In the fourth episode of our third season, Prince talks with Gary Simpson, the senior minister of Concord Baptist Church of Christ in Brooklyn, New York.
Discussion topics include:
- How preaching differs from other forms of communication
- Finding your authentic voice
- Can preaching be taught?
- And more!
Guest bio
The Rev. Dr. Gary V. Simpson is the Senior Pastor of The Concord Baptist Church of Christ, Brooklyn, New York. The son of the late Rev. Rufus N. Simpson and Mrs. Mary H. Simpson Price, he responded to God’s call on his life while he was still a teenager. He preached his first sermon at the age of 15 at the Southfield Missionary Baptist Church in Columbus, Ohio, and was ordained at the age of 20 by the Eastern Union Missionary Baptist Association.
He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Denison University with a B.A. in Religion and Black Studies; earned his Master of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary in NYC; and his Doctor of Ministry degree from United Theological Seminary.
Pastor Simpson was called as the Senior Pastor of Concord Church in 1990 and has served as the congregation’s Chief Disciple, pouring out his heart in Concord’s community life. He is an accomplished musician and teacher with a heart for pastoring God’s people. In 2002, he was sought by the Lilly Endowment to create a formal Pastoral Residency program at Concord Church, aiding young seminary graduates with their transition into full-time pastoral ministry. Under Pastor Simpson’s leadership, Concord is one of a handful of churches across the country that served as a teaching congregation for young pastors.
He has achieved tenure at Drew Theological Seminary and is currently an Associate Professor of Preaching and Pastoral Formation. He has served as Visiting Professor of Preaching, Worship and the Arts at Union Theological Seminary. He has taught and lectured at New Brunswick Theological Seminary, Harvard Divinity School, Yale Divinity School, Princeton Theological Seminary and Candler School of Theology. He is one of eight featured preachers on the Future of Great Preaching website, a web resource for the Andover Newton Theological School, and his video is being used in theological schools to teach the art of preaching.
The former Chair of the Board of Trustees for the Fund for Theological Education, Board of Trustees for Denison University for 26 years, Pastor Simpson currently serves on the National Grid Foundation, The Association of Theological Schools and The American Baptist Home Mission Societies. He is married to The Rev. Dr. Emma Jordan-Simpson and they are the parents of Candace Yonina, David Michael and Jordan Elizabeth.
Transcript
Prince Rivers:
What would it look like not just to lead, but to thrive? That’s a big question. In the post-pandemic era, church leaders are facing all kinds of new challenges. And doing church faithfully and effectively can sometimes feel more difficult than ever before. My name is Prince Rivers. I’ve got a background in leadership studies, and I’ve had the privilege of serving as a pastor for more than 25 years. One of my passions is supporting the people who lead congregations. On this podcast, some of the most innovative leaders I know sit down to share about how we can carry out our work in a way that is life-giving for us and for the people we serve. I’m so glad you’re listening. Welcome to today’s episode of Leading and Thriving in the Church.
Dr. Gary V. Simpson is our guest today on Leading and Thriving in the Church. Gary Simpson is the leading pastor of the Concord Baptist Church of Christ in Brooklyn, New York. He is an author and associate professor of homiletics at Drew Theological Seminary. He’s taught at Yale Divinity School, New York Theological Seminary, New Brunswick Theological Seminary, and United Theological Seminary. He’s been a lecturer at Harvard Divinity School, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Candler School of Theology. He currently serves as the chair of the Ordination Council of American Baptist Churches of Metropolitan New York, as a board member of the National Grid Foundation, and as a life member of the Denison University Board of Trustees. Gary, I’m grateful to have you on Leading and Thriving in the Church. Thank you for being here today.
Gary Simpson:
Thank you, sir, for the invitation. I look forward to our conversation.
Prince Rivers:
Well, you have been at Concord Baptist Church of Christ for how many years now?
Gary Simpson:
It’ll be 34 years next month.
