The Witness of Preaching

by Thomas G. Long

This thorough and detailed revision of The Witness of Preaching is even clearer and more helpful than the first edition. Long has updated the language, expanded the key chapter on biblical exegesis, and included more examples of sermon forms, illustrations, and conclusions. He continues to critically engage the best thinkers in the field of homiletics, bringing into the conversation both important new voices and the latest works of those who appeared in the first edition. In addition, he addresses some of the new forces at work, such as the use of video clips and PowerPoint presentations in sermons.

Genres: Theology, Nonfiction, Christian, Christianity, Religion, School, Grad School

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

Reviews

[Brother Brandon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read for seminary.

This is a really good book. Broad and balanced coverage on a lot of homiletical theory, but not convoluted. Long presents the popular views to the main homiletical questions, shows the pros and cons and then shares his own view. I found this approach helpful.

One chapter that helped me a lot was Chapter 6 on sermon form/structure. It freed me up to see that no sermon form works for every text. Sometimes a 3-point sermon is bless. Other times you need Lowry's Loop 😂 Still other times, you need to preach inductively and leave a little surprise at the end. Although I kinda knew this, I think I still felt a bit restricted by another preaching book I read a few years ago that argued very strongly for one particular style (it left a mark because I read it pretty early on in my preaching).

More could be said about this book, but I gotta go pray the Psalms before I sleep.

[Daniel Gullotta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thomas G. Long's "The Witness of Preaching" stands out amidst many preaching books for its substantive theological insights and practical guidance. Unlike others that may offer superficial advice, Long's work delves deeply into the theological significance of preaching while providing practical strategies for sermon preparation, delivery, and engaging congregations. Among the wealth of memorable chapters, I found particular resonance in Long's exploration of the nuanced distinctions between sermon 'examples' and 'illustrations,' as well as his insightful examination of the complexities surrounding biblical text selection for a sermon (questions relating to what are you leaving out, what are you focusing on, what are you missing, what are you over looking, etc.). These sections not only enriched my understanding but also provided practical tools for enhancing the effectiveness of how I think about sermon writing and church preaching. Recommended to me by seasoned pastors across Christian traditions, this book has rightfully earned its acclaim in homiletics. It's both challenging and inspiring, making it essential reading for anyone passionate about effectively communicating God's Word.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

An invaluable manual to the art of preaching. Required reading for any priest or pastor.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tom Long's "The Witness of Preaching" is a refreshing and readable look at homiletics. Long is well versed in the dominant literature and gives insight into preachers such as Fred Craddock and David Buttrick. However, his real accomplishment is found in the first chapter. Unlike some homiletics texts which focus on rhetoric or communication theory, Long begins with theology. Drawing from Old and New Testament roots, Long offers an image of preacher as the one who "bears witness." Long's beginning chapter is well worth the price of the entire book. In actuality, the chapter probably could stand alone. Will Willimon suggests as much by excerpting part of the chapter in "Pastor: A Reader for Ordained Ministry" (Abingdon Press, 2002).

The image of the preacher "bearing witness" guides the rest of the book. Instead of promoting rigid forms or rules, Long promotes flexibility in preaching. The preacher must make choices based upon the task of preaching. The author offers practical advice on sermon forms, introductions, conclusions, and the like without being pedantic. I only wish that Tom Long had included more examples. However, an interested reader can easily find collections of Long's sermons on Amazon.

I only have one other reservation. This one concerns the sticky issue of hermeneutics. To be fair, interpreting the Bible faithfully is a challenge. Giving advice for faithful interpretation is even more challenging. However, Long leaves the reader wanting more. At one place, he suggests that biblical preaching "does not mean merely talking about the Bible, using the Bible to bolster doctrinal arguments, or applying biblical 'principles' to everyday life" (pg 48). As a preacher who suffers to be "biblical," I could not be in greater agreement. Scripture contains ideas and principles, but these cannot be ripped away from their context. Otherwise one easily preaches abstractions, cut from the moorings of Christ's life, death, resurrection, ascension and return. However, Long does not seem consistent dealing with difficult texts such as household codes in the New Testament: "Slaves, be obedient to those who are your earthly masters." There he suggests the need to separate gospel from what is culturally conditioned. According to Long, the task is difficult--

"The point is that texts which scream cultural bias are also gospel texts, and texts which shout the gospel are also culturally conditioned. There is no surgical procedure for separating the tissues, no guaranteed way to separate the wheat from the chaff. Hearing the claim of God in and through a biblical text always demands and act of faithful imagination, a refusing to let a text go until it has blessed us..." (pg 52).

