Joel C. Gregory, PhD

Education

PhD, Baylor University
MTh (Oxon) with Merit
MDiv, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary
BA, Baylor University

Research Interests

Applied Homiletics

Courses Taught

Preaching I Proclaiming the Kingdom (DMin seminar)
PhD Seminars in Homiletics

Publication Highlights

• Baptist Preaching: A Global Anthology (Baylor University Press).

About Dr. Gregory

Dr. Joel C. Gregory holds the George W. Truett Endowed Chair of Preaching and Evangelism at Baylor University’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary and is Director of Truett Seminary’s Kyle Lake Center for Effective Preaching. In 2023 the Baylor Line Foundation, founded in 1859, inducted Gregory into the Alumni Hall of Fame. In 2019 his peers at Baylor University, the oldest continuingly operating university in Texas and the world’s largest Baptist University, named him an Outstanding Professor. In 2018 he was named one of the “Twelve Most Effective Preachers in the English Language” by a poll of more than 500 professors of preaching in American seminaries and universities. The same year he was also recognized by the E.K. Bailey International Conference as a “Living Legend.”

Gregory holds the BA Summa cum Laude from Baylor, a MDiv from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he also taught preaching, a MTh with Merit from Oxford University, UK, and a PhD in Religion from Baylor. He served four student pastorates and three pastorates after his student days, including Travis Avenue Baptist Church, the largest Baptist Church in Fort Worth, and the First Baptist Church, Dallas. In addition to being a professor at Baylor’s Truett Seminary, he is also President of Joel Gregory Ministries. Gregory was the preacher on the International Baptist Hour, a syndicated radio broadcast on 500 stations. He served two terms unanimously as president of the Baptist General Convention of Texas.

In 2005 Gregory founded Proclaimers Place® and conducted 117 four-day seminars in 22 states, the U.K., Paris, Rome, Athens, Israel, Germany, and Switzerland.

Under the auspices of Gregory Ministries he has spoken on average in 20 states per year for decades in more than 60 churches and conferences annually. Among other preaching appointments, he brought the concluding message at the Baptist World Congress in in Durban, South Africa, in 2015 as well as speaking at the invitation of President Jimmy Carter at the Baptist New Covenant meeting in Atlanta, 2008. In 2017 he was honored to bring the citywide memorial message in Charleston, SC, on the second anniversary of the death of the Emanuel Nine, along with the governor and mayor. Joel has spoken at dozens of colleges, seminaries, and churches internationally which include Princeton University Chapel and Seminary, Spurgeon’s College, London, Regent’s Park College, Oxford, Kensington Temple, London, the E.K. Bailey International Conference on Expository Preaching, the IC3 Conference in Houston, Preaching Magazine’s National Preaching Conference, the Evangelical Homiletics Society, and dozens of other conferences, conventions, and churches annually.

Gregory is the author of five books, anthologist of Baptist Global Preaching, and a regular contributor to preachingtoday.com. His article “The Solid South: SBC State Paper Reactions to the NBC Fundamentalist Battle of 1920-22,” in American Baptist Quarterly 39:4 Winter 2020: 295-316 reported groundbreaking research in the field. His 2018 article, “Spurgeon’s Resignation from the British Baptist Union: A Microhistory of First Responders,” Baptist History & Heritage Fall 2018 No. 3: 33-50, won the Norman Cox Award for the Best Article of the Year in 2018. He presented a paper in the UK at Regent’s Park College Oxford’s Centre for Baptist Studies March 18, 2023 “John Clifford, Abraham, Spurgeon and Others: What Did God Command in Genesis 22?”

Among other investments, Gregory actively works with Compassion International in an advisory role and has travelled with them recently introducing pastors to their work in Ecuador, Honduras, Guatemala, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, as well as helping forge a relationship between Baylor and Compassion.