Dae Ryeong Kim's dissertation is a study in missiological homiletics from the perspective of an evangelical epistemology.  And this part of Dr. Ian Pitt-Watson's lecture is a powerful demonstration that homiletically verifies Dae Ryeong Kim's findings from his comparative studies in Karl Barth and Lesslie Newbigin's evangelical epistemology and missiology of preaching.  

It started some years ago now, quite number years ago now, when I was going through a period in my own life that was very painful.  One of these times that we all had in greater or less degree where it felt like the bottom had dropped out in my life.  I am not going into the precise circumstances of that trauma.  Partially because I couldn’t do so without serious breach of confidence,  partially because if I did, I think I will be drawing undue attention to my personal story.   I will be asking hearers, “Please share my trauma with me, guys.”  In the preaching of this sermon my personal trauma never became explicit.  And yet, and this is meeting the point I think you should so surely make.  It is quite clear, in retrospect, as I look back on what I preached. But the whole of the sermon, in some measure, not only grew out of my own experience   in that traumatic period, but was God speaking to me, to me, in the particularity of my situation although I never specified that particularity to the congregation.  The interesting thing was, though, that although in this sermon, perhaps more clearly than most sermons I preached, in this sermon,  it was my own agenda that was triggered for the sermon, therefore, subjective.   But I found with this sermon, when first it was preached—I don’t know what would happen now—but I found that often a lot of people tend to say to me.  When I pre-preached, the same thing happened—“You know that you preached that sermon especially for me today.  Now, I don’t say, “Actually I  didn’t.”   When I first preached that sermon, I preached especially for me.  Because that would be untrue, also.  God preached to us.  God preached to our shared Adam, our shared fallen humanity, and to our shared New Adam, our shared new status.of adapted children and family of God, and kid brothers and sisters of  Jesus Christ.    In other words, as we address our own personal hopes and fears, faith and doubt, we similarly address, and at the same time address these hopes and fears, faith and doubt in our fellow Christian men and women. This sermon, then, started from a personal trauma.  

+  © copyrights reference:  This audio clip is partially recorded for quotation by Dae Ryeong Kim from Dr. Ian Pitt-Watson's class lecture at the Fuller Theological Seminary in April 1995.  One may quotes the sentences in this audio clip by referring to "Growing a Sermon”  In Preaching to Today’s World.  Media services Audio Tape 720ab Pasadena, CA: Fuller Theological Seminary."