“After Gregory’s fall from the famous Dallas pulpit, he understandably assumed his ministry had ended. 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 own ears and sustained him. First, it sounded like E.K. Bailey’s voice, and then Paul Powell’s, and then Bill Crouch’s, and ultimately a whole chorus of “Amens” and “Hallelujahs” and “Preach its.”

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

You bet the film on casting character actor Paul Giamatti, who is 95 percent perfect to play Gregory. Giamatti mirrors Gregory’s persona: Everyman, not a leading man. A bit stooped, a tad weary. You don’t want to see him shirtless. And he’s the only actor with range for the part. The slightest gesture — a chuckle, a pause, a shrug — may convey the themes of Gregory’s life: Promise. Grandeur. Loss. Redemption.

But Giamatti’s only 95 percent perfect. So, casting against conventional wisdom, you sign James Earl Jones to overdub Giamatti’s voice. You don’t even think twice. Besides Gregory, Jones is the only person on the planet whose voice echoes what practically everybody who’s heard Gregory preach insists he surely sounds like: God Almighty.

Since you can’t trust anybody else with the screenplay, you write it yourself. To prepare, you 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’s most at home: behind a pulpit.

Then you write a life in three acts:

Act 1 — Normalcy. The pace zips. The protagonist, a boy of modest means, grows up in Fort Worth, Texas. Like millions of Baptist children coming of age in the mid-20th century, his life perches upon three sturdy pillars — home, school and a full-service neighborhood church. Despite the lure of academia, church trumps school, and the boy sets out to become a preacher. He trains at the world’s largest Baptist institutions, studying at Baylor University, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and Baylor again. Along the way, he learns the ministerial ropes in small churches.

Act 2 — Glory and Cataclysm. Gregory accepts the pastorate of the “seminary church” in Fort Worth. Promoted by the school’s connected-and-charismatic president, millions discover The Voice, an inimitably grand oratorical presence. The still-young pastor preaches in magnificent venues. In just 13 years, he assumes Baptistdom’s most prominent pulpit. Only two years later, he resigns abruptly, later endures divorce and supports himself selling “pre-need funeral plans” door-to-door.

Act 3 — Redemption. Of all the saints in all creation, a prominent African-American pastor becomes Gregory’s best friend. He keeps insisting that Gregory can’t quit. He places Gregory in front of 900 black Baptist pastors. Before you can say, “Resurrection,” Gregory ascends pulpit after pulpit. He’s the most popular white preacher in African-American congregations nationwide. Other Baptists eventually catch the spirit, and by the end of the movie, Gregory returns to Baylor. Oxymoronically, the last great exemplar of 19th-century pulpit oratory invests his final years teaching 21st-century ministers to preach.

Science, not sermons, captivated young Joel Gregory, growing up on the bustling west side of Fort Worth in the decades after World War II. He attended Arlington Heights High School, known for its stately campus and strong 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.

Then, two events in 1964 changed his life.

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

“I was 16, and Bill was still a pro ball player. I felt a sense of conviction then,” Gregory remembers. “A few months later, in June of ’64, during the evening service of a youth Vacation Bible School — to this day, it was the most vivid spiritual conviction. I told the youth 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 culture,” and Connell Memorial Baptist Church in their neighborhood naturally extended both family and culture. Even before that evening of commitment, Pastor Ira Bentley and key laypeople helped him begin to hear the “call to special Christian service,” as 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 point blank: “Why would you throw your life away?” But Joel threw his life into the arms 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 also included lessons learned in a string of small Baptist churches. Along the way, he developed a grand, 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 deal of my style, at the base of it, goes back to an encounter my junior 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 anything just like it.”

“Up to then, I’d been preaching youth-revival topical sermons,” he reports, chuckling at the memory. Dumbfounded by Lowrie’s ability to mine truth from Scripture and apply it to the practical needs of his listeners, Gregory made an appointment. 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 conversation with D.L. pushed me to apply it.”

So much for sermon preparation. What about delivery?

Gregory laughs when asked how he became “the last great Elizabethan orator.” But he acknowledges accuracy in the observation. His sermons really 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.

But so do 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 power, as well as tapping into everyday life for practical application, honed Gregory’s sermons.

Indirectly, so did the evangelical preaching prince Chuck Swindoll. “In the late ’70s, people would leave church and ask, ‘Say, did you hear Swindoll?’” he notes. “My preaching had become heavy and scholastic — point/subpoint. And here was Swindoll, preaching from contemporary, lived experience.”

Still later, when Gregory proclaimed in larger churches and became the featured preacher on the Baptist Hour radio and TV program, he learned he “had to lighten up some on pure exegetical content,” the heavy-duty biblical mining and refining. Why? “To communicate; to keep people’s attention.”

