Lifeway Research surveyed 1,002 Protestant preachers and asked them to “name the top three living Christian preachers that most influence you.” The number one name—Billy Graham—is not entirely unexpected. But the second name on the list is something of a surprise: Chuck Swindoll.
Swindoll is an author, host of the radio Bible-teaching ministry Insight for Living, and a pastor of Stonebriar Community Church, in Frisco, Texas. I attended his church when I lived in Dallas and found Swindoll to be a winsome and effective preacher. But I never would have suspected him to have such an influence on other pastors.
Apparantly, Ed Stetzer, director of LifeWay Research, is also surprised:
Considering our sample includes liberal and conservative, all races and ethnicities, mainline and evangelical, we were surprised that the list looked like mainstream Christian radio and publishing and was not more representative,” he said. “Of course, the majority who answer drive the final numbers, but I was expecting more diversity in the responses.
Indeed, the other names rounding out the top-ten are a veritable “Who’s Who” of popular evangelicals.
—Charles Stanley, senior pastor of First Baptist Church, Atlanta, and founder of In Touch Ministries.
—Rick Warren, senior pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., and author of the best-selling book, “The Purpose-Driven Life.”
—John MacArthur, pastor-teacher of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, Calif., and president and featured teacher of the Grace to You ministry.
—Barbara Brown Taylor, religion teacher at Piedmont College in northeast Georgia and author of 12 books including “An Altar in the World.”
—David Jeremiah, founder of Turning Point Radio and Television Ministries and senior pastor of Shadow Mountain Community Church in San Diego County, Calif.
—Max Lucado, minister of writing and preaching at the Oak Hills Church in San Antonio, Texas, and the recipient of three Christian Book of the Year awards.
—John Piper, pastor for preaching at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis and author of more than 30 books, including “Desiring God.”
—Andy Stanley, senior pastor of North Point Community Church, Buckhead Church, and Browns Bridge Community Church – all in the Atlanta area – and founder of North Point Ministries.
With the exception of Taylor (a former Episcopal priest), all of those names listed are conservative evangelical preachers (Piper would be at the top of my list with R.C. Sproul (not listed) as a close second).
What are we to make of the inclusion of a single mainline Protestant on the list? Does it say more about the dominance of evangelical media or is it further evidence that the decline of liberal Protestantism has reached the point where even preachers can’t name more than one influential mainline preacher?
(Via: Frank Lockwood)
Related: Joseph Bottum’s The Death of Protestant America: A Political Theory of the Protestant Mainline (Aug/Sep 2008)
February 3rd, 2010 | 9:20 am
I don’t know, Joe, maybe Harry Emerson Fosdick was the high water mark for mainliners (in his youth my elderly father – a Presbyterian minister, now evangelical – was an admirer of Fosdick). When I chastised him for that, he reminded me that, in those days (the early days of the “wireless”!), preaching was still somewhat of a form of entertainment. Years ago I remember reading that G. Campbell Morgan, predecessor to the incomparable David Martyn Lloyd-Jones at Westminster Church in London, once remarked that he was convinced that an avid laywoman parishioner of his loved him most because of the way he pronounced “Mesopotamia.” BTW, I totally agree with you about Dr. Sproul. I supported his ministry before I crossed the Tiber. He is a fine Christian man as well. And Dr. Lloyd-Jones was incomparable. I’ve never heard his equal.
February 3rd, 2010 | 11:14 am
What strikes me about this list is the connection between the simple availability of one’s media (books, tv, radio) and their place of influence. Are they popular because they built an empire around themselves? Or did they build an empire around themselves because they’re popular? If it’s the latter, then why don’t preachers of exceeding talent (but much smaller empires) like Darrel Johnson or Greg Boyd make the cut?
PS – I’m sure LifeWay would be happy to sell you any of these preachers’ books (except Taylor). Almost makes me wonder if this was some sort of marketing survey….
February 3rd, 2010 | 11:36 am
My guess is that the Protestant mainline, like the Catholics and Orthodox, isn’t organized to produce “star” preachers. The more traditional religious bodies are all, to one degree or another, centered around the small-ish local parish/congregation. A great Catholic priest or methodost minister may well attract enough loyal “followers that his church is filled every Sunday, but he doesn;t exactly have a lot of autonomy to then go out and build an 8000 seat facility to attract more of the same. The Evangelical groups are less structured and thus lend themseloves to “entreprenuerial” growth much more readily.
February 3rd, 2010 | 12:54 pm
How many mainline pastors were included in your survey?
February 3rd, 2010 | 12:58 pm
“Most Influential Preacher Not Named Billy Graham”
“The number one name—Billy Graham—is not entirely unexpected.”
I’m confused. If Billy Graham is the number one name, why is he not the most influential?
February 3rd, 2010 | 1:41 pm
Hi,
Thanks for the article, and here is a slight correction. The Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor is still an Episcopal priest, although her ministry is at Piedmont College rather than in a parish.
The priesthood is a lifelong commitment, rescinded only if one chooses to do so and/or if questions of moral character are raised. BBT’s influence and writing speaks to her character, and she has chosen to exercise ministry in a broader context as ordained individuals in any denomination do. Thanks!
February 3rd, 2010 | 1:46 pm
suek: “Most Influential Preacher Not Named Billy Graham”
Assuming you’re serious, read as answering the question “Who is the Most Influential Preacher Who is Not Named Billy Graham?”
February 3rd, 2010 | 1:48 pm
sd: “Star” preachers? The fact is that mainline churches really have nothing to say to people that isn’t already being said on TV by the likes of Dr. Phil, Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra et al.
