Last Heroes Feat. Derek Joel Never Again

Imagine you're a large-shot Hollywood producer, and you're making a movie almost the life of iconic Baptist preacher/pastor/professor Joel Gregory.

You lot bet the motion picture on casting character actor Paul Giamatti, who is 95 per centum perfect to play Gregory. Giamatti mirrors Gregory's persona: Everyman, non a leading man. A chip stooped, a tad weary. You don't desire to encounter him shirtless. And he's the simply actor with range for the part. The slightest gesture — a chuckle, a break, a shrug — may convey the themes of Gregory'southward life: Promise. Grandeur. Loss. Redemption.

But Giamatti's only 95 percent perfect. So, casting against conventional wisdom, you lot sign James Earl Jones to overdub Giamatti's voice. You don't fifty-fifty call back twice. Too Gregory, Jones is the only person on the planet whose voice echoes what practically everybody who'south heard Gregory preach insists he surely sounds similar: God Almighty.

Since you can't trust anybody else with the screenplay, you lot write information technology yourself. To fix, yous study 19th- century oratory and read all the great preachers of that era. No other genre will capture Gregory's tone in the place he'southward most at abode: behind a pulpit.

Then you write a life in 3 acts:

Human activity one — Normalcy. The step zips. The protagonist, a boy of modest means, grows up in Fort Worth, Texas. Like millions of Baptist children coming of historic period in the mid-20th century, his life perches upon 3 sturdy pillars — dwelling house, school and a total-service neighborhood church. Despite the lure of academia, church trumps school, and the male child sets out to go a preacher. He trains at the world's largest Baptist institutions, studying at Baylor University, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and Baylor again. Along the manner, he learns the ministerial ropes in small-scale churches.

Deed 2 — Celebrity and Calamity. Gregory accepts the pastorate of the "seminary church" in Fort Worth. Promoted past the school'due south continued-and-charismatic president, millions notice The Voice, an inimitably grand oratorical presence. The notwithstanding-young pastor preaches in magnificent venues. In just 13 years, he assumes Baptistdom's most prominent pulpit. Only two years later, he resigns abruptly, afterward endures divorce and supports himself selling "pre-need funeral plans" door-to-door.

Human activity iii — Redemption. Of all the saints in all cosmos, a prominent African-American pastor becomes Gregory'due south best friend. He keeps insisting that Gregory can't quit. He places Gregory in front of 900 blackness Baptist pastors. Before y'all can say, "Resurrection," Gregory ascends pulpit after pulpit. He'due south the nearly popular white preacher in African-American congregations nationwide. Other Baptists eventually catch the spirit, and by the terminate of the pic, Gregory returns to Baylor. Oxymoronically, the last great exemplar of 19th-century pulpit oratory invests his concluding years teaching 21st-century ministers to preach.

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cience, not sermons, captivated young Joel Gregory, growing up on the bustling west side of Fort Worth in the decades after Earth War 2. He attended Arlington Heights High School, known for its stately campus and potent academics. And he participated in a federally funded program to funnel bright students into biological research. "I lived in the lab," he recalls with obvious fondness.

And then, two events in 1964 inverse his life.

First, he attended a youth service at a nearby church building, where Bill Glass, a member of the Cleveland Browns who later became an evangelist and prison government minister, provided the main attraction.

"I was sixteen, and Bill was all the same a pro ball role player. I felt a sense of confidence then," Gregory remembers. "A few months after, in June of '64, during the evening service of a youth Vacation Bible School — to this day, information technology was the most brilliant spiritual conviction. I told the youth government minister, John Scales, God was calling me to preach."

The leap from lab to pulpit wasn't all that far for the earnest, studious youngster. Edith and Clifford Gregory raised their son in what he describes as a "church-centered family and civilization," and Connell Memorial Baptist Church building in their neighborhood naturally extended both family and culture. Fifty-fifty earlier that evening of commitment, Pastor Ira Bentley and key laypeople helped him begin to hear the "call to special Christian service," equally Baptists spoke of it in those days.

