We all know from dreary experience of one kind and another that “They don’t make ‘em like that anymore.”  Whoever “they” may be, together with whatever product is up for critique.

The gospel of Jesus Christ can’t rightly be called a “product,” nor can faithful, courageous ministry. But it’s tempting to say of the Rev. Dr. Paul Waddell Pritchartt that fewer of like heart and like spirit seem these days to enrich our lives: proclaiming God’s Holy Word with the same vigor, the same vision.  

Would that, in these troublous times, they might. Paul Pritchartt (with a little help from his friends: the biggest of those being the Lord Himself) changed the Episcopal Church of the Incarnation in ways that become more and more visible, more and more admirable, as time goes on. He laid the foundation, back in the 1970s and 1980s, for the supercharged house of  worship and mission that Incarnation, under other hands, would become.

He remodeled the worship of the parish, the youth program, the music program, the outreach program. And, most memorably, in some sense, he preached:  tight little masterpieces of orthodox theology and inspiration that won him an international reputation.

He’s gone, but as the old saying has it, he lives on: not least in the sermons we are privileged – blessed is perhaps the likelier way of putting it – to be found in this archive.

Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest is the Prayer Book’s timeless counsel  for the absorption of God’s written word.  It’s a marvelous formula to which, in Paul Pritchartt’s case, one additional activity is to be commended: Listen. Listen with expectation. Listen with reverence. Listen with the joy God puts in the hearts of the faithful when a great preacher ascends to the pulpit, there to unfold with conviction the ancient words of Truth and Assurance.  

           - William P. Murchison, Jr.