February 3rd, 2010 | 3:37 pm
Social comments and analytics for this post…
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February 3rd, 2010 | 5:01 pm
Thanks for this article. I just want to echo the correction above and (since a few hours have passed since it was offered) express my hope that the post will be edited to reflect it, before too many more people read the misstatement that Barbara Brown Taylor is a “former Episcopal priest.” As WP writes, she is an Episcopal priest in good standing, with a ministry at a college.
February 3rd, 2010 | 5:19 pm
Beth As WP writes, she is an Episcopal priest in good standing, with a ministry at a college.
I checked the bio on her website and it makes no mention of her still being a priest. Since she wrote a book about how she left the church over gay-rights issues, I am leery of making a claim about her that she might not make about herself.
It is true that a few years ago she said that although she had left the Episcopal Church she still considered herself a priest (“In the Episcopal Church, one is a priest forever. I would have to renounce my vows to stop being a priest. I have no plans to do that.”). But does that mean she is in good standing with her church?
February 3rd, 2010 | 10:00 pm
I can’t believe that Tim Keller hasn’t been mentioned. Most pastors I know have man-crushes on him and have shaped their exegetical teaching along his model. This test is bogus.
February 4th, 2010 | 12:06 pm
TomG…
Of course. Yes, I was serious.
Heh…the joke’s on me!
February 4th, 2010 | 8:49 pm
I can think of several influential “mainline” pastors: Tillich (Luthern), Spong (ECA), the Niebuhr brothers (UCC), Schuller (RCA), Peale (RCA). Of course these guys were most influential a generation or more ago. So it just isn’t true that mainline protestantism is structurally unable to produce stars. Perhaps there are stars among mainline clergy, but they weren’t included in the survey? Or perhaps the survey was heavily biased by evangelical pastors. Or it could be that the mainline is in such a state of decline that they simply aren’t generating well known pastors. I’m not part of the mainline, so I don’t know who their contemporary stars might be.
I am surprised that neither Tim Keller, Alistair Begg, Chuck Smith nor Bill Hybels were seen as influential as Max Lucado, Andy Stanley, or David Jeremiah.
February 5th, 2010 | 1:59 pm
As an evangelical (though I prefer the term “orthodox’) pastor in a mainline church (PCUSA) I have to wonder about this list. Not because of the lack of mainliners — that’s not surprising as each mainline respondent could probably have named a handful in his (or her) own denomination, but because it fails to define “influence” and because it makes much of what are very small numbers. Graham only received mention (as one of the top three) in 21% of those surveyed and it goes down to 7% for Swindoll. Excluding Graham in other words, less than 70 of nearly 1000 pastor’s surveyed named Swindoll and it went down from there.
What does that tell us? — probably that we pastors are very picky about preachers we admire as “influences”… and that the reasons we admire them are as varied as there are preachers. Folks I admire are all over the map denominationally, and to a lesser degree, theologically.
Here the reality — most of us are too busy to do a lot of listening to other preachers, and on Sunday morning the person we are listening to most of the time is… ourselves… so this survey is, well, not surprising because I think it’s a list of “preachers I could think of off the top of my head whilst being interviewed on the phone”…
February 7th, 2010 | 5:45 pm
This is interesting. It sounds as if this tends to favor the charismatic, popular, celebrity preacher types who are most heavily represented among evangelicals. I would suspect that many mainline, catholic, and orthodox preachers would not see this as a good thing, but would much rather know that the people whom they serve are the most influential preachers by bearing witness as the Body of Christ. In other words, ecclesiology is a major factor in defining the content and form of both “preacher” and “preaching” In the end, we we may well discover that the most influential preachers did their work in anonymity, known only by God.
February 16th, 2010 | 2:42 pm
John MacArthur & Pretrib Rapture
Who knows, maybe John (Reformedispy) MacArthur is right and the greatest Greek scholars (Google “Famous Rapture Watchers”), who uniformly said that Rev. 3:10 means PRESERVATION THROUGH, were wrong. But John has a conflict. On the one hand, since he knows that all Christian theology and organized churches before 1830 believed the church would be on earth during the tribulation, he would like to be seen as one who stands with the great Reformers. On the other hand, if John has a warehouse of unsold pretrib rapture material, and if he wants to have “security” for his retirement years and hopes that the big California quake won’t louse up his plans, he has a decided conflict of interest. Maybe the Lord will have to help strip off the layers of his seared conscience which have grown for years in order to please his parents and his supporters – who knows? One thing is for sure: pretrib is truly a house of cards and is so fragile that if a person removes just one card from the TOP of the pile, the whole thing can collapse. Which is why pretrib teachers don’t dare to even suggest they could be wrong on even one little subpoint! Don’t you feel sorry for the straitjacket they are in? While you’re mulling all this over, Google “Pretrib Rapture Dishonesty” for a rare behind-the-scenes look at the same 180-year-old fantasy.
February 21st, 2010 | 7:36 am
I wonder how they come up with these figures? I realize that American theology has been on the decline for years and especially since the feel good charismatics have taken over the mainline media networks with their garbage of halse claims. {I can say these things because I was a Charismatic from 1992-2008, but from 2004-2008 I began to preach and to teach Reformed Theology}. Anyway I believe that R. C. Sproul would be at the top of the list if more people studied instead of clinging to their denominationalist traditions.
As for the above post on MacArthur I do agree that pretribers will be shocked to find out that they will go through tribulation. I do not speak as an inexperienced individual. I wrote and taught an entire course on Revelation based on today’s dispensational teachings and have come to realize that all that I wrote and taught was garbage. I read into the scriptures what I wanted them to say as do all dispensationalist. Jesus will come once more for his people and when he does he will destroy all that do not obey the gospel. Therefore there will be no one left for their so-called millennial fantasies. As 1 John 2:18 so plainly puts it—beloved it is the last time. There will be nothing after this age, but the world to come.
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