Sixteen-year-old Joel's embrace of ministry upset his biology teacher, Frederick Arseneau, who saw potential in the boy. And a fellow science student asked betoken blank: "Why would you lot throw your life abroad?" Simply Joel threw his life into the artillery of God and never looked back — or even sideways — for almost three decades.

Gregory also threw himself into preparation for ministry. The path led to Baylor and Southwestern Seminary and back to Baylor for a doctorate. It besides included lessons learned in a string of minor Baptist churches. Along the fashion, he developed a thou, mesmerizing preaching presence and a pulpit voice that peals like thunder.

At Baylor, "I had the privilege of studying under the late Ray Summers," a leading 20th-century New Testament scholar, he says. But "a good bargain of my style, at the base of operations of it, goes back to an encounter my inferior year at Baylor in my first pastorate. It was an Easter service at North Fort Worth Baptist Church. D.L. Lowrie, the pastor, was a young man — an exegetical, expository preacher. I had never heard annihilation simply like information technology."

"Upwardly to then, I'd been preaching youth-revival topical sermons," he reports, chuckling at the retention. Dumbfounded by Lowrie's power to mine truth from Scripture and utilise it to the practical needs of his listeners, Gregory made an date. Pastor and aspiring preacher spent half an hour talking about sermons. "That conversation had as much to do with shaping my preaching as anything for a long time," he says. "It was seminal. Summers gave me the exegetical and biblical tools for interpretation. That 30-minute chat with D.L. pushed me to utilise it."

So much for sermon preparation. What nearly delivery?

Gregory laughs when asked how he became "the last smashing Elizabethan orator." But he acknowledges accuracy in the observation. His sermons actually do echo the 19th century. "In my own reading … I feasted at the feet of the great Victorian and Edwardian preachers — Charles Haddon Spurgeon, G. Campbell Morgan and Alexander Maclaren." Early influences hold fast.

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ut and then practice contemporary influences. He points to two of the most revered Southern Baptist preachers of the 1960s and '70s, Clyde Fant and the late John Claypool. "I'm thankful to those men. They modified what might have been something else." Their emphasis on tapping the biblical narrative for drama and ability, besides as tapping into everyday life for practical application, honed Gregory'southward sermons.

Indirectly, so did the evangelical preaching prince Chuck Swindoll. "In the late '70s, people would leave church and inquire, 'Say, did yous hear Swindoll?'" he notes. "My preaching had become heavy and scholastic — bespeak/subpoint. And here was Swindoll, preaching from contemporary, lived feel."

Still later on, when Gregory proclaimed in larger churches and became the featured preacher on the Baptist Hour radio and TV plan, he learned he "had to lighten upwardly some on pure exegetical content," the heavy-duty biblical mining and refining. Why? "To communicate; to keep people's attending."

"I didn't abandon biblical preaching," he explains. "Merely I had to give them lived experience. The listening situation has changed."

Ever the pupil, Gregory all the same is learning. Turning to his desk, he raises an enormous stack of CDs — "every sermon John [Claypool] preached at Broadway Baptist Church building in Fort Worth.

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ut still, exegesis and application and oratory can't encapsulate the essence of Joel Gregory in the pulpit. For that, y'all need to hear The Vox.

Like practically everybody who always listened to Gregory preach, I still call back the first fourth dimension I heard him behind a pulpit. He accepted the unenviable assignment of preaching in chapel at Hardin-Simmons University in 1976 or '77. Preaching at a Baptist school is a lot like preaching in prison. Both crowds are captive audiences. Just prisoners think of chapel equally a welcome break.

Gregory wore a dark suit and white shirt, popbottle glasses, a choppy mustache and excess pounds. He laid the bar of expectation on the floor. My classmates and I prepared to take hold of upwardly on reading or napping.

And then he spoke.

Few of us had yet heard James Earl Jones. Just if you can imagine a preacher with the voice of Darth Vader, you tin imagine Gregory opening his mouth. Nosotros sat upwardly.

So the oratory kicked in. Flowing from Gregory's lips, Christianity sounded magnificent. Vibrant. Worth our lives. We leaned forward. And we listened.