Prince Rivers:
34 years next month. And I know you did ministry in at least a couple of other places before that, but where I want to start now as we talk today about the preaching life: we know that that life originates with a call from God. So I know some of us have call stories that are quite extensive and maybe we can’t tell the whole story, but what would you want us to know about your entrance into ministry and accepting this path as discipleship in your life?
Gary Simpson:
Well, I think I would want people to know that I am still being called. One event, it began, I became aware of it or conscious about it as a teenager. I’m one of those what they used to call “boy preachers,” started preaching very early at 15. I have answered several calls, in preaching actually, as I have matured and as I have had life experiences. I still have some of my first sermons. I keep them and every once in a while I look at them and read them and look up and say, “God, I’m sorry.”
Prince Rivers:
Yeah, sure.
Gary Simpson:
The early ones, I had that experience sometimes even now of just missing the mark. But I think for me, it has been a series of continuing — I use Eugene Peterson’s idea in some way, “a long obedience in the same direction” as he calls the praying life. I might struggle with the word “obedience” in some ways, but I do think that that captures it for me.
Prince Rivers:
Yeah, that’s a great frame — that you have been called and you continue to be called in many different ways. That’s a helpful reflection for us. So we’re going to talk a little bit, hopefully a lot, about preaching today, and there are a lot of different forms of communication. When you, maybe, stand before a seminary classroom or you think about what your task is Sunday to Sunday, what is preaching? I mean, how is it different from other forms of communication? What are we doing on Sunday morning?
Gary Simpson:
That is the best question ever. I don’t know if I have an answer to it.
Prince Rivers:
In your view. In your view.
Gary Simpson:
Yeah, the extent that I think that preaching is a very multi-layered complex idea…it is to borrow the words of my predecessor Dr. Taylor, it is a “presumptuous responsibility,” as he would say, that how is it that somebody who has been infected with the same disease gets up every Sunday and announces to people a cure? I mean, I think it is a challenge, and I think we’ll get to talk about this later, but the pandemic has made us just rethink so many things about what it was, what it has been, what is the interplay between authority and authenticity? What is it exactly? These are the kinds of questions that I raise in the preaching class. I think the best thing I have or the sharpest thing I have, because I do think it’s always evolving — it is an attempt to convey the presence of God into, at first, a particular community. Gennifer Brooks says that preaching is a particular word to a particular people at a particular time.
I think that the presumption that we are speaking for God is an overstatement. I think we are in fact middle people who are struggling to, in one ear, hear the voice of God. And then try to articulate that with all the limitations that we have, including our language, to express what we have heard. Multisensory, I think it is not just the sounding of the preaching, it is the combination that — I’ll use this old term from the ancestors — people would speak about somebody who is a “seer.” If you’re seeing something and trying to articulate or describe what one has seen, recognizing that every time we finish, our inability to actually articulate everything that we have seen or heard is always going to be a little amiss. And so I think that’s why I am of the opinion that nobody ever masters it. I have heard great moments created by a sermon perhaps, but I think that no one goes in or comes out thinking, I really got it. We always feel inadequacy or not quite that is in our preaching. That’s a long answer.
Prince Rivers:
No, very helpful.
Gary Simpson:
That’s the nature of how complicated it is. I recognize when I’m teaching, and I have been teaching and preaching for about 26, 27 years, that I am not trying to teach people a formula: “Okay, do this and do that and do that, you have a sermon.” Because you can do all those things and still not have an encounter with God. What I try to do is to teach an orientation, a way of interpreting the word — not the literal sense, but in the biblical sense “the word” — and interpreting the context in which that word is being lifted.
I think you have to, if you press me, I would say at its heart, preaching and listening to a sermon is about hermeneutics. It’s a matter of interpretation, and the ability to interpret well and to convey interpretation and to leave room for the interpretation that comes from the hearer themselves. I think we’ve all had that experience that somebody has come back to us after a sermon and said, “You really blessed me with that.” And you say, “Did I say that?”
Prince Rivers:
Exactly.
Gary Simpson:
No, you didn’t say it, but there’s something happening. I’ll use a biblical metaphor that has been talked about prayer, that the Holy Spirit interprets our groanings. That’s the essence of what’s happening and we’re dependent upon that encounter and that presence to happen as we try to do what we have prepared.
