By Walter B. Shurden
John R. Claypool, God Is an Amateur (Cincinnati, Ohio: Forward Movement Publications, 1994, 87pp.)
John R. Claypool, Mending the Heart (Boston, MA: Cowley Publications, 1999, 68pp.)
One of the foremost religious radio broadcasts in America began in 1945. A committee called the Southern Religious Radio Conference, consisting of Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians and Southern Baptists, launched “The Protestant Hour.”
Though known as “The Protestant Hour,” the program was actually only 30 minutes in length. At its peak, more than 600 radio stations in America carried the program. In the 1990s, it morphed into the present “Day One” radio broadcast, sponsored by six mainline denominations, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship among them.
True to a central theme of Protestantism, “The Protestant Hour” highlighted the preached Word. A sermon by a great preacher was the central part of the program. The most celebrated Protestant preachers from America and elsewhere appeared on the program to preach their distinctive understandings of the gospel.
In the early '70s, when I lived in beautiful east Tennessee, I was driving one Sunday morning to a preaching engagement in Oak Ridge, TN. On my radio, I happened upon “The Protestant Hour,” and I heard for the first time the golden voice of Dr. Ernest T. Campbell, pastor of the Riverside Church in New York, City. I had been reading and admiring Campbell for years before I heard him that day on “The Protestant Hour.”
Twenty years previously, in the mid-1950s, John Claypool, then a young Baptist preacher, drove along one Sunday morning “moving the dial from station to station” until he, too, finally heard “the sound of a cultivated voice.” “The longer this one spoke, the more impressed I became,” he wrote.
At the conclusion of the broadcast, the program host identified the preacher as the famous Samuel Shoemaker of Pittsburgh. Claypool reflected, “From that day forward, I listened to it regularly wherever I went and over the years heard many of the great pulpit giants of both this country and Great Britain.”
In the spring of 1988, John Claypool received a surprising call, inviting him to be the preacher on “The Protestant Hour” for several of the Sundays that Fall. “It was one of those things,” he said, “that frankly I had never even dreamed of doing, which made the opportunity that much more gracious.”
In 1994, Forward Movement Publications published a little 87-page book by Claypool entitled God Is An Amateur. The book contained the sermons adapted from those Claypool preached on the famous radio program. Of the 12 sermons in the short book, Claypool made the following observation: “They do not represent all the Christian vision by any means, but certain important facts of it that have nurtured and inspired me and hopefully will do the same for you.”
And it is true that these 12 chapters constitute an apt beginning point for initiation into the thought of John Claypool. As Claypool himself said, you will find several of the recurring themes in this small volume that nourished the soul of the gentle preacher.
He simply could not, for example, keep from saying that “Life is Gift.” He said it often. He said it in many ways. He said it from many biblical texts. Out of the 12 sermons he preached on “The Protestant Hour” and contained in God Is An Amateur, I counted eight of them that had a direct connection to this inspired and inspiring refrain that “Life is Gift.”
The title of the book is taken from the lead sermon, “Amateurism, God and Ourselves.” It is vintage Claypool as he returns in this sermon to the first chapter of Genesis, as he had so often, to talk theologically about who God is and who we are.
He toyed with the word “amateur,” pointing out that it originally came from a Latin root, “amore,” that means “to love.” An “amateur,” Claypool insisted, had nothing to do with incompetence or lack of professionalism. Rather, it originally meant someone who did something for the sheer love of doing it. And “this concept of an amateur—one who does what he or she does for the love of it—that is very close to the heart of things as they are interpreted by the Biblical writers.”
An amateur! That’s who God is—one who acts in creation for the sheer love of sharing aliveness and existence. The original meaning of “amateur” in relation to God “helps us to see that everything that exists in our world goes back to a generosity that acted as it did for the sheer joy of it.”
And an amateur! That’s what God wants of each of us, to choose freely, to live creatively, and to experience the delight of generosity.
