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Read is not merely elegant and literary; his words carry authority. So does his silver-haired, kinetic presence as he hunches forward in the pulpit, chopping the air with one hand to emphasize a point or flinging phrases imperiously out over the congregation. What he manages best of all is to be civilized and witty yet dedicated to a faith that many worldly and successful men find hard to maintain. He comes at problems mind first, deals with them in terms that sophisticated people understand, always giving the devil his due, never glossing over the chaos and confusion. But through his thought runs a strain of deep feeling and faith capable of convincing others. One of Read's finest sermons, called "When I Stopped Explaining Human Suffering," notes that he knows by heart, but has stopped offering, all the standard religious ways of justifying God's apparently harmful ways to man, of answering the seminarian's eternal question, "Why did this happen if God is love?" Read's passionate conclusion: "I believe the Christian Gospel not because it offers the best explanation of human suffering, but because it gives us the strength we need to win through." All of which illustrates Read's own suggestion that a sermon must be commanding rather than chatty, and that however urbane, it should finally "leave the listener in the presence of God."
Edward (E.V.) Hill, 46, Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church in central Los Angeles. E.V. Hill does not have to worry about competing for attention with television—or anything else. There is hardly a gifted teacher, TV actor or stand-up comic in America who can surpass the show that Hill puts on every Sunday before 1,400 enthralled parishioners in the black ghetto of Los Angeles. Hill is a man of a thousand voices, and all of them can range from a whisper to a raspy roar. It is the folly of mankind, especially as practiced by the folks in his congregation, that Hill dramatizes with a gift for caricature reminiscent of Geoffrey Chaucer limning the qualities of his sinful pilgrims. In devastating yet genial parody, Hill can do a drunken black and a policeman, a young couple falling in (and out of) love, wives bearing grudges against husbands, husbands tired of wives. From time to time he'll call out, "Are ya'll listenin' to me?" or "Help me now!" or "Help me, Holy Ghost!" The crowd joins in until the church hums with sound.
But just when it seems that this is pure show biz, Hill will lay his theme on the people: the need for agape, or pure, unselfish love. "I can't be bothered with my old mother," he quotes a parishioner. "I can't be bothered gettin' married. I can't be bothered with my husband." Each "bothered," thunderously drawn out, reverberates with pride and selfish isolation — and the boredom that he sees as a curse of the modern world. "Sin won't stop developing," he notes. Boredom and selfishness are merely the devil's latest tricks. "Life lived at its best is full of daily forgivin' and forgettin'," Hill concludes. "It's no trick to love the lovely. It takes a child of God to love the unlovely."