"I never took a lesson," Gregory says of his peerless vocal instrument. "I call back I took one course in public speaking at Baylor. Early on, I had no consciousness of commitment. … In my 20s, people began to remark on my vocal production. Past the time I went to Gambrell [Street Baptist Church building in Fort Worth] in 1977, I was aware of a souvenir — I mean a gift — of speaking that tended to appoint people."

Gregory admits experience shaped and tempered and rounded out his presentation. He preached in ever-larger venues, which seemed to demand vigor and vocal athleticism to friction match the grandeur of the gospel. Notwithstanding, he tries to recollect to calibration his voice to the room. "I've found it takes a sure-size place to speak like that. … Likewise, you don't want to lean on delivery while neglecting content."

On the other paw, Gregory thinks proclamation of the gospel is an endeavor worthy of grandiloquence.

"As someone who sees the preaching job as exposition of Scripture, I experience there is a identify to maintain what you call a more than oratorical fashion of preaching," he says. "I'm keenly aware that [style of preaching] is fading. But the desolation of Scripture — its emotive impact — can lend itself to oratory if that's natural to you, if information technology'southward genuine."

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ncreasing numbers of Baptists resonated with Gregory'due south project of a magnificent gospel. Not however 30 years old, he accepted the Gambrell Street pastorate in 1977. He stepped into the pulpit directly across the street from Southwestern Seminary, then the largest preacher mill on the planet.

Non long after Gregory arrived at Gambrell Street, Russell Dilday became president of the seminary and joined his church. Pastor and president hitting it off.

"That was a great influence — Russell'due south friendship," Gregory recounts. "He and others became promoters, virtually, of my ministry. He opened enormous doors."

Gregory initially appealed to Dilday by delivering three strong sermons in a row, when the new seminary president and his married woman, Betty, were seeking a church home.

"Nosotros decided maybe our all-time choice was the church right nearby, in our neighborhood," Dilday recalls. "Nosotros visited 1 Sunday forenoon, and I was so impressed by that immature human. He didn't have the characteristics you would expect in a popular preacher. He wasn't tall. He had glasses. … Merely that was one of the all-time biblical sermons I had heard in a long time. People said he has a voice similar God'due south, only deeper. But he was biblically sound and had practiced illustrations."

As veteran church-visitors, the Dildays realized about preachers possess at least one "sugar stick" — a favorite, proven sermon — and they decided to see if they heard young Gregory on a carbohydrate-stick Sun. And then, they went dorsum to Gambrell Street that Sun dark. And the next Midweek night.

"I began to realize this was not a single incident," Dilday says. "He was a solid Baptist, biblical, evangelical."

The Dildays joined Gambrell Street. Pastor and president would go visiting church prospects together. Their families shared meals. They became friends. And Dilday's respect for Gregory grew.

"I began to tell people one of the best preachers in the land was my young pastor," Dilday remembers.

Thanks to Dilday's influence, Jimmy Draper — so pastor of Starting time Baptist Church in nearby Euless and a Southwestern lath member — invited Gregory to preach at the Southern Baptist Convention Pastors' Conference in 1980 in St. Louis, a and then-mammoth meeting on the eve of the SBC annual meeting. "That was the first very, very large setting where I preached," Gregory says. "That resulted in a crush of invitations to preach. I actually wasn't prepare."

Gregory preached to a packed house every Dominicus at Gambrell Street and oftentimes flew off to preach in other churches and ministers' conferences during the week.

The opportunities multiplied in 1982, when Gregory joined the Southwestern Seminary faculty to teach preaching.

Again, Dilday advocated for Gregory.

"He's the only faculty member in my time — 16 years in that location — whom I had to promote against the wishes of the faculty," Dilday reports. "The preaching faculty were a footling worried he would travel to the churches a lot and wouldn't stay home. My answer was nosotros needed a skilful representative of Southwestern among the churches. They said he'll be too skillful; the students will be discouraged they tin't alive up to that high quality. I asked if they wanted mediocre professors. Other said students will imitate him. I said they could do worse."

Under Dilday's direction, the seminary worked out a program for Gregory to teach one year and review the organization if problems developed, which they did not.

"He became very, very true-blue equally a instructor," Dilday says. "He was popular with the students and popular on the preaching excursion. And he developed good relationships with the faculty."