Prince Rivers:
Yeah, and just like you said about the hearer who hears something we’re sure we didn’t say literally. I sometimes think from the preacher’s perspective, you may feel like you’re walking into the pulpit with a pretty half-baked idea and someone really receives it in a way that is deeply significant and spiritually important in their life, but from your mind on that paper or tablet, whatever you use, it just didn’t really seem like much at all. So that’s helpful, the whole piece about hermeneutics, that is extremely helpful. And to the point that you made about how you try to articulate this to your seminary students, I’ve heard an esteemed preaching professor and scholar question whether we can teach preaching, and he’s written books about preaching. What I mean — you hear that, what is your reaction to that, “you can’t teach it?”
Gary Simpson:
There are some aspects to it that cannot be developed. There’s not a skill set in the classroom, so to speak. So I spend my time — I have spent my time early on in teaching talking about creative process and about teaching people, “How do you do what God did in the beginning?” And that is to have something, have life created, either it depends on what your genesis story is, whether you believe it has been made out of nothing or it is chaos that is turned into something. I think that’s the preacher’s task. Every time we are headed towards something, we are trying to bring life out of either nothing or something, an idea. How do you take that idea and go forward? I really think that although there are some techniques that people can learn to do things and some organizational skills to do that, I really think preaching is more akin to art than it is to…there are some sciences about preaching, but I actually think that there is a certain art and if you press me, I would certainly be with Kirk Byron Jones and talk about the jazz of preaching.
I really think that there’s a certain approach to the basic outline or structure of a sermon, and then one has the ability to change the pace, to pace the rhythms differently, to pause, to syncopate, to go counterpunch — all the things that one does in music I think is what really makes for the best of preaching. And I guess the sculptors would have a way to say it, talk about that too, and others would, but I really think it’s an art and that is one of the reasons why it is elusive.
I’m very careful, let me just say this. I’m very careful not to pigeonhole preaching into the quote-unquote “gifts of the Spirit” in the sense of the charismata the New Testament speaks of. I think that the danger of that is that it all depends on God at that point. Either you have been gifted or you have not been gifted, so that you can say is a talent — that there are just some people who have a certain natural inclination toward things. Then you’re saying “it is all about me” and that there is no sense in which there is some gifting that goes on with that.
But an artist, I think a true artist, not somebody who performs, but a true artist understands that talent and gifting together create art, which means you can get better at it. You can be in tune with your instrument, you can grow in it. It is an aspect that I would hope that my own preaching is responding to. I’ll use Jay-Z’s understanding of rhythm and flow. He said the great MCs understand there are always rhythms going on, that light gives us rhythm. There are these sounds and beats that are in the background and it is our job as the quote-unquote “master MC,” to use his language, is to develop one’s own flow as they fall into that rhythm, resist that rhythm, play with that rhythm, stand on it, resist it, all of that, and that is where preaching happens.
Prince Rivers:
So that takes me to this notion, and you mentioned it earlier, of authenticity. And Howard Thurman has this phrase that I love, “listening for the sound of the genuine,” which, in the context, he was talking about the sound of the genuine in your life so that you can go and live it out and be the you that God created you to be. But I also think that preachers, on their journey, have to develop whatever that authentic voice is, whatever that authentic self is. What counsel would you give to someone younger in the ministry about authenticity and about finding their voice?
Gary Simpson:
I think that is right. I think at some point our voice discovers us. The first reality is that until you find your voice, you borrow as many of those as you possibly can.
Prince Rivers:
Guilty.
Gary Simpson:
We imitate or mimic the people who we think might be the folks that we would want to be in our own voice. At some point, like all children, with all parents, great word differentiation happens where a child says to a parent, “Okay, I am of you but I am not you.” And so the ability and experience brings that along.