“I didn’t abandon biblical preaching,” he explains. “But I had to give them lived experience. The listening situation has changed.”

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

But still, exegesis and application and oratory can’t encapsulate the essence of Joel Gregory in the pulpit. For that, you need to hear The Voice.

Like practically everybody who ever listened to Gregory preach, I still remember the first time 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. But prisoners think of chapel as 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 catch up on reading or napping.

And then he spoke.

Few of us had yet heard James Earl Jones. But if you can imagine a preacher with the voice of Darth Vader, you can imagine Gregory opening his mouth. We sat up.

Then 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 think I took one class in public speaking at Baylor. Early on, I had no consciousness of delivery. … In my 20s, people began to remark on my vocal production. By the time I went to Gambrell [Street Baptist Church in Fort Worth] in 1977, I was aware of a gift — I mean a gift — of speaking that tended to engage 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 match the grandeur of the gospel. Still, he tries to remember to scale his voice to the room. “I’ve found it takes a certain-size place to speak like that. … Besides, you don’t want to lean on delivery while neglecting content.”

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

“As someone who sees the preaching task as exposition of Scripture, I feel there is a place to maintain what you call a more oratorical style of preaching,” he says. “I’m keenly aware that [style of preaching] is fading. But the pathos of Scripture — its emotive impact — can lend itself to oratory if that’s natural to you, if it’s genuine.”

Increasing numbers of Baptists resonated with Gregory’s projection of a magnificent gospel. Not yet 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 factory on the planet.

Not long after Gregory arrived at Gambrell Street, Russell Dilday became president of the seminary and joined his church. Pastor and president hit it off.

“That was a great influence — Russell’s friendship,” Gregory recounts. “He and others became promoters, almost, 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 wife, Betty, were seeking a church home.

“We decided maybe our best choice was the church right nearby, in our neighborhood,” Dilday recalls. “We visited one Sunday morning, and I was so impressed by that young man. He didn’t have the characteristics you would expect in a popular preacher. He wasn’t tall. He had glasses. … But that was one of the best biblical sermons I had heard in a long time. People said he has a voice like God’s, only deeper. But he was biblically sound and had good illustrations.”

As veteran church-visitors, the Dildays realized most preachers possess at least one “sugar stick” — a favorite, proven sermon — and they decided to see if they heard young Gregory on a sugar-stick Sunday. So, they went back to Gambrell Street that Sunday night. And the next Wednesday 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 country was my young pastor,” Dilday remembers.

Thanks to Dilday’s influence, Jimmy Draper — then pastor of First Baptist Church in nearby Euless and a Southwestern board member — invited Gregory to preach at the Southern Baptist Convention Pastors’ Conference in 1980 in St. Louis, a 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 really wasn’t ready.”

Gregory preached to a packed house every Sunday at Gambrell Street and often 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.

Once again, Dilday advocated for Gregory.

“He’s the only faculty member in my time — 16 years there — whom I had to promote against the wishes of the faculty,” Dilday reports. “The preaching faculty were a little worried he would travel to the churches a lot and wouldn’t stay home. My answer was we needed a good representative of Southwestern among the churches. They said he’ll be too good; the students will be discouraged they can’t live 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 plan for Gregory to teach one year and review the arrangement if problems developed, which they did not.

“He became very, very faithful as a teacher,” Dilday says. “He was popular with the students and popular on the preaching circuit. And he developed good relationships with the faculty.”

So with his weekends free, pulpits from around the nation did indeed beckon. The next year at the behest of SBC Music Director Bill Reynolds, a faculty colleague at Southwestern, Gregory preached five 15-minute theme interpretations at the SBC annual meeting in Pittsburgh.

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

Still, the peak of the Baptist mountain loomed far above annual meeting theme interpretations.

Gregory kept climbing.

By 1988, fundamentalists and moderates waged an all-out war for control of the SBC. Gregory, then 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 battlefield.

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 find a splendid wall guarding his property. But devastation greeted him when he passed through the gate. He learned the steward used the castle’s stones to build the wall.

Gregory’s metaphor contained just enough ambiguity to please and anger moderates and  fundamentalists alike. “Some on both sides thought 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 part, Gregory contends he preached on behalf of peace within the SBC. “My goal was to build a big middle.”

To that end, his most memorable message constituted a colossal flop. The SBC went right on fighting. In San Antonio, Gregory preached peace, while W.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. Soon, Criswell started talking about retiring from the pulpit of “the world’s largest Baptist church” (even then, a suspect claim). The pastor-search committee from First Baptist, Dallas, came a-courtin’. And the highest pastoral summit in the Baptist universe — that pulpit — loomed in Gregory’s sight.

Read More