Then with his weekends free, pulpits from around the nation did indeed beckon. The adjacent year at the behest of SBC Music Managing director Bill Reynolds, a kinesthesia colleague at Southwestern, Gregory preached five xv-minute theme interpretations at the SBC almanac meeting in Pittsburgh.

"Once again, it accelerated things for me in a disorienting fashion," he admits. T.B. Maston, the legendary Southwestern Seminary ethics professor and Gregory'south parishioner at Gambrell Street, agreed. Maston once told fellow ethics prof Bill Tillman: "Joel went up too fast."

Nevertheless, the pinnacle of the Baptist mountain loomed far above annual meeting theme interpretations.

Gregory kept climbing.

Past 1988, fundamentalists and moderates waged an all-out war for control of the SBC. Gregory, so pastor of the huge Travis Avenue Baptist Church in Fort Worth and president of the Baptist General Convention of Texas, mounted a podium in the middle of the battleground.

Asked to preach the annual convention sermon that year in San Antonio, he delivered what many longtime observers call the most memorable sermon in SBC history, "The Castle and the Wall."

At the heart of his sermon, Gregory told about the owner of a magnificent castle who took a long journey. Before he departed, he instructed his chief steward to protect the castle in his absence. Upon returning, the owner rejoiced to observe a fantabulous wall guarding his holding. Merely devastation greeted him when he passed through the gate. He learned the steward used the castle's stones to build the wall.

Gregory'due south metaphor contained just enough ambiguity to please and acrimony moderates and  fundamentalists akin. "Some on both sides idea I was in their camp," he recalls. "And some on both sides thought I was an appeaser. …"

"I do think the metaphor holds," he insists: In their struggle for control of the SBC, some Baptists were willing to tear down the castle to build a wall to protect the castle they demolished. For his function, Gregory contends he preached on behalf of peace within the SBC. "My goal was to build a big center."

To that cease, his nearly memorable bulletin constituted a jumbo flop. The SBC went correct on fighting. In San Antonio, Gregory preached peace, while West.A. Criswell, legendary pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas and white-haired icon of the convention's fundamentalist faction, infamously called moderates "skunks."

If Gregory's SBC sermon hurt him with the fundamentalists, they didn't hold a grudge. Shortly, Criswell started talking about retiring from the pulpit of "the world's largest Baptist church" (even then, a suspect claim). The pastor-search commission from First Baptist, Dallas, came a-courtin'. And the highest pastoral pinnacle in the Baptist universe — that pulpit — loomed in Gregory's sight.

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n 1964, a young preacher-boy from the westward side of Fort Worth never aspired to reach the ultimate pastorate — thirty miles downward Interstate thirty and a multitude of cultures away in downtown Dallas.

"When I started preaching, if people liked you, the onetime laity would say, 'Y'all're the next Baton Graham,'" Gregory remembers. "That mantle transferred in the 1960s and '70s to W.A. Criswell. Just I never thought almost [becoming 'the next W.A. Criswell'] until people started saying information technology. I never paid much attention until a number of people started saying information technology. But when the search commission showed up, that got my attention."

The committee arrived within a few months of when Gregory preached the SBC sermon in '88. "I was told the late Carlos McLeod [beloved evangelism director of the Baptist General Convention of Texas and an FBC Dallas member] floated my proper noun … maybe as a compromise candidate. I talked with them off and on for 2 years."

Those discussions bore fruit the Sunday after Thanksgiving 1990, when the church building unanimously chosen Gregory to become only its third pastor in more than than nine decades. "The Spirit was bouncing all over the identify. I had never heard or seen anything similar that," recalls Gregory's longtime friend and eventual concern partner, Karl Singer, who recently had joined First Baptist Dallas after nearly 17 years as executive managing director of the Willow Creek Association.

Gregory joined the church building the following Jan. If he had carried a flag, he could've planted it on the peak of Baptists' highest mountain.

Gregory, the heir, was to serve as pastor alongside Criswell, the venerated patriarch, who would exist called senior pastor. And so Criswell presently would retire, and Gregory would stand alone on the peak.

