Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Give me one hundred preachers who fear nothing but sin and desire nothing but God, and I care not whether they be clergymen or laymen, they alone will shake the gates of Hell and set up the kingdom of Heaven upon Earth.
Young people, some of whom are not born into the faith, are being fired up by preachers using basic Islamic scripture and mobilized to wage jihad by radical imams who represent themselves as legitimate Muslim clergymen.
So, is Hollywood anti-religion? Not in my opinion. But unlike, say, politicians and preachers who talk faith before going off to speak in tongues to their mistresses, Hollywood just doesn't wear its faith on its sleeve.
Many Muslims put their Islamic faith ahead of their national identity and forbid preachers from other religions from coming into their countries to convert their young. Apostasy is treason to Allah. Heresy has no rights.
I went West and took part in the strike of the machinists - the Southern Pacific Railroad, the corporation that swung California by its golden tail, that controlled its legislature, its farmers, its preachers, its workers.
I was raised in Austin, Texas, around trial lawyers. My friend and I - we were 14 - would go and watch her father try cases. I also heard of lot of Baptist preachers in little churches saying crazy things with such conviction.
I love the melodies in the Old Testament, how preachers highlight them when they read from the Scripture. But I was influenced forever by the New Testament. I love the Beatitudes, informing us that the meek shall inherit the earth.
While I was raised around churches and had gotten to know a few preachers fairly well, the thought never entered my head that I would one day stand and deliver. Not only was I not interested, I lived with a major struggle: I stuttered.
When it comes to sermon writing, generally there are two problems. Some preachers love the research stage but hate the writing, and they start writing too late. Others don't like doing research, so they move way too fast to the writing part.
Preachers at black churches are the last people left in the English-speaking world who know the schemes and tropes of classical rhetoric: parallelism, antithesis, epistrophe, synecdoche, metonymy, periphrasis, litotes - the whole bag of tricks.
I am suspicious of writers who go looking for issues to address. Writers are neither preachers nor journalists. Journalists know much more than most writers about what's going on in the world. And if you want to change things, you do journalism.
I purposely don't talk about money, because people are already skeptical about TV preachers. But I do say that I want you to be blessed. To me, prosperity is having health, having great children, having peace, good relationships. It's not about the money.
There is no need to be longwinded as a pastor, but there is a difference between being longwinded and preaching for a long time. Preachers should be conscious of time because God does everything in decency and order; nonetheless, God's word is not on the clock!
Unfortunately, I have been a little disappointed that we have issues out there like traditional marriage, abortion, school education, and we have so much silence from the black community, from black preachers, because they understand first hand the impact of all that.
Jeremiah Wright is one of the greatest prophetic preachers that black America has produced. What I find striking is that many white brothers and sisters miss the fact that there would be no black church if the white church wasn't political and racist in refusing to worship with us.
I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best - I mean, when I'm at my best - of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in my poetry and prose, or I missed everything.
When I was in meditation, God began to speak to me, and God said, 'Roland, I have enough preachers. I need people where you are in your positions. When you are on radio, when you are on television, you speak into more people in the five minutes than some preachers speak to in an entire year.'
They decided to no longer air my messages on 'The Hour of Power.' They felt they could have greater impact if they had lots of different preachers. 'The Hour of Power' owns the Crystal Cathedral, and the owners, in effect, evicted me... so that they could have other preachers on Sunday mornings.
To fight extremism, we will need to pursue a two-pronged strategy: both 'hard,' through stricter control of our borders and a more robust and technologically advanced security response, and 'soft,' based on better intelligence-gathering, working to return our mosques to their spiritual function and barring entry to foreign preachers.