How different is this "blessing" from discovering "biblical `principles'"? Long offers no distinction except the term "faithful imagination." Interpreting difficult texts is the challenge of every preacher, and this reader would have loved some guidance in what consists a "faithful imagination."

Despite these reservations, Tom Long delivers an excellent primer on homiletics.

[Toby · Rating 2 out of 5]

A colleague of mine commented that by the time that he has finished his sermon preparation for the Sunday he is already bored of it. This book helpfully challenges that attitude by pointing out that the sermon is an event and in fact the sermon doesn't happen until it is preached. Preparation beforehand is a necessary prequel, like practising and rehearsing for a concert. It cannot take the place of the live "performance".

The emphasis on the event nature of the sermon is one of the strong points of this book, but that aside, this is not a book that I'm likely to return to or remember. I heard Tom Long speak at a seminar on preaching and found him engaging and inspiring, but this book is neither of those things. I suppose it is better that way round if you are a preacher. There is a dryness to the book. Too much of it is about the mechanics of constructing a sermon. That's useful for a homiletics course although I wonder if it warrants as much attention as Long gives it. I can't remember a great deal from my homiletics course (apart from the fact that my tutor quoted from Lord of the Rings a fair amount) but there was certainly not a great deal on how to structure a sermon.

The attention given to constructing a sermon means that less attention is given to some (in my view) of the really key things. How do you make a sermon come alive? Where is the place for rhetoric in a sermon? How can using extended metaphors help us keep our congregations engaged and interested? There is nothing at all about humour which is one of the key ways that modern audiences (especially those under 40) engage with the spoken word. Oddly in his chapter on sermon illustrations he seems to misunderstand quite what a metaphor is. At least the examples that he uses don't seem to be metaphors. Only a couple of paragraphs is given over to the crucial question of how we use non-Christian cultural sources in our sermons, suggesting that this is something that he perhaps does not do very much of. And from an Anglican point of view (and I'm guessing that he is not an Episcopalian) there is a question of how the sermon leads into the sacrament.

So lots of questions to ask. It's a useful handbook but reminds me too much of some of those handbooks on poetry that you come across which manage to describe and desiccate the poems at the same time. Kate Bruce's book Igniting the Flame remains the best homiletic book that I have read thus far.

[Rob O'Lynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

[Caution...that 4/5 is a bit misleading.]

To be honest, this is a book in which I agree with about 90% of the content. I have an infinite amount of respect for Tom Long, and reference him repeatedly in my multiple preaching classes. His passion for preaching and depth of wisdom has advanced the study and practice of homiletics in many ways.

That being said, and for as high of a rating that I gave this third edition (which really is the best edition, given the updating on issues like technology, plagiarism and the preacher's spiritual life), I ultimately do not accept Long's concept of "witness" as the paradigm for understanding the preacher's task.

I think to ignore the other paradigms that he discusses (and then dismisses) -- herald, storyteller and pastor -- seriously limits our ability to preach the gospel in a post-Christian society. Yes, this sounds counter-intuitive, given the theological nature of "witness."

The issue, I have long thought, is two-fold:
1) Preaching must be about more than what we have simply "seen and heard" but also point towards transformation, a concept that Long finds deeply problematic to his Reformed approach to the Christian faith.

2) Preaching must, therefore, employ various models and methods in order to effectively preach the gospel in a distracted culture. Heralds (prophets, John the Baptizer), storytellers (Qoheleth, the Gospel writers, Jesus) and pastors (Paul, Peter, Jude) have long advanced the gospel through a variety of communicative forms. Why, then, should contemporary preachers do any less?