I had a conversation with Dr. Taylor. I try not to preach from texts I’ve already preached from, so I’m always looking at things. I went back to a text and I read something in that text, I know that I had preached that sermon in my life or text maybe 20, 30 times in my life of preaching. But this time I went to it and I saw something that I never saw in all the times I had been reading that text. And in those moments when I had Dr. Taylor here, whenever I had one of those moments, I always called him to get the voice of wisdom. So I called him up and I said, “Doc, I’ve been preaching this sermon 30 years and I just saw this in the text,” and he laughed and he said, “You’re coming to it now, I guess.” I said, “What do you mean?” This is the heart of it. The sermon is the life.
Meaning preachers: there are certain things in my life and life experience, I don’t want it to mean longevity, I’m not talking about longevity, but there are spaces in which life develops the sermon. And the text that you might have looked at before because you have experienced and encountered life differently, the next time you go to it, it’s very different. And there are some things that I used to bring all of the youthful suspicion of in the text, which I lean into now in my older years. One of my colleagues says that as he gets older, his theology gets more complicated, more complex, but his faith gets more simple.
But you come to that, I almost hate to say that in a culture that does not appreciate aging, that there are just some things — I don’t want to sound like that old fogey guy who says…I had a preacher in my youth who would always say, “Son, you’re not old enough. You don’t know that. You don’t understand that.” I hated it when he said that. And at this point, I started to understand personally that that authenticity has to come as we have these experiences, as we have these failures, as preachers, as we have these disappointments, as we have new understanding and new encounters with the community.
May I back up all the way to the front of this question? Because I wanted to say something at the beginning where you said that preaching is about calling, I think that is true. I think what we often forget that that calling is not just about ourselves and God, it is not. So Paul has a lot of things he says about “if I please man…then I do not please God.” And some of that stark binary dualism stuff gets in the way. I think the other thing that we have to say about calling is that we do not even have a concept of a calling to preach or anything else without a community that shapes us to understand that as a part of our living. In other words, I’d like to ask this question to people who are sitting for ordination exams within the denomination. I ask them, “Well, how did you get into this room?” And they will start on their call story.
And well, it’s about them and God and I would always say, “Yes, but you are really here by the invitation of your church that says that it has seen something in you that says that you might be worth spending some time discerning about a call.” So the whole concept of call rises out of a community. There would be no creatures if there were not communities who had some concept that somebody is to stand before us and do whatever it is we think preaching is doing.
Preaching is not something done to people. A lot of us see it as something that’s done to people. Let me go over here and tell these people that, it is actually something done among them. And I think that nuance has, again, I’m marked, I have to just say, I’m very much marked by my experience in the pandemic, how the mode of preaching changed. I was sitting in the library in my house every Sunday morning doing this in front of a Zoom screen. And what’s very different, I wouldn’t even go over to the church to record because in my mind I need to fit where the people sit. There’s something about being…they’re not coming out to the church, so I’m not coming out to the church. And we had that experience inside our own living rooms and becoming one, those scattered who are yet one. So I always want to say the people are a part of that process.
Prince Rivers:
That’s rich. Yeah, I’m sure the pandemic, and especially with you being in New York, in many ways was extremely challenging and brought out some very different things in your preaching. And you’ve alluded to this already, and that is how your preaching has changed, or at least how life changes preaching. Maybe that’s a better way to articulate it. “The sermon is life.” I also think about what’s going on around us and we happen to be in a very unique point in history, just one more unique point in history. And I think about the role of preaching in the church and the socio-political climate in which we find ourselves. How should preachers be thinking about the craft, the art, the work of preaching in light of all of the stuff that’s going on around them and around their people?
Gary Simpson:
Yeah. I think that is the assignment at this point to figure that out. For example, the question of authority has imploded: “I tell you what God told me to tell you and you just have to do what I say.” I think people are exhausted from that reality. I think preaching is more dialogical. I think it is more about storytelling. It is about being willing to be earnest and honest about how you feel even when you…sometimes I read a text and I say, “Man, there’s no word of God in that.” And then, okay, so then the question is, if it is not just adhering to or following the word, what is it about the absence of God in this text reading that gives us an opportunity to in fact encounter the presence of God? I don’t think that all scripture is intended for me to do exactly what it said. It gives me an opportunity to say, “But is God in that?”
