The witness of preaching

An interview with Dr. Thomas G. Long.

Derek J. Morris, D.Min., is senior pastor at Forest Lake Church, Apopka, Florida, and author of Powerful Biblical Preaching: Practical Pointers From Master Preachers.
Thomas G. Long, Ph.D., is Bandy professor of preaching at Candler School of Theology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.

Thomas G. Long is a distinguished teacher and author in the field of preaching. He taught for many years at Princeton Theological Seminary before assuming his present position as the Bandy Professor of Preaching at Candler School of Theology. He has written and edited numerous books on preaching, including The Witness of Preaching, Preaching and the Literary Forms of the Bible, and The Senses of Preaching. Dr. Long has been recognized as one of the twelve "most effective preachers in the English-speaking world."

Derek Morris: In your many years of teaching and writing, you have made a compelling case for viewing the Christian preacher as a witness.1 I wonder if we could begin by exploring that idea.

Thomas Long: Well, I'm attracted to that image for many reasons, not the least of which is that it's a New Testament image. As such, it has a double meaning: as witness and as martyr. It shows that the stakes are high for preaching the gospel and the risk is great. Anytime we think it's safe to preach the gospel, we either misunderstand the gospel or we misunderstand the culture because it's not ever safe to preach the gospel. There are always costs involved and the martyr image makes that clear.

DM: How does this image of the Christian preacher as a witness affect our understanding of the preacher?

TL: First of all, it makes it clear that the preacher does not stand there with something that she or he has generated out of his or her own mind or competence. One's witness is always dependent upon something else. One bears witness about something or to some thing. Second, this image of a witness makes it clear that what is at stake is truth. Witness is a legal term. The person who has seen and experienced something that the public needs to know for the sake of the truth is put on the stand and sworn in and commissioned to do one thing: to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help them God. And there is a great penalty for bearing false witness because we, the public, need to know the truth. The culture needs to know the truth about God and humanity, and the witness is telling that truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

DM: That sounds like a solemn responsibility, not one to be taken lightly. How should this call to be a witness affect the preacher?

TL: It should remind the preacher not to fudge the testimony, not to try to make it more palatable, more attractive, more accept able. Sometimes the truth is hard to hear but our commission is to tell the truth. It also helps us understand this very thorny issue of character, the moral character of the preacher. Sometimes you'll read in homiletical text books that the preacher must, in a sense, be of an exemplary moral character. People don't believe the message unless the preacher is one, two, or ten notches above the ordinary hearer. And other times, you read that the ethical life of the preacher has no consequence whatsoever. The witness image balances those nicely in the sense that, yes, the preacher must be a morally trustworthy per son to the extent that the witness is willing to tell the truth. The totality of the moral life is important, but here it is not the essential issue. The central issue instead is the willingness of the witness, in this one place, not to hedge, not to fudge, to tell the truth about what has been seen and experienced. So those are some of the things that helped me reach out to this witness image as a provocative image for preaching.

DM: You emphasize, in your book The Witness of Preaching, that "the witness image carries with it guidance about the rhetorical form of preaching,"2 and that "the shape of the witness's sermon should fit the character of the testimony."3 How does the content of the testimony affect the form of the sermon?

TL: The problem in homiletics is that our field has a tendency to latch onto a particular form as the solution to our communicational problems. So whether it's the three-point form or the narrative form or the inductive form a lot of times you'll find people in the literature saying that whatever we used to do is passe, what we now need to do is this or that. The witness image rejects a single form as the solution to a communication problem and recognizes that multiple rhetorical forms are available.

You don't, however, just pick them arbitrarily. You pick the one that is fitting for the kind of testimony you're giving. Sometimes the prosecuting attorney or the interrogating attorney will say to a witness, "Would you tell your story?" Well, that calls for a narrative form. The witness narrates the experience that embodies the testimony. Other times the prosecutor will want to know about particular facts. What happened here? Was it day or night? Was the car blue or green? And so the communication of specific concrete factual information becomes the chosen rhetorical form. If you look at courtroom testimony, it takes hundreds of different styles, each one fitted to the kind of information that's being communicated.

DM: You suggest that "the witness is not a neutral observer."4 Is the witness permitted to share his or her own experience with the truth as part of the testimony?

TL: Your question is an apt one, and there is a tightrope to walk here. The court is not interested strictly in the interior experiences and feelings of any witness. There is something out there that the witness has seen and experienced and is telling about. So the truth that we're after is outside of the witness. But in the case of the gospel truth, this is momentous and urgent truth. It's something like a witness in a court room who has seen a multi-car collision on the highway and though he or she is bearing testimony to something that happened on that interstate that day in fact that was actually seen by them it means that they are now personally involved in it. There is no way for a true witness to be detached from what they've seen and experienced. This is encapsulated in Peter and John's passionate reaction to the order to stop preaching, that is, bearing witness in Jesus' name: "'We cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard'" (Acts 4:20, NIV). So when we are bearing testimony, bearing witness to the gospel, we're always revealing our own involvement in the truth that we are proclaiming.

