Constitutive Rhetoric In The Discourse Of Three Popular Founders Of Charismatic Churches In Ghana

Abstract

Ghanaian Charismatic pastors and their churches have been studied quite much except that few studies have explored constitutive rhetoric in their discourse. This thesis attempted to fill this gap by exploring how Duncan-Williams, Mensah Otabil, and Agyinasare, three popular Ghanaian Charismatic leaders, use constitutive rhetoric in their discourse to create organised identity for their churches. Qualitative case study design and purposive sampling method were used to select the three pastors with their churches based on their popularity and representativeness of the Charismatic phenomenon in Ghana. The data comprised four website texts and fifteen sermons of the pastors for December 31-All-Nights from YouTube. Qualitative content analysis foregrounded by Constitutive Rhetoric Theory served as the analytical framework. It was found that the website texts namely history, beliefs statement, vision statement, and mission statement used rhetorical principles of naming and identification by an assumed we to create the churches as a collective or community. Adjectives, adverbs, and syntax were also used to construct each church and the pastor as the best to attract memberships. Also, the sermons were created as deliberative and epideictic rhetoric to construct the churches as a community and orient the members towards future courses of action. The pastors used Aristotle‘s persuasive strategies of ethos, pathos, and logos in their sermons to persuade their audiences to accept and act on constituted identities. The findings have implications for the scholarship on language use by Ghanaian Charismatic pastors and for further research.