And can I really say with all confidence, particularly those texts that tend to create “others” and then demonize others…the word that Jesus says to the disciples infinitely is really the challenge: that you should love one another is to say that you should have love to the other. Right? This whole idea of, I think, in preaching, my job right now is to say to everybody whosoever will who comes in — or who tunes in, because they don’t all come in — that you are valued and God sees you. You are valued as you are. God sees you. And all of us I think are called to not just the work of preaching to transform people, but preaching to be transformed and modeling that transformation. I would hope that some people in the church would say, you don’t mind if somebody says that was a good sermon, but what would hearten me most is if somebody said, “Man, if that guy with everything I know about him can make that declaration about God, there’s hope for me.”
I think that idea of preaching over people is about done. I mean, most of us are on the floor at some point. In fact, I don’t even sit in the pulpit anymore, and I stopped doing that even before the pandemic, because there’s something about standing up in the pulpit and looking out at the people and the strange psychology between your ego telling you, “Look at all this.” And on the other hand to say, “You are going to destroy this. Look at this, look at what you’re doing to this.” I mean, both of those things happen in a pastor, I think. So I sit on the first pew inside the chair of the Deacon Board so that in order to even get up to preach, he has to make space for me to make the walk up, which says that what’s about to happen is a cooperative word.
Prince Rivers:
That’s right.
Gary Simpson:
And I’m coming up to stand and I always wonder, “Well, what should the chair of the board say? Not today, Reverend.”
Prince Rivers:
“We’ve got somebody else.”
Gary Simpson:
Yeah. But I like that symbol and I picked that up from a friend in the Midwest who, everything is happening, the pulpit is now a stage for many things, and some of that is practical, but he would go up and then preach, and I always think there ought to be some symbol that we get. We are modeling in that moment, I’m modeling, both the cooperation of having worship as a part of the congregation up until that moment and then stepping into space as one of them. So I think that’s part of the challenge.
Prince Rivers:
Yeah. Well, I feel greatly affirmed with this coming from you. I started doing that at the church I serve, like your friend, for practical reasons. We’d just come back out of the pandemic. We’d done a renovation and took the pulpit chairs out off the platform because the stain didn’t match the new wood. And I realized after a few weeks that I was actually able to experience worship in a different way because I wasn’t staring at the people with them staring back at me. Yeah, I’m not surprised. And yeah, that’s great.
So I’ve heard you preach and I know even just as a human being in person, you are Gary wherever you go, and that’s what I love about you and you share transparently with the church as is needed. And I have heard people preach and say things that I think they perceive to be transparent and vulnerable. Is there a way to think about how much transparency and vulnerability is too much, how little is not enough? Because I do think a preaching professor once said there’s a difference between being transparent and bleeding on the people. I don’t know if that’s helpful.
Gary Simpson:
Yeah, I think I know that phrase and I know exactly that it is a good reading — one ought not…all confessions are not necessarily good for that moment. Although I do think that preaching at its heart is confessional. We’re honest, openly honest, but I don’t think we’re being deceptive. But what we are really doing with preaching is saying, “This is my witness.” And I think again, a cultural shift between the mid-twentieth century and now, preaching was about authority at that point. If you look at churches that are built at that time, you go up into the pulpit and then stand in a cone or something.
Prince Rivers:
That’s right.
Gary Simpson:
And I think now that it is the authenticity that makes people look at their life. We used to think that it was a thought: if I just showed you this, then you’ll do it because it’s in there. I don’t think people care that it’s in there, and I don’t mean that as a biblical commentary. In this culture of alternative truth, fact-ivity is very different from the truth. So people want a living, breathing — I’ll use the word “theological” word, incarnation of the truth that we are trying to speak of. And I think that every time we preach, there used to be people who would say that there is no “I” in preaching. But I think again, to show people, for example, that even when I tell a story, even if it is not autobiographical, it is me. Definitely makes me my story, it is my perspective. These are still my words, these are my emphases, and all of that. So let’s stop denying that we are not invested in the stories that we tell: “This is a good story for me and that’s why I’m sharing it with you.”
