Word: church
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
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...
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...
Peter J. Gomes, 37, the Memorial Church at Harvard University. A quintessential New England preacher who speaks like a Brahmin, Gomes is a board member of the Pilgrim Society in Plymouth, Mass., his famous home town. He happens to be black. Gomes (rhymes with homes) notes wryly that his parents raised him in "a rather backward environment in which language still had some validity." The Plymouth schools thereafter drilled him in memorizing large chunks of great prose and poetry, a skill he retains...
Elam Davies, 63. Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago. In a time of laid-back preaching, Davies is a successful anachronism: a consummate, self-conscious and often florid dramatist of the pulpit. A transplanted Welshman with volatile eyebrows and a powerful Thespian gift, he is not a large man, but he fills the brooding gothic gloom of the Near North Side church with his resounding voice, as the late Dylan Thomas might if he were reading Yeats, or Richard Burton would if playing Hamlet. Like the poet Thomas, Davies grew up in Swansea, Wales. He claims that Burton patterned his style...