Cecil Taylor, former dean of the school of Christian studies at the University of Mobile, has not slowed down much in his 13 years of retirement, continuing to write, preach and teach as the Lord opens doors.
“I’m an inveterate reader,” he told The Alabama Baptist. “When I was a kid, I used to read the cereal box while I was eating breakfast. I’ve read all my life, and I can’t stop. That’s just me. So, during this period of time, I’ve continued to work.”
In March, Taylor visited UM to sign copies of his book “Patterns for a New Testament Church” and hand out copies of a flash drive called “Life Works” containing 65 years of sermons, Bible studies and other documents.
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The book was inspired by the now out-of-print George McDaniel book “The Churches of the New Testament,” and it developed from a series of sermons Taylor preached.
“I started out by showing scenes from the cities where the churches were located — things that would have been there when Paul went there, such as pieces of the wall or an aqueduct or something,” Taylor said.
Some have called “Patterns for a New Testament Church” a series of cameos of churches, he said.
“My objective was not to focus on what New Testament churches believed. Plenty of books have been written about that. I wanted to investigate how they behaved,” Taylor said. “What characterized these churches? What were their marks? What can we say about how they operated?”
Taylor relied heavily on the Book of Acts and letters to the churches to formulate snapshots on governance, worship style, community impact, generosity and other topics.
‘Life Works’
As for the flash drive, Taylor is ready to share it with anyone willing to give him a mailing address and $25 to cover the cost. It contains more than 600 sermons, 12 full sets of class notes from UM Christian studies classes, more than 30 studies on books of the Bible, more than 200 Sunday School lessons published by TAB, PowerPoints for a humanities course and various theological materials.
“Some of the sermons are from the earliest days of my ministry. Many of them are from the latest days of my ministry, and that’s why it’s called my Life Works,” Taylor said.
A couple of friends who live near Taylor in Marshall, Texas, regularly use his material as they teach Sunday School classes, he said, and one of them preaches in a local prison using the flash drive content.
Another project keeping Taylor busy in retirement is editing and writing for Societas Auctoritas, a free, online, monthly periodical founded and managed by his grandson Michael Taylor, a Ph.D. graduate of the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. The elder Taylor writes Bible studies and sermons for the periodical.
One sermon per week from his lifetime of ministry is published by Pioneer Evangelism in English, Swahili, Luganda and Punjab and is used by more than 6,000 pastors and house church leaders, mostly in East Africa and India.
In addition, books on Jude (2022) and Malachi (2023), both containing a verse-by-verse study and sermons, were published in the Pioneer Evangelism series in English, Spanish, Swahili, Kiuganda, Kuriburundi and Kirunda.
For the first four years of retirement, Taylor taught in the religion department at Wiley University, a historically black college in Marshall, and he has served as an interim pastor and supply preacher for several churches in the area.
He preaches on Sunday evenings at an independent living center in Longview and leads a Bible study there on Thursday afternoons.
“I want to die with my boots on. I don’t want to rust out,” Taylor said. “I told the Lord long ago that if He opens doors, I’m going to walk through them unless He says, ‘No.’”
Not done
A time may come when the ministry of prayer is all he can manage, he said, and even then, he will want to be useful.
“I took my pastor to lunch the other day, and he is turning 40 this year. I turn 82 this year, so I’m twice as old as he,” Taylor said. “He said, ‘You’re at the age where you have more to say to us than you ever did.’”
Experience in ministry, Taylor said, is not necessarily knowing what to do.
“It’s knowing what you’re not going to try to do again because it didn’t work the first time. You may not know exactly what to do, but you know some things you’re sure not going to do,” he said.
When he retired in 2013, Taylor’s wife Reeda had earned a nursing degree from UM with a goal of becoming a travel nurse. Taylor planned to offer his help to any local churches wherever she would be contracted to work.
Instead, once they moved to Texas to be near family, she got involved in tennis, grandchildren and working part-time, and the initial plan “just never eventuated,” he said.
Following orders
“Someone once said, ‘If you want to make God laugh, just tell Him your plans,’” Taylor said. “We didn’t do what we thought we were going to do, but we’re doing what we think He wants us to do. That’s the important part, after all, that we just let Him tell us what to do, and we go do it.”
To order a copy of the Life Works flash drive, write to him at drcrt@aol.com.
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