And I think that opportunity for us to share together, to encounter — I still like Frank Thomas’s definition of the nature and the purpose of preaching, “and they never liked to quit praising God.” He said Black preaching, but I think it was true in all preaching that the nature and purpose of preaching is to get the listener to encounter the grace of God. As Christian people, we would say that is found in Jesus Christ. I think that’s my job every Sunday. How can I get people who I know have not experienced the forgiveness of grace, the healing power of grace, the transforming power for grace? I’m assuming when they walked in there, they’ve been beat up by something in the world. My job is to, number one, make sure that I’m not beating them up. I can’t replicate the powers and the troubles and the difficulties that they have experienced. I am saying to them, in the words of one of the songs of my tradition, sit down and rest a little while.
Prince Rivers:
Yes, yes.
Gary Simpson:
It used to disturb me when people would fall asleep when I was preaching, and then I got a different perspective that maybe for some people this is the only place in their whole life that week that they feel comfortable enough, safe enough to fall asleep or at peace, not fighting where they feel like this is a safe place to be whatever I am. And so I don’t get as upset. My concern is as long as I don’t fall asleep while I’m there.
Prince Rivers:
That’s a different story.
Gary Simpson:
That would be a different story. But no, I guess what you hear me also is, and I appreciate you making a comment about Gary, I, at the end of the day, that’s all I’m doing, man. I’m not standing behind any title or anything like that. I’m just trying to live as best I can with all of the maladies and complications that are part of who I am, I’m just trying to live the best I can, walking in that one direction, hoping that before this is all done, that somebody will say thank you, that I helped them and that’s about it. I’m not trying to get out of here tomorrow.
Prince Rivers:
We don’t want that.
Gary Simpson:
No, I don’t want that, but I am a lot closer to that time than I was the time where somebody else had to feed me and all of that as a child. And you think about that, and again, that’s the perspective of life. And some of the things I think about now, I would not have thought about those when I first got to preaching. You wouldn’t have known to do it.
Quick story in my first church: some people from my father’s church came to hear me preach and they had a tape of a sermon I had done when I was like 16 and 17 years old. And I was just embarrassed, this was my first church. Well, I wasn’t a doctor then, but I’m pastor now and they call me Reverend Simpson and all of that. And they were playing my voice shallow — my theology was, if it was there, it was very sketchy. There was a lot that wasn’t going on. I said, “Please turn that tape off.” The old deacon said to me, he said, “Reverend, leave the tape on. You could only talk as far as you can see.” And I tell myself that almost every Sunday.
I think one of the things we do is that we believe that we have to hit the home run every time we get up to preach. We model also: what does it mean to have a life that doesn’t measure up to our expectation? When we preach and that sermon doesn’t go the way, we show up again. I think if there’s anything we show people, it’s patience and persistence and trust in God and hopefully, and sometimes, penance.
Prince Rivers:
The other sports analogy I sometimes think about is that field goal kicker who, sometimes, they’re going to be the hero of the game and sometimes they’re going to miss by inches and hey, you got to come back next week and kick another field goal.
Gary Simpson:
I’m also struck by Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s idea. Bonhoeffer says the word of God goes forth every time we preach, even in spite of our most feeble efforts.
Prince Rivers:
Yeah.
Gary Simpson:
We were talking about that earlier — “did I say that?” kind of thing happens and I think it takes the pressure off of us too, I think.
Prince Rivers:
Yeah.
Gary Simpson:
I mean, because a good sermon is really not up to me by myself. We have to wrestle preaching from the idea of performance alone and the idea of having a platform. Those two things we have to wrestle because it is more than me having the platform to say what I want to say. The old school folks would call it the “sacred desk.” There’s an honor and a burden to do that, knowing what I know about myself and what I know about the world in which I live. And there are moments in which I’m going to shift to funerals for a moment and say that for me, I think that’s the most important time, when people are open to thinking about their own mortality and those things. I think it’s important that we give a word that is not necessarily — not a word about anything, but about “what are the truths about life?”