If only witness was promoted as a "best practice" among a variety of best practices, much like Robert Stephen Reid's "four voices." Then, to me, this would be the homiletics textbook that we both need and deserve.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book really helpful. I have read several books on preaching before. Some of them gave helpful advice in crafting and delivering the sermon. This book probably is more helpful in terms of writing and organizing a sermon than it is in delivery but it is valuable because it also gives a good overview of various homiletic approaches.

[Scott Masters · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book, with strong theological, exegetical and practical tips for your average preacher. (CS214W-Homelitics/Practice of Preaching)

[Joshua Pearsall · Rating 4 out of 5]

From the preface:
When I wrote the first edition of The Witness of Preaching in the late 1980s, I was trying to do both something old and something new. The “old thing” was to create yet another basic textbook on Christian preaching, both as an introductory resource for beginning students and as a refresher for more experienced preachers… What sets Witness apart from the others is that I have tried to allow the theological image of bearing witness to the gospel to govern and organize every aspect of the process of creating a sermon from beginning to end—from the interpretation of a biblical text to the oral delivery of the sermon. The “new thing” was to create a textbook that was in direct conversa- tion with other voices and opinions in the field of preaching. For much of its history, the discipline of homiletics was viewed, like the other so- called practical fields, as applied theology. What this meant was that “real” theology was acquired in the systematics class or in Bible courses, and preaching class was consumed with the process of learning the prag- matic skills and techniques needed to apply this theology, already worked out elsewhere, in the form of sermons. Thus, most homiletics textbooks were manuals written by master preachers who shared secret recipes, techniques, and nuts-and-bolts wisdom about their methods for fashioning effective sermons. These books were often very sage and helpful, but they were for the most part quite self-contained and largely unaware of other voices and other views. They said, in effect, “Here is how I do it. Imitate me.”... We began to recognize that the ways the church preached over its history, as well as the ways it celebrated the Lord’s Supper or showed hospitality to the stranger, were not just applied theology; they were theology—theology in action, theology embedded in practice.

And it does just that. One may or may not agree with everything Long says, but this work is definitely different where it strived to be different from other preaching books. He is one of the few authors I've read on preaching that actually speaks about the variety in homiletics, in preaching theology and approach. Not just diversity in how people receive preaching, but in how people themselves actually work in the pulpit. Though I do think he spends a bit too much time explaining what not to do, it was an enjoyable read.

[Russell Frazier · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thomas G. Long writes a solid, compelling book on preaching. He explores several images of the preacher, e.g. the preacher as herald, pastor, and storyteller/poet. He concludes by arguing that the best image for the preacher is that of the preacher as witness.

He attempts to avoid the binary of deductive or inductive approaches to preaching. However, he doesn't entirely succeed, in my opinion. Unfortunately, he seems to cast off too quickly the former and classical form of preaching represented by the classic rhetoriticians and represented more recently by homileticians such as John A. Broadus, James Braga, and Bryan Chapell (to mention only a few). Long seems to underscore the weaknesses of the deductive approach to preaching with few (if any) benefits of this manner of preaching. While he mentions the weaknesses of the inductive approach to preaching, he finds more palatable the new homiletic, represented in the teachings of Fred Craddock, Eugene Lowry, and Paul Scott Wilson. Long does want to avoid their anthropocentric focus and the redundancy of their sermonic forms. He adapts the homiletic "moves" of David Buttrick to avoid the "straightjacket" (my word) of the inductive preachers (p. 154). Long briefly describes several frequently used forms of sermons (p. 189f.).

According to Long, the preacher must exegete the biblical text to discern its claim and identify the sermon's focus and function with the congregation's needs in mind. The focus and function of the sermon must determine the sermonic form. Long provides some exemplary sermons in the appendices with helpful descriptions (and charts) of the "moves" of the sermons as examples for readers to follow.

Overall, Long's book is a very good, solid book that I recommend as a textbook for homiletics or preaching courses. It develops an excellent theology of preaching centred around a quotation from Jurgen Moltmann: "They come from God's people, stand up in front of God's people and act in God's name" (p. 3).

[Adam Tomlinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I very much appreciated Tom Long's approach to preaching. His desire to use the legal terminology of "witness" as the basis for his homiletical approach brings a beauty and a balance to the pulpit. A witness does not make the law. A witness does not convict those who break the law. A witness does not make arrests. A witness simply testifies to the truth, as they have understood it.

