Preacher now counsels other preachers

The Rev. Gardner Taylor may never preach another word, but the vocation to which he dedicated his life and for which he has won so many accolades still consumes his waking hours.

From the modern brick home where he is now retired, Taylor, known as the "dean of American preachers," spends long hours on the phone and in correspondence with other preachers across the country. He calls what he does an "informal consulting service," but that gives it a businesslike cast.

What Taylor really does is dispense wisdom, and he does it with a clear sense of humility.

Recently he wrote to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, advising him how to respond to explosive excerpts of sermons that have tarnished Sen. Barack Obama's presidential bid, as well as to the Rev. Billy Graham, expressing his condolences on the death of his wife, Ruth.

Taylor, who will turn 90 in June, is still keenly attuned to the times. The legendary civil rights champion and longtime pastor of Concord Baptist Church of Christ in Brooklyn, N.Y., has witnessed nearly a century of momentous events. From his study in Raleigh, N.C., decorated with framed photos of African-American church leaders, Taylor has dedicated himself to helping younger pastors.

"Once he gets into the preaching moment there's something mystical about what happens to him," said Michael Battle, president of the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, which houses Taylor's papers and is endowing a professor's chair in his name. "It's as though God dispenses an enormous amount of power and presence. He just has phenomenal strength."

Taylor admires Obama, though he has never met him, and recognizes that the candidate's perspective is different from his own.

"He belongs to a new generation of blacks who did not pass through the seething years of segregation and the first years of integration and all the problems involved in that," said Taylor. "His outlook is to some extent different -- to the good."

That led him to write to Wright, whom he has long known, and to offer pointers on how to respond to the furor that erupted when inflammatory sentences from Wright's sermons -- in which he seemed to curse America -- appeared on YouTube.

"Jeremiah, if you are going to get hopelessly angry, then don't go," Taylor wrote in one letter referring to appearances Wright made last month to defend himself. "Show patience. Put statements in the form of questions. Much rides on it."

He worries that instead of opening a discussion on race, Wright's words have given people a legitimate excuse to dismiss Obama.

"Many people will not vote for Mr. Obama finding it convenient, respectable and satisfying of conscience to say, 'I would have voted for him, but Jeremiah Wright said so and so.'"

Called to the ministry

But Taylor not only keeps abreast of politics. He has a pastoral bent, one that led him to write to the ailing and bereaved Graham. Although the two are not friends, Taylor's own wife of 54 years, Laura, died in 1995 after being hit by a truck, and he knows the pain of loss.

"There's no loneliness to compare to the loneliness of losing a mate," he said. "Many a night I went to bed and wished to God I'd never get up."

Taylor has since remarried. His new wife, Phillis, is a former high school teacher from Brooklyn. The couple moved to Raleigh in 2006 so Phillis, who is 20 years younger, could be closer to her sister, who also lives in Raleigh.

Taylor was born in Baton Rouge, La., where his father, Washington Monroe Taylor, was also a minister. The young Taylor wanted to go to law school, but a car crash during his senior year of college altered his course. Taylor was driving a 1934 Dodge and collided with a Model T Ford traveling in his lane. Two men died in the crash, but Taylor was cleared of blame by two white witnesses -- a rarity in the Jim Crow South of the 1930s. He felt a stirring to the ministry right then.

After graduating from divinity school at the now-defunct Oberlin School of Theology in 1940, he made his way to the Brooklyn church when he was 30 years old. Although race relations were somewhat better in New York than in the South, Taylor kept his eyes trained on the nation as a whole. His father and the Rev. Martin Luther King's grandfather were Baptist ministers and friends, and Taylor nurtured the relationship with the late civil rights leader. To this day he refers to King by his nickname, "Mike."

In 1960, Taylor and King sought to wrest control of the National Baptist Convention, the largest of the African-American denominations, to make it more receptive to the civil rights platform. After a two-year struggle to win the presidency, a struggle historian Taylor Branch described as "something more like soccer riots," Taylor gave up his run. The conflict led to the establishment of the Progressive National Baptist Convention, to which Taylor and King moved their membership.

In the succeeding years, Taylor grew his church into a center of black empowerment. An elementary school and a nursing home were built alongside it. A federal credit union and a community endowment were also established.

Taylor was named one of the 12 most effective preachers in the English language in a 1996 Baylor University survey. In 2000, President Bill Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)