The Rev. Gardner C. Taylor prays during his sermon at a historic meeting of four black Baptist denominations at the Opryland Hotel in Nashville, Tenn., in 2005. (Photo Credit: Michael Clancy, Religion News Service file)
(RNS) The Rev. Gardner C. Taylor, widely considered the dean of the nation’s black preachers and “the poet laureate of American Protestantism,” died Sunday (April 5) after a ministerial career that spanned more than six decades. He was 96.
The Rev. Carroll Baltimore, past president of the Progressive National Baptist Convention, confirmed that Taylor died on Easter Sunday.
“Dr. Taylor was a theological giant who will be greatly missed,” he said of the minister who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2000.
PNBC President Rev. James C. Perkins said Taylor “transformed America and the world for the better. How appropriate it is that God called Dr. Taylor home on Resurrection Sunday. In both life and death Dr. Taylor gave a clarion call to the transformative power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
Concord Baptist Church of Christ, the imposing, block-long, brick church Taylor pastored for 42 years, became a beacon of hope and vitality for many African-Americans in Brooklyn, N.Y., and a model for the nation. When the church was destroyed by fire in 1952, Taylor defied naysayers by not only rebuilding the edifice, but also doubling its size.
Concord, one of New York City’s largest churches, operated its own elementary school, nursing home, credit union and million-dollar endowment used to invest in the community. But for more than four decades, it was Taylor who made Concord’s pulpit “the most prestigious in black Christendom,” proclaimed author and scholar Michael Eric Dyson.
Dyson described Taylor’s preaching style as a blend of technical aspects, brilliant metaphors and an “uncanny sense of rhythmic timing put to dramatic but not crassly theatrical effect.”
The tall, charismatic pastor was renowned for the memorable sermons he spun from tales, anecdotes and Scriptures, but rarely captured in manuscripts. Taylor, a preacher’s preacher, kept his thoughts in his head before ushering them forth, and kept a black pocket Bible handy when he wanted to refer to the sermon’s Scripture reading for the day.
“When you talk about Gardner Taylor, it’s more than just the words,” said the Rev. Bernard Richardson, dean of Howard University’s Rankin Memorial Chapel.
Richardson, who first heard Taylor preach when he was a student at Yale Divinity School in 1984, said, “It’s his presence and I mean, everything about him preaches … his mannerisms, his sincerity, his love of God, love of Scripture. … When he mounts the pulpit, one immediately feels they’re in the presence of someone who is truly gifted.”
This gifted clergyman appreciated the accolades and honors he received during his ministerial career, but relished humility. “I’m appreciative that people take notice of me,” he once said, “but when I go to worship, I’m not looking for that.”
There is a divinity school series, the Gardner C. Taylor Lectures in Black Preaching at Duke Divinity School, and a street in Brooklyn named for Taylor.
Taylor also will be remembered for a thorny page in black Baptist history struck by his allegiance to civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., during a tense time in the National Baptist Convention, USA. In 1960, Taylor, King and other black ministers split from the denomination after a fierce debate over King’s civil rights agenda, which many black clerics of the day thought was too politically liberal. As a result, Taylor and other King supporters seceded from the convention and formed the Progressive National Baptist Convention, of which Taylor was once president.
Those were troublesome days for Taylor, who said he lost friends as a result of the split, but his fervent preaching and ministry never waned.
When he was asked during an interview about what makes a great preacher, Taylor responded, “In the Book of Ruth, Naomi says, ‘I went out full, and I’ve come back empty.”’
For Taylor, “That was the story of life. It’s also the story of preaching; we must keep ourselves full so we can empty ourselves in the pulpit.”
In 2011, Taylor described what principles contribute to someone being a great preacher.
“I think the secret of preaching is a deep religious conviction, a knowledge of the Bible and the attempt to express it as well as one might,’’ he said. “I think that is the difference between the ordinary and the extraordinary.’’
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NAIROBI, Kenya (RNS) As Good Friday services began here, Christian and Muslim leaders preached unity a day after a horrific terrorist attack at Garissa University College left 147 students dead, most of them Christians.
Al-Shabab, the Somalia-based Muslim insurgency, claimed responsibility for the massacre that began around 5:30 a.m. Thursday (April 2) as Muslims students were at mosque for morning prayers and Christian students were still asleep in their dorms.
The masked attackers — strapped with explosives and armed with AK-47s — stormed the dorms, took some hostages and gunned down others. When Kenyan security forces struck back, the attackers detonated explosives. Security forces killed four militants.
