Gardner C. Taylor

Gardner Calvin Taylor (June 18, 1918 – April 5, 2015) was an American Baptist preacher. He became known as "the dean of American preaching".

Ministry

As a student, Taylor became the pastor of Bethany Baptist Church in Elyria, Ohio, a role he held from 1938 to 1941. He then became pastor of the Beulah Baptist Church in New Orleans until 1943, and of his father's former congregation, Mount Zion Baptist Church, in Baton Rouge, until 1947. He then became head of the Concord Baptist Church of Christ, the second largest Baptist congregation in the United States with 8,000 members, located in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a neighborhood in Brooklyn. Under his leadership, the congregation grew to as large as 10,000.

Taylor was pastor of Concord for 42 years before retiring in 1990. More than 2,000 of his sermons are archived, and recordings of many of them are available in collections such as The Words of Gardner Taylor: 50 Years of Timeless Treasures and at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta.