Here you will find a compilation of Young Preachers talking about their favorite preaching resources. These resources include books, classes, videos, mentors, and more. See what has influenced other young preachers, and maybe find a new resource for yourself!
Add your own influences to the list. Comment below or email nick@academyofpreachers.net with your one or two most influential preaching resources and a few sentences about them. This article will continue to be updated with new submissions.
Dominique Robinson, AoP ’11
I love listening to Black female preachers before preaching. I believe this has to do with my grandmother being my very first pastor and introduction to God. I seem to have an affinity for hearing God’s Word through the embodiment of a Black female being.
The Women’s Bible Commentary; The Africana Bible: Reading Israel’s Scriptures from Africa and the African Diaspora; True to Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary
I enjoy using all of these preaching resources because they allow me to engage diverse perspectives of the sacred text and help me to identify the connections between the text and my context. They aid in my development of structure, illustrations and deepening of the articulated theologies.
Aaron Coyle-Carr, AoP ’12
This website has just about everything. Need an appropriate illustration from a popular movie? How about a scholarly article on the textual variants found within your passage? The Text this Week has it all. Though the site is primarily organized around several lectionaries, a scripture index allows you to access their wealth of resources on just about any scripture passage you might want to preach.
A weekly lectionary-based preaching podcast. Two pastors, one Methodist and one UCC dialog about the lectionary texts for the upcoming week. Their conversations range from the nerdy to the profound, and there’s always lots of inspiration for preachers of nearly any stripe. Since it’s weekly, the conversations are very topical and attend to contemporary issues of justice in the North American context.
Jenny Elliot, AoP ’13
I have found the best preaching resource for me the past few years has been the posts from fellow young AoP preachers on Facebook. Seeing what my brothers and sisters in Christ are wrestling with, are excited about, and what God is doing with their call to Gospel preaching reminds me we are never alone.
Joseph Howard, AoP ’12
This may sound like a cop-out, but the Bible is my primary resource for sermon preparation. Additionally, God just pours and random times and I do my best to keep up. I also love to consult hymns and Gospel/Christian songs that go along with the subject matter that I’m discussing. And I love using analogies, stories, and even jokes to illustrate points. These are some of the tools I typically use to frame sermons.
Jeremi Taitt, AoP ’17
The Certain Sound of the Trumpet by Samuel Dewitt Proctor
This book on crafting a sermon should be a quarterly or monthly read for young preachers. It details all components of sermon writing with simplistic yet poignant writing. This book will challenge and improve your sermon writing and presentation with each read. In addition, this book is a great introduction into the mind of one of the greatest preachers EVER!
The Preaching Life by Barbara Brown Taylor
Barbara Brown Taylor’s writing in “The Preaching Life” is poetic. The beauty and the burden of the call to preach are woven perfectly together. Brown details her experience with an ever-present God and the challenges of ministry of yesteryears and today. This is a great resource and was recommended to me by Art J. Gordon AOP 11 as I discerned the call to preach. This book should be a required read for all pursuing the call to preach.
Nick Bettis, AoP ’15
The Homiletical Plot by Eugene Lowry
This book introduces a specific sermon structure called the Lowry Loop, but more so it presents a case for sermons being constructed with plot in mind. Not necessarily telling a story throughout a sermon, but organizing a sermon to contain narrative patterns of conflict, climax, and resolution, even in sermons without any stories.
Preaching and the Literary Forms of the Bible by Thomas Long
Long suggests that sermons should not only say what the Biblical text is saying, but it should also do what the Biblical text is doing. He teaches how to model sermon construction on the literary form and function of the Biblical text.
Chris Breslin, AoP ’11
Podcast has been a particularly helpful tool for me as I learn the craft of preaching. Planting a church and going from having preached a dozen or so sermons in my life, to preaching more than forty times in the first year of our community, I leaned heavily on the wisdom from Jon Chandler’s guests. Each episode features a preacher from varied contexts, with varied styles, congregational expectations, ecclesial backgrounds, and formations describing their theology of preaching, congregation, tools, research and planning process, and methods for rest and sustainability. I’d highly recommend to any (young) preacher looking to hone their own process and find their own homiletical voice.