A dynamic and gifted orator, John Rowan Claypool, IV was highly sought after as a guest preacher and speaker for institutions and organizations throughout the country. Known for his confessional style of preaching, Claypool delivered his material with heartfelt and relevant personal examples of living the gospel teachings in daily life. In 1979, Claypool was the first Southern Baptist minister to be asked to deliver the prestigious Lyman Beecher Lectures at Yale University. Those lectures were later published as The Preaching Event.
Claypool also made several significant television and radio appearances. Notably, he participated in the 1960s in a weekly radio program called “The Moral Side of the News,” which gained him an even larger audience.
Claypool lived his life preaching and teaching a message of hope in the face of uncertainty and of recognizing the essential gifts we are given as a starting point to living freely and with an open heart.
Sermons
- Love Can Be Dangerous, 1959, First Baptist Church, Decatur, GA. Post-war America in 1959 began to show the emerging divisions of race, religion, and class. Claypool uses the example of Jesus’ suffering and death in Roman-occupied Jerusalem to demonstrate the redemptive power of love available to all. Christians are asked to be brave and love in this all-encompassing way.
- A Crisis of Conscience, 1964, Crescent Hill Baptist Church, Louisville, KY. Claypool examines race relations, poverty, and religious differences across cultures.
- Life is a Gift, 1970, Crescent Hill Baptist Church, Louisville, KY. A sermon delivered only four weeks after Lara Lue’s death in 1970. Later in his career, Claypool referenced this sermon as pivotal in his adopting a confessional style of preaching.
- The Christian Understanding of Death, 1972, Broadway Baptist Church, Forth Worth, TX. Claypool explains his view that death is “Act Three” of life – not a regression into nothingness, but a progression to another stage.
- Neighborliness in Today’s World, 1973, Broadway Baptist Church, Fort Worth, TX. Claypool addresses the need to practice neighborliness for the good of urban society.
- The Challenges of Adolescence, 1977, Northminster Baptist Church, Jackson, MS. Claypool reflects on adolescence.
- God Is an Amateur, 1979, Northminster Baptist Church, Jackson, MS. The sermon depicts God as an amateur in the original sense of the word, not as one who is an inexperienced novice, but one who does something for the love of it. God’s only motivation is love.
- Courage and Death, 1979, Northminster Baptist Church, Jackson, MS. Claypool discusses death as the great unknown of life and how to meet it courageously: with hope, trust and courage rather than with fear and foreboding. Jesus teaches us, “Be not afraid.”
- The Preacher as Witness, 1979, Yale Divinity School. Claypool addressed the theme of what it is to be a preacher in his lecture for the prestigious Lyman Beecher series at Yale Divinity School.
- Confessional Preaching, 1982, Consultation on Preaching, Stone Mountain, GA. Claypool describes the confessional style of preaching, its effectiveness, and the experiences that led him to adopt this method.
- Being Who We Are, 1989, St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Birmingham, AL. Every individual has a unique plan intended by God. Claypool urges his listeners to follow that light rather than the designs of others.
- Alchemy of Grace, 1992, St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Birmingham, AL. Claypool invokes the Samaritan’s act of love in helping others to demonstrate the power of grace: “deliberate intention to take our wounds and allow them to make us more compassionate and more aware, rather than more despairing and more bitter.”
- The Worst and the Best, 2001, First Presbyterian Church, Atlanta, GA. Claypool’s sermon on the first Sunday after the 9-11 attack explores how the worst situations can allow one to transform life in positive ways. God’s grace has the power to turn negative experiences into saving and redemptive ones: “God is never outmatched by evil.”
- Growing Through Grief, 2002, Trinity Episcopal Church, New Orleans, LA. A talk occasioned by the Stephen Ministry, a special outreach to those facing especially hard life challenges. Claypool discusses the loss of his daughter and offers what he has learned about the sensitive interaction with one who is experiencing grief.