in particular: Who is Gardner C. Taylor? Why choose Taylor as a case study in crossover preaching? What is an intercultural-improvisational homiletic? First, I provide a brief biographical sketch of Taylor designed to introduce the reader to his life and ministry. Second, I provide data to support my thesis that Taylor was a crossover preacher. Third, I delimit the key terms in the model I propose (e.g., What do I mean by improvisational? What do I mean by intercultural?) so as to provide parameters for the crossover designation, and I interface these key terms with current homiletical literature. Our answer to the third question will demonstrate that, although some important homiletical literature has already been written, much work remains.

Question 1: Who Is Gardner C. Taylor?

Gardner Calvin Taylor was born on June 18, 1918, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He was the only child of a well-known Baptist preacher, the Reverend Washington (“Wash”) Monroe Taylor, and his well-educated wife, Selina Gesell Taylor. Washington Taylor served as pastor at one of the largest...