Will Campbell, Preacher Man
Essays in the Spirit of a Divine Provocateur
Kyle Childress & Rodney Wallace Kennedy
foreword by
Stanley Hauerwas
WILL CAMPBELL, PREACHER MAN
Essays in the Spirit of a Divine Provocateur
Copyright © 2016 Wipf and Stock Publishers. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Cascade Books
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
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Paperback ISBN 978-1-4982-0273-2
Hardback ISBN 978-1-4982-0275-6
Ebook ISBN 978-1-4982-0274-9
Cataloging-in-Publication data:
Names: Childress, Kyle, and Rodney Wallace Kennedy.
Title: Will Campbell, preacher man : essays in the spirit of a divine provocateur / Kyle Childress and Rodney Wallace Kennedy.
Description: Eugene, OR : Cascade Books, 2016 | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: ISBN 978-1-4982-0273-2 (paperback) | 978-1-4982-0275-6 (hardback) | 978-1-4982-0274-9 (ebook)
Subjects: 1. Campbell, Will D., 1924–2013. 2. Church work. III. Reconciliation. I. Title.
Classification: HV7407 .C535 2016 (print)
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
Introduction
Will D. Campbell, preacher, pastor, storyteller, civil rights activist, provocateur, unofficial chaplain of country music, and thorn in the flesh of institutional Christianity, is a paradoxical figure in Southern religious and literary life. Will always insisted he didn’t want any disciples and was known to chase more than one earnest seminarian away from his farm outside Nashville, Tennessee. We are disciples of Will D. Campbell. Now, we attempt to take up the mantle of Will and carry it as far down the road as possible. Whether Will would have approved or not is up in the air. He never “cottoned” to the idea of disciples.
Will’s symbol was the floppy preacher’s hat of an earlier era and he always said that he was just a preacher. Just a preacher? There’s no such thing as just a preacher. We too are preachers.
Marshall Frady describes Will as one of God’s “divine fools.” We believe that Will was a twentieth-century version of St. Paul’s “fool for Christ.” The irony of “folly” comes across in Will’s character, preaching, and writing. He dares to speak truth to power while celebrating the generosity of spirit, compassion, forgiveness, and courage of simple Christian faith.
As Will’s friend, Walker Percy, put it The Second Coming, “Could it be that the Lord is here, masquerading behind this simple silly holy face?”
To use a different metaphor, from St. Paul’s writings, Will was a “thorn in the flesh” of the institutional church, especially the Southern Baptist Convention. William Sloane Coffin, in a sermon, says, “A thorn is something we are stuck with.” Some of us are called to be thorns in the flesh of the majority. No one chooses such a calling but it is carved out of our experiences and our education. We wake up one morning and know that we have been called to get up on the horse of dissent and ride like the wind. Or as the Rev. Alonzo Hickman in Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth, says to his protégé Hickman: “And the Master said, ‘Hickman, Rise up on the Word and ride . . . . And Bliss, I threw back my head and rode! It was like a riddle or a joke, but if so, it was the Lord’s joke and I was playing it straight. And maybe that’s what a preacher really is, he’s the Lord’s own straight man.’” The message: To all sinners, pure compassion; to all self-righteous, the wrath of critique. We offer this collection of essays and sermons as a memorial to Will Campbell. Will dealt with an array of favorite subjects: racial division, prisons, capital punishment, Congress, the Constitution and flag burning, secular politics, biblical certainty, capital punishment, women clergy, homeless/houseless persons, the First Amendment, submissive wives and Southern Baptist preachers, illegal aliens, the “R” word—redneck, war, boycotting Disney over gays, money, being a true conservative, human rights, prayer in public schools, topless bars, Bill Clinton’s mess, marriage and happiness, Jews and Christians.
These essays are, simply put, two writers “unplugged” from the usual rigor of more academic writing. They are in the words of Will Campbell, whose style we have attempted to imitate, “a medley of little ditties.” They are of various lengths and subject matters—humorous, ironic, combative, inspirational, and perhaps even a bit profound. They reflect at times whatever one of us was mad about in the morning when first reading the accounts of the comments and claims of various kinds of Baptists. As preachers made the news with outlandish claims or crazy actions, the temptation to pray, “O Lord, please let this one be a Methodist or a Presbyterian,” was overwhelming.
Will insisted that he didn’t want any disciples. We, taking the route of a Nicodemus or Joseph of Arimathea, have been secret disciples all these years. And now that Will has entered the new realm of eternity, we are publicly declaring that we are his disciples because he was so clearly a disciple of Jesus. Will, having imitated Jesus, and paying a huge price for doing so, is a saint that now deserves our imitation. Will, we love you! After all, what’s not to love about a preacher who dared to call a certain species of Baptist preachers “those fat-cat false prophets”?
Our prayer is that the essays in Part I exemplify the spirit of Will D. Campbell, saint of almighty God. He is the kind of saint we would want to go to battle beside. After all, saints are often the toughest sort of people in the world. The sermons in Part II are offered as a tribute the Will as a preacher. While Will saw little remaining use for the “high steeple churches” the two of us are pastors of Baptist churches—in Dayton, Ohio and Nacogdoches, Texas. What we do, week after week, is write and deliver sermons. We offer these sermons not as models but as samples of how we struggle to be faithful to the Word and the words that we write. Most of all, it is our hope that this volume will encourage others to have the courage to speak truth to the powers and to dismantle the sacred cows. After all, from the golden calf of Exodus to the goose that lays the golden eggs in America, we have not made much progress. And someone ought always be there to raise the voice of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, in the face of all our golden idols. For us it is our calling, our true vocation and we revel in the ecstasy of the sermon.
Will Campbell: In Memoriam
Kyle Childress
I had never heard of Will Campbell until the day I walked into a bookstore and saw a brand new novel called The Glad River, written by a Baptist preacher whom the dust jacket described as a “steeple dropout” and veteran civil rights activist.
I was a student pastor of a small rural Texas Baptist church. While I didn’t know it yet, it was a good church. But at the time the church and I were in turmoil over the issue of race. At one point I had a shotgun pulled on me with the threat to blow my “nigger-loving head off”; in the year ahead I would have a man come after me in a congregational meeting to “whip the pastor’s ass because I’m tired of his preaching on race.”
After reading the dust jacket I didn’t hesitate; I bought the book. I read The Glad River in three days and then cried for another three. I found a copy of Campbell’s Brother to a Dragonfly and cried some more. Then I sat down and wrote a long letter to him about my struggle with my congregation