I must admit, the first half of this book is much better than the second half, where he gets a bit pedantic in his explanations of things like metaphor, analogy, and simile, which were fine, but not new or important to me.

However, his approach for how to think of a sermon, in his "out of the stockroom" section, was quite helpful in asking one's self "how do I want to communicate this text?"

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fine textbook for beginning preachers. Long takes time to define who a preacher is in relation to the responsibility of transmitting the gospel to listeners. He says,"Preachers come to the pulpit from somewhere, and unless we can name that place, we risk misunderstanding who we are and what we are supposed to be doing (3)."

Long will walk you through methods of exegetical preparation, and give you four chapters on the organization of a sermon. The most interesting bits, for me were the chapters on plagiarism and what he titled "From Desk to Pulpit" a chapter on the presentation of the sermon.

Also included in the text is a helpful appendix with four example sermons. Two of the sermons are by women preachers, two by men.

[James Tetley · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent book on preaching. Very helpful starter to the whole topic of developing a talk keeping it focused thinking about the moves involved, how to illustrate and make sure one is keeping and holding the line. Recommended reading. Would have valued a bit more discussion on the aspect of painting pictures through narratives, but there was some good discussion on 3 point flows vs unveiling the route as you go through.

[Ross · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book for a homiletics class in seminary.
Long describes the preacher as a member of the congregation chosen to bear witness to the truth of God revealed in the Scriptures. He provides many practical processes for each step in the work of preparing and delivering a sermon, including exegesis, sermon writing, and practicing to preach. I found it incredibly relevant to my learning and hope to refer to it again in my preaching.

[Terri Milstead · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic book about preaching and sermon prep. I already had been given great tools which I use for exegetical work, but this book has some steps for beyond that that I know will transform how I go about writing my sermons once the research is complete. Definitely one of my school books which will stay close at hand.

[Радостин Марчев · Rating 5 out of 5]

Много балансирана, богословски издържана и практически трезва книга. Най-доброто цялостно въведение по предмета, което съм чел до този момент. Задължително не само за учещи се проповедници, но и за такива с по-дълъг стаж.

[Michael Nielsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thomas Long moves the homiletic task forward as not just narrative preaching but being a witness of and for the people. A witness tells what they see and hear. The witness of the preacher is the biblical revelation of Jesus Christ and what he did for us!

[Scott D · Rating 5 out of 5]

Preaching by one who knows, for those who do it! Phenomenal work.

As one who has preached for a few years this book was refreshing. He speaks as a fellow traveller and relates to his craft, our craft with passion and precision.

[Brian Layman · Rating 5 out of 5]

EXCELLENT BOOK. Well reasoned. Covers perspectives not necesarily shared by the author. Covers most if not all aspects of hermeneutics/crafting sermons whether for a living or simple pulpit supply.
This may be the most I've enjoyed reading a non-fiction book.

[Corey · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book on preaching

I read this book for one of my ordination classes and absolutely loved it. In regards to a topic like preaching, structure is key in making the book readable. Long accomplished this through and through.

[Bill Whitford · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this to be a helpful way to look at preaching and sermons from different angles, different perspectives. I gained some insight into how I preach now, and how I would like to in the future. Very helpful and worth rereading.

[Jana · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wealth of knowledge. I appreciated all the examples and different preachers sermons he included. He references, women and people of color and that was a win for me. This will be one to go back to for reference.

[Freddie Klein · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meh. Some good quotes but rather wordy.

[Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorites for the technical task of preaching. Helpful, instructive.

[Aldon Hynes · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you want to preach and want a solid foundation, this is a great book to have in your library.

[Parker Friesen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book for anyone who wants to get a better idea of what preaching is and is not.

[Ryan Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty good textbook outlining the basics of preaching from a mainline perspective.

[Zach Waldis · Rating 5 out of 5]

The classic book on preaching, I've read the older edition. I haven't found anything better in over a decade of ministry.

[Cristina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Super Buch, kann ich nur empfehlen. Lässt einem über die Bedeutung einer Predigt nachdenken.

[Yapaag · Rating 5 out of 5]

i like it