Like many a failed venture, Gregory descended much more chop-chop than he ascended. What happened next would take a book to tell. In fact, his memoir, Too Keen a Temptation (The Elevation Grouping, 1994), recounts it nicely. Here'southward the globe's shortest Reader's Assimilate version: Gregory encountered an inordinately complicated state of affairs. Criswell refused to retire. So Gregory quit.

"It was a hard ii years," Gregory says, mastering understatement. "Looking dorsum, I knew it was risky to go. … I was enthralled with the greatness of the pulpit, a globe pulpit. I had no clue about the balance of it."

He cites a lesson learned in hindsight: "A strong gift tin take you where the absence of other gifts cannot keep you."

"A preaching souvenir got me to that identify," he notes. "All the other [skills necessary to succeed] I really didn't intendance virtually. At Outset Dallas, preaching is just an entrance-level requirement. … That just got you lot in the door."

More than 20 years later, Gregory declines to say Criswell misled him every bit he considered accepting the Dallas pastorate. "I do recall when I went, Dr. Criswell was ready to leave. When he actually faced the reality, it was almost impossible [for him to consider leaving]." So, from Gregory's perspective, remaining in Dallas presently became impossible, too.

In the summertime of 1992, Criswell told Gregory he intended to stay longer. Others have since confirmed Criswell wanted to remain as pastor of FBC 50 years — an anniversary then 5 years in the altitude. Without clearly delineated duties, the co-pastors could not co-exist, Gregory decided. Besides, partisan groups were lining up, some for each pastor. Tension mounted.

So, by August of that year, Gregory decided to leave. "About the last month I was there, I just thought about how to practise it," he reports. "I didn't consult with anyone, and that was a error. … Skillful men in the church were trying to work it out, only I saw, myself, no solution."

Heeding his own counsel, he rose earlier a Wednesday-dark crowd and quit.

"From a perspective of 22 years afterward, I feel the Lord led me there, and the Lord led me abroad," he says. "I recall some of my successors would say it was a shock that helped clarify the situation."

Withal, Gregory's resignation delivered personal and family shocks.

"The disruption of the church played into another disruptions," he notes, acknowledging he didn't engage "the clearest thinking of my life" in those days. "I wanted to be lone. I wanted to hide."

The Gregory family unit moved out of a half-million dollar home in the tony Lakewood section of Dallas and into a loaned townhome. Soon, he establish himself in a phone booth in the Fort Worth Social club, request for a chore selling "pre-demand funeral plans" door-to-door for Greenwood Cemetery, where he had performed numerous funerals.

That made for what he wryly calls a "tragicomic state of affairs." Gregory craved privacy, just he couldn't duck notoriety equally he knocked on doors selling funerals. "Every block, people would recognize me," he remembers. Non that his fame hurt; he made "Rookie of the Year" in 1993.

Still, a shock is a shock. "I was thrown from a large salary, a large house, and preaching on national TV to disappearing and working with commission only salespeople," he says. "I had been promoted — over-promoted. And to get from that perch to knocking on doors, it was, to some degree, what the doctor ordered. … By my own arroyo, I had become increasingly insulated from the realities of the life of the typical person in the pew. … But this is where existent people live."

Vocational plummet and financial gratis-autumn didn't define the limits of Gregory's travail. He watched his sons, Grant and Garrett, suffer. He and his wife, Linda, divorced. "Divorce is a tragedy. We paid an enormous price," he says.

But at least he didn't sell pre-need funeral plans the rest of his life. He wrote Too Peachy a Temptation in 1994, and that led to a job with The Summit Group, a book and specialty magazine publisher. He learned about business and excelled at editing. He even became an expert in a distinctly Texan food genre, publishing Chili Pepper magazine with his practiced friend Karl Singer. Gregory got on.

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ut his pulpit voice — that Voice — roughshod all but silent.

"From the time I left First Dallas in '92, until '97, I spoke very piddling," he reports. "Nobody knew what to make of it. They didn't abandon me, but they didn't know what to practise with me."

Actually, one person however had an idea. While Gregory was pastor at Commencement Baptist in glitzy downtown Dallas, he met the late E.K. Bailey, legendary pastor of Concord Missionary Baptist Church in gritty due south Dallas. They collaborated to prevent pond pools from closing in the African-American neighborhoods surrounding Bailey's church. And in Bailey, Gregory found a true friend.

