(3 of 8)
Today the pendulum is swinging back in favor of preaching. When search committees are scouting about for a minister to hire, the top things they are likely to look for are, as an old adage puts it, 1) Preaching. 2) Preaching. 3) Preaching. Right now there are around 200,000 Protestant preachers in America. Anyone presuming to choose the best would be guilty of the sin of pride, not to mention some shortage of charity and common sense. The following seven stars of the pulpit selected by TIME'S editors and correspondents across the country are at the very least proof that many splendid practitioners of the ancient art of preaching are still at large in the U.S. Only preachers who nurture a congregation week by week, year after year, were considered, thus ruling out famous evangelists like Billy Graham and TV personalities. Those chosen had to convey, along with solid content and skillful delivery, the sense of over whelming conviction that is one of the golden keys to great preaching.
Like poetry, preaching is always a mystery. Each Sunday brings the danger of failure, and with that the question of potential impact. In his intriguing little book on preaching, Telling the Truth, Novelist and sometime Preacher Frederick Buechner describes the magic moment when the minister steps into the pulpit. In the pews sit a college student there against his will, a banker who twice contemplated suicide that week, a contractor on the take, a pregnant girl who feels life stir within her, a teacher hiding his homosexuality. "The preacher pulls the little cord that turns on the lectern light and deals out his note cards like a riverboat gambler. The stakes have never been higher. Two minutes from now he may have lost his listeners completely to their own thoughts, but at this moment he has them in the palm of his hand. The silence in the shabby church is deafening because everybody is listening to it. Everybody is listening including himself. Everybody knows the kind of things he has told them before and not told them, but who knows what this time, out of the silence, he will tell them?"
David H.C. Read, 69, Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church of New York. "The worst sin is dullness," says Read, a transplanted Scotsman and British army chaplain who is never dull. Still, he disapproves of the whole idea of "princes of the pulpit," and he deplores the fact that people go to church to hear a celebrated preacher rather than to worship. But if there is any one prince of the Protestant pulpit these days, it is Read.
A typical Read sermon may begin with a quote from Humpty-Dumpty to Alice and turn on some apt lines from Samuel Johnson or Shakespeare as it wrestles with a timeless (but contemporary) problem using the perspectives of the Bible. "Scholarly content is terribly important," Read says, "but it shouldn't intrude." Read's material is solid enough to make him one of the few preachers whose collected sermons can be read as literature—and at the same time enjoy a respectable sale in book form.