| Witness is a key metaphor that addresses postmodern yearning for authenticity and integrity in preaching in the current cultural milieu of the United States and Canada. The speaking and writing of twentieth-century world missionary and evangelist E. Stanley Jones provided a bountiful source of autobiographical material through which to explore Jones' self-understanding as preacher-as-witness. The purpose of the study was to describe Jones' homiletical self-understanding as witness to Jesus Christ, analyze the content of his speaking and writing as it pertains to preaching, and outline his sermonic approach.; Jones' underlying homiletical worldview was probed in its natural context through a grounded theory process of simultaneous data collection, analysis, and synthesis. All of Jones' twenty-seven published books were scrutinized as well as ten selected sermons in print and in audio and videotape formats spanning sixty years of Jones' preaching ministry. Samples of my own preaching were appended as examples of the integration of Jones' approach with postmodern praxis. The focus of the study was not on others' assessment of Jones, or critical evaluation of his preaching, but on his self-understanding as witness to Jesus Christ as a means to inform the present opportunity for preaching in a postmodern context.; The study clarified boundaries between the metaphors of testimony, confession, and witness, offered an extension of Thomas G. Long's work on the witness of preaching as an underappreciated metaphor for preaching, and presented witness as a theoretical bridge between speaker-driven and audience-driven polarities in preaching. The preacher-as-witness, as revealed in Jones' speaking and writing, is an integrated person who, through immediate experience of Jesus Christ, speaks and lives out faith in him, respects but exercises discernment in the face of other religious and cultural traditions, centers unwaveringly on Jesus Christ, and introduces, interprets, and commends Jesus Christ in non-defensive public speech. Witness was Jones' operative homiletical worldview and furnishes a rich metaphor for preachers' self-understanding in the current postmodern context. |
