OBLIGATORY RHETORO-STYLISTIC NARRATIVES: TESTIMONIES AS ACCOMPANIMENT TO CHRISTIAN SERMONS

Abstract

Testimonies are invaluable to effective sermon composition and delivery. The testimony is a narrative but strictly speaking the narrative is not always a testimony. Yet, the narrative as a feature of preaching has only recently just begun to be appreciated as a critical component of religious communication. This study locates the (sub)genre of testimony as an obligatory narratives accompaniment which imbues preaching with greater rhetorical and religious powers and argues that it is indeed a carefully structured linguo-religious narrative and deliberately delivered in a religious setting by or of a witness; sometimes it comes in the form of the personal experience of the preacher as well. It is an affirmation of the intervention of God in the testifier’s situation. The testimony as a piece of discourse exhibits a coherent pattern having: (a) an opening and a closure (b) plot and (c) character. Seven (7) testimonies deployed by Pastor E.A Adeboye of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, Lagos-Nigeria in the pre-eminent ritual event of the Church, the Holy Ghost Service, HGS, were gathered and analysed for the study. The framework adopted for this study is a blend of the rhetorical approach and discourse analytical method that involved speaker-hearer (or writerreader) orientation, topic development, topic support and meta-discourse. Study findings indicates that such a religious segment as the testimony ‘Move’ is shaped by a specific communicative function and is considered as a functional unit. Further, this study made attempts to clarify the functional value of the Testimony Move demonstrating that as with the hortatory and persuasive discourse, either in isolation or combined, there will obligatorily be macro-segments (Longacre: 34). The macro-segment of each type, in turn, would be constituted of two feature components: rhetorical and pragmatic in nature.