Evangelist Tony Campolo died today at the age of 89.
It’s Friday, but Sunday’s coming.
Tony was one of my favorite preachers and one of my favorite college professors.
He was also a mentor. I volunteered in after-school tutoring programs he ran in Philadelphia. I wrote scripts for his radio commentaries back in the ’90s. And I was his teammate on the alumni squad in Eastern’s intramural basketball league. The man had a smooth two-hand set-shot.
I’m both saddened by Tony Campolo’s death and encouraged by his life and I will need to say more about what he taught me, and taught all of us, at greater length later.
For more than a decade, I had a front-row seat to the world of “progressive evangelicalism” — the Ron (Sider) and Jim (Wallis) and Tony Show. But as I wrote here recently, unlike Ron and Jim, Tony was never really a white evangelical:
Tony Campolo [was] a missionary sent to white evangelicals. He was ordained as an associate pastor at Mount Carmel Baptist Church, a historic Black Baptist church in West Philadelphia. That’s where he was converted and discipled. And that is where he learned his hermeneutics — where he learned how to read and understand the Bible.
Mount Carmel is also where Tony learned to preach. The difference between Black church preaching and white evangelical preaching is “cultural,” but not in the reductive way that’s usually understood. The biggest “cultural” difference in those styles of preaching is hermeneutical — a very different way of reading and approaching and understanding and invoking the Bible. I’ve heard Tony preach more than 100 times and never once did I hear him attempt to quantify the preponderance of the biblical data.
So again, Tony Campolo is an indigenous missionary, a white guy commissioned by Black Christians to go and dwell among white evangelicals, preaching the gospel to us so that we might hear and repent and be saved.
Tony was, among other things, a master story-teller. So here I’ll re-post a bit from one of his favorites: “I Fired Them Deacons.”
Tony got the story from Clarence Jordan, founder of Koinonia Farms and thus, later, of Habitat for Humanity.
In the 1950s, an old “hillbilly preacher” invited Jordan to come and speak at his church in rural South Carolina. Jordan arrived to find, to his surprise, a large, thriving and racially integrated congregation — a remarkable thing in that time and place. (Sadly, it’s actually a remarkable thing in any time or place.) So Clarence asked the man how this came about.
When he first got there as a substitute preacher, the old man said, it was a small, all-white congregation of a few dozen families. So he gave a sermon on the bit from Galatians where Paul writes: “You are all children of God … There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Here I’ll pick up from Tony Campolo’s retelling of Jordan’s story:
“When the service was over, the deacons took me in the back room and they told me they didn’t want to hear that kind of preaching no more.”
Clarence asked, “What did you do then?”
The old preacher answered, “I fired them deacons!”
“How come they didn’t fire you?” asked Clarence.
“Well, they never hired me,” the old preacher responded. … “Once I found out what bothered them people, I preached the same message every Sunday. It didn’t take much time before I had that church preached down to four.”
Tony and Jordan told that story as an illustration, generally, of the principle that the preaching congregations need to hear is often the very preaching that those congregations don’t want to hear. And they both told it, more specifically, to point out that what most white congregations don’t want but very much need to hear is preaching that condemns white supremacy. They both held up the success of this “hillbilly preacher” as an example of the kind of church growth and fruit-bearing ministry that can come about only if churches are willing to tackle “what bothered them” — i.e., the sin of white supremacy — head on.
That’s all very biblical stuff. Very Isaiah 58 — loose the bonds of injustice, break every chain and set free the oppressed and “Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly … and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail. Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in.”
I like to think that’s all true — that good moral advice will also be good practical advice for church leaders seeking to have growing, thriving congregations. Alas, I’m not entirely hopeful that it always works out so neatly. Sometimes, as in the case of this hillbilly preacher’s success, doing the right thing will lead to greater success. Other times, I’m afraid, virtue will need to be its own reward because it will be its only reward.
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