A student at Beeson Divinity School once got here to preaching professor Robert Smith Jr. in tears. The young man’s fiancée had returned the ring to him and called off their engagement. Smith cried with him. Then he made the scholar preach his scheduled sermon that day at school.
“I told him ministry is like that,” Smith said. “You can’t cancel a sermon” and say, “I won’t preach today because my heart is broken.”
It’s a lesson Smith has learned well through his own tragedies. He has performed the funerals of 1 wife and two sons, yet he keeps preaching.
Over his many years in ministry, the 74-year-old has trained classroom after classroom of aspiring pastors to proclaim the Word and earned approval for his powerful example. He preaches in the standard African American exhortation style with a wealthy array of theological and cultural references sprinkled in. His sermons all the time center on a biblical text.
Beeson’s founding dean Timothy George said Smith “once desired to grow to be knowledgeable baseball player, and he preaches like an awesome shortstop: agile, athletic … musical, and strategic, poetry in motion.” He recalled seeing him “stride a whole pulpit in an exuberant pulpit moment.”
Smith serves because the Beeson’s Charles T. Carter Baptist Chair of Divinity, and the varsity named its preaching institute for him.
He has spoken at 135 colleges, universities, and seminaries worldwide together with churches from a slew of major US denominations. His book Doctrine That Dances was named the 2009 Preaching Book of the Year by CT’s Preaching Today. Smith received a living legend award in 2017 from the E. K. Bailey Expository Preaching Conference, a prestigious honor amongst African American pastors.
Dean Douglas A. Sweeney called him “probably the most influential preachers and teachers of preaching on the planet,” yet he’s also known for investing in students a lot that “a whole bunch all over the world count him as a spiritual father.”
Upon his retirement the top of this semester, Smith will launch a recent chapter in his ministry journey. Yet he’ll remain a preferred preacher characterised by joy and shaped by tragedy.
From Cincinnati to Louisville
Four many years ago, it seemed unlikely Smith would grow to be a preaching legend. He was pastor of New Mission Baptist Church in Cincinnati, the daddy of three young boys, headed back to highschool for his bachelor’s degree at Cincinnati Bible College.
Smith was one in all the school’s only African Americans, and the registrar once suggested he should “go to one in all your personal schools.” But he persevered.
Then the underside fell out in early 1984. His wife, Gayle, who had lupus, caught a chilly she couldn’t shake. Eventually, she went to the University of Cincinnati Hospital, where a physician said she could be tremendous. Smith left the hospital on a Sunday morning to evangelise before returning with some clothes for Gayle to wear home.
That afternoon her hospital room was empty. A nurse said Gayle had been taken to ICU with seizures. Per week later she died. Smith preached her funeral from Ezekiel 24, where the prophet’s wife died and God told him to proceed preaching.
Image: Courtesy of Beeson Divinity School
The big query was “Can you go on and preach the message that God has given you though your heart is broken?” Smith said.
He could.
Smith graduated from college two months later, continued pastoring in Cincinnati, and earned a master of divinity degree 4 years later from Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Amid his educational journey, he married his second wife, Wanda, who stays by his side 38 years later.
In 1993, he earned a PhD in homiletics from Southern and immediately was given a position as associate professor of preaching by the administration of Albert Mohler, then within the controversial first yr of a presidency focused on turning the seminary back to its conservative roots.
For a yr and a half, Smith was a full-time pastor and a full-time professor, driving the 254-mile round trip from Cincinnati to Louisville a whole bunch of times. “I do know the road from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Louisville,” he said. “I can drive it with my eyes closed.”
In 1997, Smith ended his 20-year pastorate at New Mission Baptist, feeling released to go away once the congregation’s mortgage was paid off. Now focused fully on teaching, he began to pile up awards, honors, and speaking engagements. He led Southern’s preaching department, wrote curriculum for African American doctor of ministry students, and was heading in the right direction to receive tenure.
Smith even planned to be buried at Louisville’s Cave Hill Cemetery, where Southern Seminary legends James P. Boyce, John Broadus, and A. T. Robertson have their graves (together with the graves of KFC founder Colonel Harland Sanders and boxing legend Muhammad Ali).
‘My students became my parishioners’
But God wouldn’t let Smith coast through the remaining of his academic profession. In 1997, he received a call from Beeson, the divinity school of Samford University in Birmingham. Established in 1988, Beeson was lower than a decade old, and its success was not assured. When Wanda advised him to present Beeson a résumé in case God was as much as something, he replied, “I don’t want God to be as much as anything.”
Nonetheless, Smith said, he was. Smith accepted the decision and has been teaching there 27 years—commuting between Birmingham and Cincinnati the entire time. Smith’s chief legacy at Beeson has been caring for college kids. He meets individually with each of his students each semester. Often he marries them. Sometimes he buries them.
“I asked the Lord to let me pastor again,” he said. But “the Lord said no,” and “my students became my parishioners.”
Beeson’s interdenominational atmosphere matches well with Smith’s theological affinities. The school’s professors and students are Baptist, Methodist, Anglican, and Presbyterian, together with a sprinkling of other denominations. Smith says he won’t compromise on doctrinal essentials, but he’s at home in various theological camps.
He has friends with different views of female pastors, baptism, church polity, and social ministry (though “I don’t get into the woke stuff,” he says).
“People hold things which might be different from me which might be nonessential, and it’s okay,” Smith said. “I baptize people through the mode of immersion. Presbyterians don’t. We’re not going to separate, when it comes to fellowship, over that. It’s not essential. Whether you baptize within the Pacific Ocean or pour some water over their head,” in “all things there have to be charity.”
Uncharted waters
Tragedy continued to follow Smith through his journey at Beeson. His son Tony was murdered in 2010 during a failed robbery on the restaurant where he worked. Tony’s death helped encourage Smith’s 2014 book The Oasis of God: From Mourning to Morning, Biblical Insights from Psalms 42 and 43. Last yr, his son Bobby succumbed to cancer after a 15-year battle. Smith preached each funerals.
George said Smith’s preaching has been shaped by tragedy.
“Robert has lived within the depths,” George said, “and he preaches out of the depths.”
Enduring tragedy isn’t a badge of private honor, in response to Smith. He sees it as a badge of honor for Christ alone.
“It wasn’t a matter of attempting to be heroic and trying to indicate people how strong I used to be,” he said. “I wasn’t strong, and so they knew that. But they got a probability to see God reveal his power through a weak vessel.”
Smith’s spiritual endurance through tragedy is due, not less than partly, to what George calls his “inscripturated soul.” Smith is thought to cite lengthy Bible passages from memory during sermons. Long automotive rides together have given George a front-row seat to Smith’s knowledge of the Bible.
“Sometimes we might be traveling along within the automotive, and he’ll just start singing Scripture,” George said. “While we travel possibly 40–50 miles, he’ll just be singing Scripture over and yet again. I feel it’s within the deepest level of his soul.”
At Beeson, Smith brings a fishbowl to preaching class, stuffed with papers listing difficult Bible passages. Students each draw a passage, then preach on the text they draw.
In retirement, Smith plans to do something similar: accept whatever recent challenges he draws and keep preaching the Bible.
“I’m sailing uncharted waters,” he said. “It’s really exciting to see what God is doing. I’m more excited and more passionate than I actually have ever been before in ministry.”
David Roach is a contract reporter for CT and pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church in Saraland, Alabama.