"When I left the church and moved into a tiny flat in Fort Worth, the ane person who kept calling me was E.K.," Gregory recalls, smile at the poignancy of Bailey'southward persistence. "'Gregory, you should preach,' he'd say. Information technology was crazy."

Or maybe inspired. In 1997, Bailey invited Gregory to speak at the Due east.Thou. Bailey International Preaching Conference. "I didn't know what it was," Gregory recalls. "I thought it was a seminar for preachers."

Instead, he walked into a ballroom at the Fairmont Hotel in downtown Dallas to an audition of 900 ministers, primarily African-American pastors.

"I spoke on 2 Corinthians 4:6 — 'We accept this treasure in earthen vessels.' Information technology was a life-defining moment." The Apostle Paul'southward treatise on brokenness and hope tracked Gregory's sojourn, and his sermon took a biblical-notwithstanding-confessional tone.

What happened next mirrored Gregory's ascension as a bright-lite young preacher in the SBC. "The brothers and sisters started asking me to come preach," he says. "I was clueless this would happen. I started preaching at churches all over the country."

That happened because African-American churches resonated with the broken-yet-redeemed Gregory, explains Ralph West, pastor of The Church Without Walls in Houston.

"One of the African-American church building'southward strong points is its ability to give people second chances. Very few pastors who stand up upward and preach in any African-American church would disagree with that," says West, who has known Gregory since Westward entered Southwestern Seminary while Gregory led Gambrell Street.

"The blackness church identifies with broken people," he adds. "Information technology is a church of redemption, a place of forgiveness. It gives the marginalized a place to find their opportunity."

Given that opportunity, Gregory consistently delivers, West says. "Black preaching is not done just past black people," he notes. "Joel has an uncanny ability to chronicle to people through other people's stories and by revealing just enough of his ain story to say: 'I place with you. I sit in the ashes with you.'"

African-American churches love Gregory considering they still embrace dandy preaching, Westward reports. "The preaching moment — information technology's non but prophetic; it'southward priestly," he says. "Joel tin be prophetic, very challenging. Only he can be priestly, very confident all the same compassionate."

West treasured Gregory's preaching so much, he invited Gregory to be his summer preaching assistant and so he could take an extended break. That close relationship has spanned about a decade, and their relationship has blossomed.

Their relationship besides has provided another reason West admires his friend. "Joel is an incredible pastor," he says. "We talk about every day, and … he really is a pastor. He has hundreds of stories where he talks about how he prayed with people, won people to Jesus Christ, visited people in the infirmary. His pastoral pity often is overshadowed past his preaching, [but] he has a shepherd's heart."

Seasoned and softened by his experience in Dallas and the aftermath, Gregory's sermons today differ from how Gregory preached when his star was rising. Of his rapid autumn and subsequent struggle, he says: "Information technology humanized me. Information technology humanized my arroyo to the [biblical] text. It humanized my preaching. It imbued me with more of a sense of pity, understanding and empathy with what people face. I had experienced challenge and grace. … Nothing always helped me more."

Dilday and Westward both agree.

"It'due south an amazing picture of redemption," Dilday observes.

"He himself is a wounded healer," West adds. "He tin can say, 'I have wept your tears and drank the bitter dregs of your sorrow.' That makes him unique. Without that, he's just a well-polished preacher. Merely this is soul talk. … You know he knows where you've been."

Grace redeemed Gregory. A few years ago, he preached a sermon titled "How Not to Become Shook upward When Your World Shakes Down" to an arena full of African-American Christians at the Hampton University Ministers' Conference in Virginia.

"I went from being on international television to disappearing. I went from living in a mansion to a tiny apartment. I went from being everywhere to being nowhere," he told the crowd. "I tin stand today and tell you lot that when your life is at the corner of Stone Boulevard and Difficult Place Avenue, that's where God lets yous find him."