Does that mean that preachers can only preach things that they have totally experienced? The answer is no. And the best image I know to illustrate that comes from an old Joseph Sittler sermon called, "The View from Mount Nebo," in which he develops the image of Moses on Mt. Nebo looking over into the Promised Land.5 He can see it, but he will not experience it. And there are many things in the gospel that the witness can see but that the witness has not, in his or her own personal Christian maturity, fully experienced.

DM: You suggest that the witness of preaching must be viewed as part of "a great and cosmic trial." Does the witness of preaching have cosmic implications?

TL: Yes! Most Christian witness takes place in the context of corporate worship, and corporate worship is never understood theologically as just a little tiny congregation gathered for worship. We're gathered in the great company of saints and when we gather at the Lord's table, we're gathered at that great banquet table. Richard Fenn, who teaches at Princeton, has made the case and I think it's a compelling one that the structure of worship in most Christian communities is a kind of mock trial in which the charges are brought against God's people.6 Then testimony is brought in, and then the great acquittal, the announcement that in Jesus Christ there is no condemnation. That's good news! It's the good news.

DM: What are the greatest challenges facing a preacher as a witness at the beginning of the twenty-first century?

TL: Let me point to a couple: one in culture and one inside the church. Out in the culture, we have to negotiate a hearing now everywhere we go. The New York Times is not going to do, in the foreseeable future, what it did a century ago, and that is print summaries of the sermons of the great New York preachers. The culture is not automatically interested in what the pulpit or the church has to say. Therefore, in ways that are reconciling and peacemaking on the one hand, while they are disruptive and prophetic on the other, the church has to get out there in the public square and negotiate a hearing for the gospel. And that's a terrific challenge.

Inside the church, I have been concerned at the loss of theological and biblical knowledge on the part of the average lay person. Preaching is done, in a sense, as an active ministry by the preacher, but theologically it is done as an act of the whole church; and therefore, preaching is not simply a person who knows something standing up in front of people who don't know something and spilling out information. When we preach the gospel, we preach it to people who have heard the gospel, and it confirms what they have heard and stretches them to a new place, and back and forth it goes. One of the challenges for the preacher in the twenty-first century is to rebuild and refresh the memory of the church. Preachers need to give congregations their Bibles back, to rebuild their the ological vocabulary, one brick, one word, one concept, one text at a time. And when seekers come in the door of the church, we should not suspend our vocabulary, our language, our lore, our stories, our gospel we should teach it.

DM: What closing word of counsel would you give to a preacher who desires to be a faithful witness?

TL: The most important moment in the sermon creation process is what the old rhetoricians called the moment of invention, what the biblical hermeneuticians called the moment of interpretation, and what a homiletician might call the moment of encounter with the text. When a preacher will reserve the time and energy to dwell long enough, and energetically enough, on the text, so that he or she arrives at that place where the text speaks, then the preacher has something to say. And all the rest of the process is important but not nearly as important as that. If there is not that moment, then all the wonderful illustrations and terrific structures and charismatic personality in the world will not make this an authentic event. Responding to that, I'm really talking about a moment of hearing the voice of God in the text. Then you stand in the pulpit and say, "I just have to tell you what I have seen and heard."

1 Thomas G. Long, The Witness of Preaching (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1989), 42-47.

2 Ibid., 46.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 Edmund A. Steimle, Morris J. Niedenthal, and Charles L. Rice, Preaching the Story (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980), 43-51.

6 Richard K. Fenn, Liturgies and Trials {New York: Pilgrim Press, 1982), 27; quoted in Thomas G. Long, The Witness of Preaching, 47.


Ministry reserves the right to approve, disapprove, and delete comments at our discretion and will not be able to respond to inquiries about these comments. Please ensure that your words are respectful, courteous, and relevant.

comments powered by Disqus
Derek J. Morris, D.Min., is senior pastor at Forest Lake Church, Apopka, Florida, and author of Powerful Biblical Preaching: Practical Pointers From Master Preachers.
Thomas G. Long, Ph.D., is Bandy professor of preaching at Candler School of Theology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.

July 2001

Download PDF
Ministry Cover

More Articles In This Issue

Dealing with difficult people

Pastoral attitudes and approaches to challenging parishioners.

Pastoring on the postmodern frontline (part 1)

Understanding postmodern ways of thinking and feeling.

The shout

Proclaiming the gospel regardless.

I doubt I should tell you this . . .

A pastor deals with his inner fears.

Elderly parishioners at risk

Raising pastoral consciousness about the elderly.

Putting the Word back in worship

Simple techniques that help make the Bible come alive in worship.

I have learned

After fifty years: Valuable pastoral insights.

Ministerial mendacity

An assessment of pastoral integrity from the pew.

View All Issue Contents

Digital delivery

If you're a print subscriber, we'll complement your print copy of Ministry with an electronic version.

Sign up

Recent issues

See All