John Albert Broadus represents a breed of gentlemen scholar-preachers who enjoyed regional and national influence in America in the last half of the eighteenth century. A brief stint as a pastor gave him practical understanding of pastoral ministry and prepared him for the institutional role that would free him to influence the theory and practice of homiletics in the English-speaking world for a century.

Contemporary preachers would do well to emulate his best qualities of spiritual devotion to Christ, love of the Scriptures, respect for the church, and diligent scholarship. He was a student of the Bible, a master exegete, a rhetorician of the first order, and a man of letters. Each of these interests and skills fed the others.

Broadus was professor of New Testament and Homiletics on the original faculty of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and the second president of the seminary. He was a linguist who was proficient in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Coptic, Gothic, and Anglo Saxon.

Broadus was a biblical scholar, administrator, educator, and preacher. His diverse gifts were harnessed in the service of an institution. For good or ill, he believed in institutions and their potential for the greatest good for the most people -- particularly he believed in the seminary to which he devoted his life and whose character he shaped as a loving parent. In the midst of institutional storms that would have frightened lesser humans, he turned down opportunities to teach at the University of Chicago, Brown University, and many others including an invitation to be the president of Vassar College. When the winds raged and it appeared that Jesus was not aboard -- or, at best, asleep in the stern -- he held to the mast and sailed on. In this day of short pastorates and career planning, such perseverance and devotion is worth noting.

John Broadus was reared in a Christian home and in due course professed faith in Christ at age sixteen. A response to a friend's inquiry about the possibility of Broadus becoming a minister reveals a somewhat unorthodox view of call.

Your inquiry if I ever think about preaching. I answer, I do; but I always come to the conclusion that preaching is not my office. Not because I consider a call to the ministry to consist in some supernatural intimation, for I believe that to be little more than an earnest and ardent desire for the work, but because I do not think I am qualified for it .... I know that my mental capacities are, in some respects, not inconsiderable, but I was not "cut out" for a public speaker. I have not that grace of manner and appearance, that pleasant voice, that easy flow of words, which are indispensably necessary .... in him who would make impressions on his fellows by public speaking.1

Two years after his conversion, Broadus enrolled in the University of Virginia to study medicine. Returning to the university for his second year, young Broadus attended revival services and was so moved by a sermon on the parable of the talents that he altered his vocational plans. Forty years later he described the effect of A. M. Poindexter's sermon.