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or several years, Gregory juggled publishing during the week and flying all over the nation to preach on the weekends. "Everything I was doing was unanticipated," he says. Because he wrote a volume, he landed in a busy and productive publishing business. And because he agreed to speak at a preaching seminar, hundreds of pulpits opened up to him, once more.

Simply Gregory still hadn't exhausted all his surprises. Virtually a dozen years ago, Paul Powell, dean of Baylor University'south George W. Truett Theological Seminary, called to ask Gregory if he would preach at the seminary's pastors' conference. "It stunned me. This wasn't on my radar," he remembers. He preached a confessional sermon titled "Blow the Trumpet," about taking up ministry once more. Pastors — most of them Anglo this fourth dimension — packed the seminary'due south chapel to hear him preach. And they did it over again the next yr.

Subsequently, Powell and the late Frank Pollard, then a Truett preaching professor about to retire, asked Gregory to consider teaching preaching at the seminary.

"In that location was a long list of unlikelihoods in that," Gregory muses. He had "wrangled" with Baylor leadership when he was BGCT president. The academy changed its charter to strengthen its hand in electing its board and to diminish the convention's influence over its largest school. Gregory joined others in opposing that action.

But afterwards a couple of years, Gregory received a one-year teaching contract. He engaged in "wonderfully frank" talks with the seminary faculty about his theology and his personal life. He later received tenure. Now, students and faculty revere him. In the Truett Seminary community, he has experienced "a wonderful relationship that is very much like family to me."

And on that campus, the Elizabethan orator has become a mentor and guide to 21st-century aspiring preachers. His classes make full. Twentysomething students adore their 66-yr-quondam prof.

"He's a respected figure. …  He's well-liked past the students because he is such an effective communicator himself," notes Chris McLain, a May 2014 Truett graduate and Gregory'southward educational activity banana the past ii academic years. "He's memorable. I can still recollect bits and pieces of sermons I heard years ago."

Gregory epitomizes the "large thought" preaching manner, describes McLain, associate pastor of Hilltop Christian Fellowship, a congregation affiliated with the Baptist Full general Convention of Texas near Crawford, non far from Waco. And in the seminary's bones preaching class, Gregory drills that way — the "blocking and tackling" of preaching.

"Those are the building blocks—develop three points, apply deductive reasoning, come up with a big idea, provide solid illustrations. Everyone can utilise it," McLain adds. "Even if that's non the students' fashion, and they preach narrative or inductive sermons, they can appreciate what he does and what he teaches. And he can teach their style, besides."

Gregory teaches outside the classroom, also, says David McDaniel, who served every bit the prof'southward teaching banana before he graduated from Truett iv years ago and calls Gregory "one of the top five mentors in my life."

"One of the things I learned from him was listening to each person's story," explains McDaniel, pastor to young adults at Holmeswood Baptist Church in Kansas City, Mo. "Sometimes life happens, and grace needs to be extended. And he was the start one to extend grace."

Aurelia Davila Pratt experienced that grace direct. She took Truett Seminary'due south basic preaching class just because information technology was required. And she chose Gregory'due south form "because he's an amazing preacher, and … I wanted to heed to him."

Course requirements included preaching a sermon, and Pratt expected that to be a i-and-done experience. "I told my family to come hear me, considering I probably never would preach again," she says. Based on that sermon, Gregory nominated her for the seminary's Robinson Outstanding Student Preacher Award, which she won.

"This is impossible. I only preached that one fourth dimension, and that was it," she remembers thinking. Award winners preach in Truett chapel. From that experience, Pratt received other invitations to preach. And from those experiences, she helped plant Grace Baptist Church building in Round Rock, Texas, where she is pastor of spiritual formation and pedagogy pastor — on the preaching rotation in one case a calendar month.

"That was an unexpected calling in my life," Pratt says. "It was Dr. Gregory who opened that door for me … something so monumental. I don't even know if he knows how greatly he impacted my life."

Told students are fond of and respect him, Gregory responds: "I promise that's the instance. Over nine years, I think I've gotten better at seeking to chronicle to the Millennial generation. Across the basic content of homiletics, I think I exercise have the students' respect for longevity."

Longevity? Seminary students look upward to one of the greatest preachers of his generation because he's been around a long fourth dimension? Well, maybe they appreciate the fact he'south still a student, too.