The Rev. Peter Karanja, general secretary of the National Council of Churches of Kenya, said the government and those responsible for security must start asking hard questions about what ails Kenya’s security system.
“It is our conviction that the folly of our homeland security is systemic and cannot be given cosmetic solutions,” said Karanja, who urged the international community to help confront these groups.
Anglican Archbishop Julius Kalu of Mombasa, a coastal city in southeastern Kenya, said the terrorists wanted to divide the country along religious lines.
“This must be resisted,” said Kalu while urging leaders to move to end religious, political and ethnic divides.
Muslim leaders here condemned the attack and disowned terrorists, terming them as criminals using religion to commit crimes.
“The Muslim community in Garissa County strongly condemns barbaric acts committed against innocent university students,” said Abdullahi Salat, chairman of the Supreme Council of Kenya Muslims. “Our heartfelt condolences go to the victims’ families.”
“This is an international war and can only be won if everyone takes part,” Salat added.
The clerics insisted on heightened security in all parts of the country, and asked the government to rein in social media, which they suggested was contributing to raised tensions.
Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state, sent a telegram to Kenya’s Conference of Catholic Bishops to express Pope Francis’ condolences. It said: “His Holiness condemns this act of senseless brutality and prays for a change of heart among its perpetrators. He calls upon all those in authority to redouble their efforts to work with all men and women in Kenya to bring an end to such violence and to hasten the dawn of a new era of brotherhood, justice and peace.”
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By now most are familiar with Janette…IKZ (pronounced “Genetics”). She is the poet behind the spoken word piece “I Will Wait” and last summer she launched a web series entitled “The Wait Is Over” to document her journey to the altar with her now husband Matthew Watson. Then “I Will Wait,” which has been viewed over 2 million times on YouTube, touched people because of Janette…IKZ’s transparency about her struggles with singleness and now, the “I Waited For You…” wedding vow is taking many by storm because of the same transparency. Not one to mince words or paint unrealistic pictures, Janette…IKZ loads her vows with brutal honesty about who she was when she first met Matthew, who she is becoming in Christ, and even how she might fail given human nature. But, most of all, what Janette…IKZ communicates for the many who’ve watched the video thus far is an honest love for her husband rooted in her love of Christ.
There’s not much more to say about it besides that, so check it out for yourself and let us know what you think.
SELMA, Ala.(RNS) With the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday this weekend, America was reminded how this small city helped bring sweeping change to the nation.
But while Selma might have transformed America, in many ways time has stood still in this community of 20,000 that was at the center of the push that culminated with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Dallas County, of which Selma is the county seat, was the poorest county in Alabama last year. Selma has an unemployment rate of 10.2 percent; the national rate is 5.5 percent.
More than 40 percent of families and 67 percent of children in the county live below the poverty line. The violent crime rate is five times the state average. The Birmingham News called the region, known as the Black Belt because of its rich soil, “Alabama’s Third World.”
“Selma sowed, but it did not reap,” says James Perkins Jr., who became the city’s first African-American mayor in 2000. “So many of the benefits that went to other places in the South and around the world since the Voting Act of 1965 did not come to Selma. I hope this 50th anniversary will help Selma begin reaping some of those benefits.”
The world’s eyes were again on Selma this weekend as tens of thousands of people, including President Obama and his family, came to commemorate the marches here that raised the nation’s consciousness and led to the end of discriminatory practices that largely excluded blacks from the ballot box.
As America honors the heroes of 1965, many are expressing grief over how Selma has weathered the past half-century.
Not long after blacks began making political headway here after passage of the Voting Rights Act, this city’s economy collapsed.
Craig Air Force Base, which hosted undergraduate pilot training, was closed in 1977. The base housed about 2,500 people and contributed millions of dollars to the local economy.
After the marches of 1965, white flight began. About 10,000 white residents have left Selma in the past three decades, leaving it 80 percent African-American.
The city’s downtown, which sits along the Alabama River, has a bucolic charm from afar, but it is pocked with as many vacant buildings as occupied ones.
“It feels like nothing new has come here in decades,” says Hubbert Fitzpatrick, 65, who grew up in the area and now lives in Houston. “It’s a little bit sad.”
Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson points to the old home in Selma of Amelia Boynton Robinson, who played a key role in the 1965 marches, as a tragic symbol of what’s become of Selma. Her home was where a group of congressmen, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders gathered to write the first draft of the Voting Rights Act.
