Which books will help me improve as a preacher?
- Krish Kandiah
- Nov 10, 2016
- 5 min read

I love preaching. In fact for the past 7 years I have spent one week of my holiday preaching and another week of my holiday listening to preaching. Whenever I travel anywhere to preach I invariably spend the car journeys being inspired by preaching podcasts. I also love reading sermons – many preachers have turned their sermon series into books and so I lap up as many of those as I can fit into my life. I also try to read at least a book a year on preaching in order to learn to be more faithful to scripture and more relevant to our culture. The following are the best books I have read in recent years. I don’t endorse everything that they have said, but each one has prompted me to rethink an aspect of my preaching.
If you are a preacher then why not read one of these before you plan your next sermon series. If you are a member of a congregation you could buy your preachers one of these as a Christmas present.
This is a terrific little book that will challenge preachers to make sure they let the genre of the Bible passage they are preaching on shape the way they preach. Too often we preachers stick a bible text into our preparation process and out comes a generic three point sermon at the other that could actually be based on any number of passages. But a sermon on the Psalms should sound and feel different to a sermon on a chapter of Romans. This book will help to inspire more variety in our preaching by paying more attention to the Bible passage.
This is a classic book by veteran Bible teacher Dr John Stott. Here’s a book that presents an apologetic for the place of preaching in the life of the church. With preaching getting a battering both from inside and outside of the church it will restore your vision and fire up your confidence.
This was the book that challenged me to be free of scripted notes when preaching. The simple challenge of the book was “If you can’t remember your sermon – how can you expect anyone else to.” This short book will challenge you to make preaching more meaningful both to you and your audience.
This is a brand new book from Tim Keller who is one of my favourite preachers. Keller’s own book on preaching is good. But I have included this book as he models how to unpick the assumptions many sceptics have about the Christian faith. I firmly believe that one of the key roles of preaching is to help equip the church to faithfully witness to the gospel in our increasingly sceptical culture. One of the vital things that preaching must do for our congregations is to equip them to speak up for Christ wherever they are. Keller is an excellent model for this and this book will help you to do the same.
It’s a blast from the past but Spurgeon is often known as the Prince of Preachers and here is some vintage wisdom from him. Spurgeon would regular preach to audiences of over 6000 at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London. This book is warm, challenging and often very funny. He is the master of the pithy one liner Here are two of my favourite: “Many preachers are at home among books but quite at sea among men.” Or ““Better abolish pulpits then to appoint men who have no experiential knowledge of what they teach.” It will inspire and challenge you. Enjoy!
Preachers need to connect with the whole church. The exodus from the church of so many young adults and the growing number of young adult churches both mean that many of our churches have a missing generation. As millennials are rapidly becoming an endangered species in our churches it is worth investing time in understanding the issues around their engagement with the church. Kenda Creasey Dean’s excellent Almost Christian offers a brilliant snapshot of how young adults are being formed in the faith and the need for a rethink of the spiritual formation that young people need in order to be ready for adult faith. We must reform our preaching if we are going to help equip young people with a real faith that will last a life time.
Lloyd Jones’ systematic expository preaching shaped a generation of conservative evangelicals. You might not agree with all he has to say - for example he was opposed to the recording of sermons because it might encourage people to listen to the word of God in an irreverent way - but you will not fail to be impressed by the sense of gravity and awe Lloyd Jones brings to preaching.
The good people at the London Institute of Contemporary Christianity have been helping the church to think about what it means to live for Christ not just in our leisure time but especially in our work time. Mark Green’s little book Thank God It’s Monday is a must read for preachers as too many of us are detached from the ordinary lives of working people and so too often is our preaching. The follow up Fruitfulness on the Frontline takes the ideas one step further and is excellent too.
Preaching normally takes place in the context of a worship service and so this challenging book by Marva Dawn forces us to take a hard look at the extent we have turned our worship services into celebrity based pop cultural froth. This book is as important now as when it was written in the 1990s as some current church planting trends are in danger of forming an unholy alliance with contemporary culture at the expense of the gospel. This book is not an easy read as Dawn raises some pointed questions that we must face if we are going to be faithful to the scripture and connect with our culture.
Young Timothy was told to do the work of an evangelist and he was also given a solemn commission by Paul to preach the word of God in season and out. Too often evangelistic preaching lacks biblical substance and biblical preaching lacks an evangelistic edge. John Chapman’s challenging book on evangelistic preaching will help us hold these two elements together.
This article was originally published on ChristianToday.com
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