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Franklin Pollard, 45, First Baptist Church of Jackson, Miss. Pollard is very much in the evangelistic mainstream as preacher in a big church in the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's biggest denomination. He was raised in a Texas shack, one of seven children of a poor oilfield worker. "We had three rooms and a path," he likes to say of the primitive conditions in his childhood. But though he has a ready supply of down-home anecdotes, he shuns the kind of cornpone and bombast sometimes associated with evangelical pulpits. Pollard commands attention instead with infectious charm and an ingratiating, please-understand urgency, communicated by eyes and face as he leans out over the congregation. Since he finds that laymen always make the same two complaints about sermons (too long, too short on humor), he tries to oblige, honing his Sunday morning sermons to 22 minutes, often putting them on tape cassettes for memorization.
Though his church stands across the street from Mississippi's state capitol and his congregation includes the current Governor and three of his predecessors, Pollard's pulpit does not emphasize politics. He does speak out occasionally about racial equality and has always insisted on an open membership policy, though First Baptist says it has no record of how many members are black. Pollard sees the U.S. in trouble, and one of his persistent themes is how to save American democracy in a hostile world. He is likely to point out that "the best in vestment of all is the missionary investment," after citing figures snowing that the average "overseas conversion to Christianity costs just $654 per convert — as opposed to the cost of $200,000 to kill a single enemy soldier in World War II or $500,000 per kill in Viet Nam. It takes character to preserve freedom, he insists. The Ten Commandments, in fact, are ten principles from God about how to keep freedom.
Pollard delivers three sermons a week, teaches a Bible class for some 500 prominent laymen every Tuesday, and prepares both a TV and a radio program weekly. "But if ser mons are not drawn directly from the Bible," he says firmly, they're "just speechmaking." With all the competing forms of commercial art and entertainment today, Pollard figures, the continuing demand for preaching "can't be explained in any other terms than that God is using it."
Gardner C. Taylor, 60, Concord Baptist Church of Christ, Brooklyn, N.Y. "He has a voice that sounds like God," an admiring fellow preacher says of Taylor. To anyone who has listened to a Taylor sermon, the judgment does not seem far off target. Taylor's voice is deep and apparently inexhaustible. Working variations on a biblical theme ("Create in me a clean heart, O God"), he artfully circles around his subject, now lulling the listeners into serenity, now rising to majestic sincerity in stately cadences that overwhelm as much with their sound as with their meaning. Taylor says that for him a sermon is a journey. "I like to start with a cool introduction to suggest what I'm going to say, without giving away the secret." But when the secret is out and the climax is reached, the key biblical phrase that Taylor wants no one to forget is engraved in the congregation's memory.