Now the home sits boarded up, indistinguishable from the many other vacant houses in that neighborhood.
“We really should be focused on protest rather than celebration,” Jackson says. “We are under attack in this season.”
David Garrow, a historian and author of “Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,” says he decided to skip this week’s events because Selma has become “a symbolic holiday for celebrities” rather than a solemn commemoration of the goals of the Selma campaign — including the need to fight poverty.
Instead, the celebrations in Selma have the effect of “reducing history to a photo opp,” Garrow says.
“The focus should be on investment and economic development in places like Selma,” Garrow says. “The focus should be on what we can do for Selma, not what Selma can do for us.”
(Aamer Madhani writes for USA Today. Reporter David Jackson contributed this report.)
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(RNS) As world attention shifts to the growing influence of Muslim militant groups on the African continent, few have paid any attention to the ongoing bloody conflict in South Sudan.
An estimated 50,000 people have died and 2 million have been displaced in the latest phase of fighting in this nation, according to the International Crisis Group, a think tank that aims to prevent and resolve such conflicts. That’s about five times more than in northern Nigeria, where the Islamist militant group Boko Haram has killed more than 5,000 people in six years.
“South Sudan’s conflict is not getting much attention due to shifting interests towards Islamic extremism,” said the Rev. Fred Nyabera of Kenya, a social scientist who is director of the Interfaith Initiative to End Child Poverty at the global faith-based organization Arigatou International. “This has become a global issue because of the immediate threats it poses to nations.
“But leaving South Sudan alone at this time when the people are trying to define their identity and country, under very fragile circumstances, is to postpone a big problem,” Nyabera added.
On Monday (Feb. 2), South Sudan President Salva Kiir and his former deputy — now rebel — Riek Machar signed a peace agreement in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, that proposes a coalition government. A power struggle between the two sparked the fighting in December 2013.
Within months, the violence took on an ethnic dimension, with government troops largely from Kiir’s Dinka tribe and the rebels from Machar’s Nuer tribe engaging in deadly clashes.
“Like many of the conflicts in Africa, the South Sudan conflict is a politically motivated tribal war,” said Sheikh Abdallah Kheir, a religious scholar at Kenyatta University in Nairobi.
Since then, the parties have signed and broken six peace agreements.
But the peace negotiations leading to the pacts have concentrated on Kiir and Machar, leaving out key stakeholders such as religious groups, nongovernmental aid organizations and community leaders.
“As long as the prospects of peace are seen as preserve of the two, then the prospects of peace will remain bleak,” said Nyabera.
Sixty percent of South Sudan residents are Christian, 33 percent follow traditional African religions and 6 percent are Muslims, according to the Pew Research Center.
South Sudan became an independent state in July 2011 after voting to secede from Sudan in a referendum. But independence has not brought stability to the region, ICG said in its Jan. 29 report.
According to the South Sudan Catholic bishops, the war is about power, not about the people.
“The aspirations of individuals and factions have led to a cycle of revenge killing,” said Roman Catholic Archbishop Paulino Lukudu Loro of Juba said in a statement on Jan. 30.
“We say to all who are involved in any way: if you continue fighting you will finish yourselves and you will finish the nation. The nation needs to be salvaged from this sin.”
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It looks like there may be a parting of the proverbial Red Sea for white-washed biblical films with the news of an upcoming release. A few days ago, IndieWire’s Shadow and Act blog broke news about “Revival: The Experience” a musical retelling of the gospel of John, and by the trailer alone it looks glorious.
The film stars Grammy nominee and subversive gospel artist Mali Music as Jesus, the one and only Chaka Khan as Herodias, Destiny’s Child’s gospel sister Michelle Williams as Mary Magdalene, acting veteran Obba Babatunde as Nicodemus, and consistently chin-dimpled Harry Lennix as Pontius Pilate just to name a few of the all-star cast. As I mentioned earlier this is a musical retelling and it looks like everyone will be either singing or dancing, including Jesus. Yes, Jesus is not only going to weep but he will sing, and if you are familiar with Mali Music you know that Jesus is going to sing exceedingly and abundantly well.
According to the film’s IMDB page, it is a hybrid of every film idiom including Broadway musical, Hollywood musical, animation, green screen technology and sound stage. It sounds like a lot but let’s hope that they edit it flawlessly in the post-production process. Here’s a look at the first trailer for the film.
