BANGOR – Former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno will be the keynote speaker at the Bangor Theological Seminary’s 98th convocation, which also will include daily talks by a Georgia minister who has been called one of the 10 most effective speakers in the English language.

Reno will speak at 2 p.m. Monday, Jan. 27, at the Hammond Street Congregational Church. The public is invited.

Reno, who served eight years as attorney general under President Clinton, said this week that she hasn’t given a title to her talk because she hasn’t finished writing it yet.

“My method of writing is to let things percolate for a while, then go back to the source materials a day or two before [the engagement],” she said. “It’s still in the percolating stage.”

Reno’s lecture is expected to fit in with the theme of this year’s convocation: “Telling the Story.”

Convocation is a three-day annual event that often includes a speaker of interest to the public, such as Reno, and brings well-known theologians and preachers to the 189-year-old institution, according to the Rev. Glenn Miller, professor of ecclesiastical history, who helped plan this year’s program.

The Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor of Demorest, Ga., will speak each day of the conference. Named one of the 12 most effective preachers in the country out of 1,500 nominees by Baylor University in 1995, Taylor teaches at Piedmont College and Columbia Theological Seminary, both in Georgia. She also was named by Newsweek as one of the 10 most effective speakers in the English language.

The Rev. Kevin Holsapple, rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Bangor, compared Taylor to a famous 19th century preacher.

“She is the Phillips Brooks of this generation,” Holsapple said of Taylor. “She is to the current generation in the [Episcopal] Church what he was to the last. Her appearance is something we are appreciative of and anticipate greatly seeing her in Bangor.”

The sermons Taylor will deliver at convocation are titled “Mother of the Other,” “The Preaching Life” and “The Good Heretic.”

Taylor has written or contributed to 10 books and writes regularly for The Christian Century magazine. Raised in what she has described as a secular environment, Taylor said she rebelled as a teenager by getting religion. In college, she wanted to be a writer, and through her sermons, Taylor has said, “It’s the word I’m in love with.”

“I want to talk about some of the wilder text that is in the Bible and let it out of the bag,” she said in an interview, adding that studying only the “happy” Bible stories gives people “a fake report of God, like a movie trailer that only shows the happy romantic ending.”

She also is expected to meet with students and ministers, where she turns for inspiration when writing sermons.

“When I talk to seminary students and they say, ‘What do you do for your preaching?’ I usually tell them, I hang my laundry out on the line,” she told “Religion and Ethics News Weekly,” a television program. “It’s humbling work. It’s work in the service of life, in a way. It keeps me in touch with basic realities: sickness and wellness and seasons and temperature, and being mindful of whether it’s raining and the horses need to be in, and how cold it’ll get tonight. I get grounded, very grounded.”

Other speakers scheduled for convocation are the Rev. Anthony Pappas of Providence, R.I., and the Rev. Richard Ward, a professor at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver.

An American Baptist minister, Pappas is an expert on small churches. The vast majority of churches in New England have fewer than 50 members. Pappas will deliver two lectures titled “Ay-uh! … Small Churches Have a Good Story to Tell” and “Say Again? Telling the Story in the Language of the Listener.”

Ward, a United Church of Christ minister whose bachelor’s degree is in speech and drama, also will give two lectures, “I Love to Tell the Story … But, How?” and “Finding the Stories All Over Again on the Pages and In-Between the Lines.”

For information on convocation, call 942-6781 or visit the seminary’s Web site at www.bts.edu. Parking will be available at the seminary, with buses shuttling people to the Hammond Street church.