Claypool was certainly no novice when it came to interpreting how to handle life’s adversities. With a realistic view of human existence, he insisted that life would work us over, rough us up, and knock us down. But, he said, we also have freedom to choose how to respond to life’s hurts. You can hear these refrains in the titles of these sermons: “And Yet,” “Love and Creativity,” “Choose Your Pain,” and a marvelous Thanksgiving sermon on “Gratitude and Ambiguity.” I repeat: God Is an Amateur is a good little book for first wading into “Claypoolology.”
At times, Claypool became a keen and shrewd theologian in the pulpit. He met head-on some of the thorniest issues confronting the human mind. At other times, he was a moral leader, chopping his way through the wilderness of ethical decision-making and guiding his listener on the path where goodness lay. Most of the time, however, Claypool stood behind the pulpit as a pastoral counselor, responding gently and tenderly to issues crushing the human spirit. You will find him as pastoral counselor in every one of his published books, but none more explicitly and thoroughly than in his little book, Mending the Heart.
Simply view the table of contents of Mending the Heart and you will sense the pastoral counselor at work. You will also understand why one could not help but read on.
Chapter One: The Wound of Grievance: When Other People Hurt Us
Chapter Two: The Wound of Guilt: When We Have Hurt Others
Chapter Three: The Wound of Grief: When We Are Hurt by Loss
Do you see now, by looking at these chapter titles, why people flocked to hear Claypool and why so many hundreds subscribed to read his sermons? Is there anyone anywhere in the whole wide world who has not been hurt by someone else? Is there anyone anywhere in the whole wide world who has not hurt someone else? And is there anyone anywhere in the whole wide world who has not been hurt by losing someone or some thing?
John Claypool wrote two critically important autobiographical sentences in the preface to Mending the Heart. “I was very young when I sensed I was being called to devote my life to staying close to God and to human beings, and to make the goal of my life bringing God and human beings closer together. This has been the shape of my calling for over 50 years, and the realities of grievance, guilt and grief have again and again been the focus of my pastoral concerns.
“The shape of my calling for over 50 years,” he said, “was reconciling the human to the Divine in the face of grievance, guilt, and grief.”
He focused upon universal issues of the human heart. One could never accuse him of preaching on subjects unrelated to the human struggle.
When John Claypool became the priest at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Birmingham, AL, he and Dr. Fisher Humphreys, professor of divinity at Beeson Divinity School of Samford University, became close friends. Teaching a doctorate of ministry seminar each year, Dr. Humphreys invited outside speakers to his class, Claypool among them.
Said Humphreys, “By far the most popular days in the seminar were the days when John Claypool spoke, which he did every year. He always did exactly the same thing. Using no notes, he talked about guilt, grief, and grievance (forgiveness).”
Fisher Humphreys went on to say, “I have extensive notes on his lectures, and they are almost exactly the same from one year to the next.”
Humphreys, one of Baptists’ best contemporary theologians, offered an assessment of Claypool’s treatment of the three subjects in Mending the Heart. “I think that what he said on all three subjects is true and important and brilliant and, much as I love some of the other books, this is my favorite.”
Humphreys noted that Mending the Heart came near the end of Claypool’s tenure as an active parish minister. “It shows that so far from his powers having diminished, they seem to have become stronger with the passing of the years.” And then, by way of making a statement with a question, Fisher Humphreys said, “It’s lovely when a great man is also a good man, isn’t it?”
Mending the Heart, like most of Claypool’s books, serves many purposes. I once knew a church with the inspiring slogan of “Helping People Make It Through the Week.” This book could do that for many people wounded by life. But these three chapters also provide challenging meditations for individual or group reflection. And the little book would be a grace gift for anyone who has lived long enough to have a sharp grievance, some destructive guilt, or some heavy grief in life.
— Walter “Buddy” Shurden is a Baptist scholar, preacher, writer, connoisseur of good preaching, and mentor to many. He is an emeritus professor at Mercer University and lives in Macon, GA with his wife, Kay. This essay is the fifth in a 6-part series which he has written for Christian Ethics Today.
