Although raised on the farm - my grandfather was an unsuccessful fundamentalist preacher turned farmer - my father and his brother both became professors.
I can't understand people calling themselves religious and being hateful. If a preacher is preaching hate, to fear God that's not religion, that's not helping humanity, that's organizing an army to defeat somebody.
To be a preacher requires two apparently contradictory qualities: confidence and humility.
You might say that Lyndon Johnson is a cross between a Baptist preacher and a cowboy.
My mother's family is Christian: her father was a Baptist lay preacher, and her brother, in a leap of Anglican upward mobility, became a vicar in the Church of Wales. But my mother converted to Islam on marrying my father. She was not obliged to; Muslim men are free to marry ahl al-kitab, or people of the Book - among them, Jews and Christians.
I've known I wanted to do this ever since I was a little kid and I used to get in trouble at church for goofing off all the time: mocking the preacher, imitating people and the things they did. I later learned my mother used to be just as goofy as I was when she was younger. I mean, Eddie Murphy in 'Coming to America?' My hero.
It is a poor sermon that gives no offense; that neither makes the hearer displeased with himself nor with the preacher.
Negroes' problem is that they do not have their egos. That's why our churches end up having a white service, because our preacher is not arrogant enough to take God's word, so he have to go and get some white fellow's agenda and put it in his church.
Preaching is effective as long as the preacher expects something to happen-not because of the sermon, not even because of the preacher, but because of God.
Just as people can watch spellbound a circus artist tumbling through the air in a phosphorized costume, so they can listen to a preacher who uses the Word of God to draw attention to himself. But a sensational preacher stimulates the senses and leaves the spirit untouched. Instead of being the way to God, his 'being different' gets in the way.