We are going to Job to say there’s a point of time for us to live and to die, and what do we do? Not with that line between us, but the reality that between that dash, as some people call it — it’s not really a dash, it’s a big squiggle thing —it stays with us in birth to death. There are peaks and there are great valleys of despair. And if I am honest about my own life, and that I experienced those myself and have a certain steadiness about life, even in that volatility, I’ll say. And I think that’s what, back to what Dr. Taylor said, I mean it’s not really the words that people are going to remember that you and I say; they’re going to talk about the congruence between those words and the life that we tried to live.
The people I know, I know a lot of people who are very good orators. I know people who are very good entertainers. My list of great preachers is very small and probably due to the fact that if it is not about me personally, then whether or not that sermon hits this mark or misses it might be on me, but if a sermon is powerful, that is not of me either.
Prince Rivers:
That’s right.
Gary Simpson:
I have to give room and thanks. I used to preach for what Dr. Taylor would say in a line of greeting when we were at Concord. People say, “That was a great sermon.” He would always say, “I’m glad it meant something to you.” It’s really what I hope — everybody who comes in, that they take meaning out of that sermon for themselves and it helps them to get through at least another day, hopefully another week until they come again and even better through the rest of their life.
Prince Rivers:
Yeah, so one of the questions I was going to ask, as we wrap up the conversation, that I think you just answered was: what do you hope will be the lasting impact of your preaching ministry and legacy? And what I keep hearing from you is the word “gratitude,” and I don’t know if you would say that.
Gary Simpson:
Yeah, I think that is the word. I will say this too. If I only preach the things that people already believe, then I’m not really helping us to grow. I think my preaching has to be a little off center…I want to be known as a teaching pastor, not just in the sermon, but in every aspect of that. I really — I almost dreaded to have this conversation when I saw it was about preaching, because my identity as a pastor is for me wider than just what happens in that one moment. And I think I want people to know me. There’s a sign in the anteroom at Concord, I found it in the magazine. I tore it out, put it up. It says, “You are called to teach, preach, and make disciples.”
And I’m hoping that when it’s over that people will say that I did that and that I hope also that they will say about my sermons that “I could find myself in a Gary Simpson sermon. It wasn’t hard.” “It’s like he was preaching to me” is probably a better way to say it. But then I also recognize that all of us are here. Andy Warhol said, “We got 15 minutes.” And there’ll be new understandings of preaching, but it is fine. But I want people to know that I tried. I want them to know I wasn’t afraid to tap up the difficult questions that the scripture raises. I was not afraid to preach on the context, the difficulty or the context in which we live, and I do that with — I hope — prophetic fire, but with a pastoral heart.
Prince Rivers:
That’s good.
Gary Simpson:
I think I’ll come to that now, hopefully somebody will say that well.
Prince Rivers:
Well, I’ll be one of the first to say it. I’m grateful for your ministry over the years and the example that you continue to set for pastors and preachers. And you mentioned, I just want to say this for the sake of the diverse audience we have, your predecessor Dr. Taylor — and for people listening is Dr. Gardner Calvin Taylor — who did Pastor Concord for I think what, 42 years?
Gary Simpson:
40 years. Yes, sir.
Prince Rivers:
And you have been on this journey for quite some time and we are grateful for the wisdom that you shared with us today. Dr. Gary V. Simpson is the leading pastor of Concord Baptist Church of Christ in Brooklyn, New York, and we’re grateful to have you on Leading and Thriving in the Church today.
Gary Simpson:
Been my honor, Prince, and take care of yourselves.
Prince Rivers:
Thank you for listening to this episode of Leading and Thriving in the Church, a podcast from Alban at Duke Divinity. Our mission is to help you be the leader God has called you to be. Our producer is Emily Lund. And we record each episode in the Bryan Center Studios on the campus of Duke University. Make sure you subscribe to this podcast on your preferred podcast platform so you don’t miss an episode. If you want more resources to help support you in your leadership, check out our website, alban.org, where you can sign up for the Alban Weekly newsletter. I’m your host, Prince Rivers. Until next time, keep leading.
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