"Dr. Gregory is e'er looking for ways to better," McLain says. "He approaches teaching with the similar tenacity that he approaches preaching. He's continually reading textbooks. Because he cares so much, he'due south respected by the students. …

"Information technology is remarkable that a great preacher will exist known as a teacher of dandy preachers."

"I have a slap-up admiration for our students," Gregory says. "They take to become out in a postmodern, post-Baptist culture. What gave me authority as a pastor — pedagogy, ordination, denominational ties — doesn't requite them authority. … They must speak from the authority of their ain integrity and transparency. That's taught me a lot."

So, prof and students teach each other, he adds. "I teach them the timeless elements of crafting sermons. They have taught me about living and communicating in this generation."

Gregory revels in what he calls "the cracking unity of Truett."

"In 50 years, I've never seen an institutional fellowship like this school," he explains, talking about the "unified bonds" that tie administrators, faculty and students together in shared purpose.

And Truett Seminary reciprocates Gregory's affection, reports David Garland, acting provost at Baylor, dean of the seminary during about of Gregory's tenure and a faculty colleague.

"Our students are serious almost preaching. In him, they see an incredible example," Garland says. "He also engages students particularly well, teaching them to tap their ain gifts. And I tin't become over how much he speaks, but he never misses a class."

Garland besides notes Gregory is a great friend, who has "fit in extremely well" with Truett'south highly collegial faculty.

Another stream of grace blest Gregory about nine years ago, when he became friends with Bill Hunker, and so president of Georgetown College in Kentucky. Crouch had reached out to alumni of Bishop College, a historically African-American school formerly located in Marshall, Texas, and then Dallas, which closed in 1988. Crouch asked Gregory to go a distinguished fellow of Georgetown and to direct the Proclaimers Place seminars, which provide intense preaching education. About 900 students, most of them African-American, accept participated in seventy seminars in 14 states and away, including Oxford University in England.

In addition to pedagogy at Truett Seminary and working with Georgetown Higher, Gregory leads Gregory Ministries, which enables him to fill pulpits beyond the nation and abroad. Last year, he taught or preached 200 times in 20 states and at Oxford and in Rome.

"It's amazing what has happened," Vocalizer, chairman of Gregory Ministries, says of Gregory's work among African-American churches, particularly Proclaimers Place. "There's nothing quite similar information technology. … Nosotros're basically asking for a leading from God for how he wants us to broaden the ministry in the African-American church building. We're strategizing. …

"There'southward a peacefulness nigh him now that had to be rebuilt with God's grace. [Merely] right now, Joel is in a better place than at any time I've known him—25 years. He'south doing great work, … and he tin keep to work as long as he has the health and bulldoze to do information technology."

Gregory at present is married to Joanne Michele Gregory, who was born in Paris, where her begetter was the military attaché in charge of security, and grew up in Seattle. She attended Bible higher in Tacoma, Wash., and graduated from Baylor. The mother of two developed children, she is a registered nurse and a signer for the hearing impaired.

This summer, his African-American sisters and brothers led in celebrating his 50th anniversary in the ministry building. A gala worship service at The Church Without Walls in Houston marked the effect in mid-June.

Later on Gregory's fall from the famous Dallas pulpit, he understandably assumed his ministry had concluded. During the long years of absence in the mid-'90s, he logically reckoned his voice had been silenced.

But the grace Gregory preached fell on his ain ears and sustained him. First, information technology sounded like Due east.K. Bailey's voice, and then Paul Powell'south, then Bill Crouch's, and ultimately a whole chorus of "Amens" and "Hallelujahs" and "Preach its."

"I'thousand very thankful for the grace that has been extended to me in all that has happened to me," he says in a vocalisation far softer than the orator's preaching instrument. "The surprises have been on the up side — and that is how gracious people have been to me."

— This commodity was get-go published in Herald, BNG'southward magazine sent 5 times a year to donors to the Annual Fund. Majority copies are likewise mailed to BNG's Church building Champion congregations.

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Source: https://baptistnews.com/article/the-rise-and-fall-and-rise-again-of-joel-gregory/

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