ABSTRACT
The Epistles are the heartland of the evangelical preacher. Many readers will recognise a debt to Thomas Long at this point. He suggests, for example, that sometimes the sermon should replicate the passage's shape or form; sometimes it should try to produce an equivalent effect on the modem listener as the passage did on the original hearers; sometimes, the forces which organize the sermon should be the same as those which control the passage and so on. The task set before the preacher is not just to tell the congregation that this is what Paul Cubitt felt but to reproduce within twentieth-century listeners the feeling of being present at a conversation where someone is personally involved, pastorally in anguish, trying to effect a change in a specific situation by every rhetorical means at his disposal. Autobiographical passages invite story treatment but other kinds of material may also be treated in this way.
