The Certain Sound of the Trumpet:  Crafting a Sermon of Authority

By Samuel D. Proctor and Gardner C. Taylor

Responded to the ongoing demand for a "how-to," step-by-step approach to powerful sermon development. Proctor's years of proclaiming the Word of God, pastoring, and effective classroom instruction to pastors, teachers, and seminarians make this a must read for even the seasoned pastor. Foreword by Gardner C. Taylor.

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How Shall They Preach

By Gardner C. Taylor

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Black Preaching:  The Recovery of a Powerful Art

By Henry Mitchell

Henry H. Mitchell has completely revised and integrated his popular books The Recovery of Preaching and Black Preaching for seminarians and pastors--both Black and White--who are seeking to add power and vision to their sermons.

Mitchell persuasively demonstrates that Black culture and preaching style are vital for the empowerment of Black congregations and have much to offer the preaching method of all preachers.  By focusing on the use of storytelling, imagination, and style of preaching rooted in African-American culture, Mitchell spotlights effective techniques for lively preaching.

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Rethinking Celebration:  From Rhetoric to Praise in African American Preaching

By Cleophus J. LaRue

This book is a clarion call for African American preachers to think more deeply about the aims and ends of their preaching—namely to stop putting so much emphasis on celebratory endings to our sermons and focus more on the substantive content in our sermons. Our so-called celebratory preaching, designed to excite the congregation into action through a highly emotional closing of the sermon, has had the opposite effect. Rather than inducing action, it has lulled generations of black congregants to sleep. While we are jumping up and down, shouting, and waving our hands in the air every Sunday during the worship hour, we seem not to notice the growing number of churched and unchurched alike who are becoming powerfully alienated from any form of institutional religion.

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Blue Note Preaching In A Post-Soul World:  Finding Hope In An Age of Despair

Otis Moss III

Can preaching recover a Blues sensibility and dare speak with authority in the midst of tragedy? America is living stormy Monday, but the pulpit is preaching happy Sunday. The world is experiencing the Blues, and pulpiteers are dispensing excessive doses of non-prescribed prosaic sermons with severe ecclesiastical and theological side effects.

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The Jazz of Preaching:  How to Preach with Great Freedom and Joy

By Kirk Byron Jones

What if preachers were as contagiously joyful in their preaching as Louis Armstrong was in his playing and singing? As rich in their sermonic renderings as Sarah Vaughan was in her musical vocals? As honest about heartache as Billie Holiday was every time she sang about the blues of life? As alluringly clear as the angelic voice of Ella Fitzgerald? As tenaciously uninhibited in the action of creating as Duke Ellington?

Drawing on a deep love of jazz and enlivening the discussion with insights drawn from the realities of African American preaching, Jones introduces readers to rich and rewarding possibilities for constructing and delivering the sermon.

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They Like to Never Quit Praisin’ God:  The Role of Celebration in Preaching (Revised and Updated)

By Frank A. Tomas

Celebration is an important component of preaching. Fifteen years, after its release, They Like to Never Quit Praising God continues to illustrate the steps that are essential to understand and experience the Gospel through celebration and praise.

Through the unique lens of African American preaching, Thomas explores the theology, dynamics and guidelines for celebrative preaching.

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The Pursued Justice:  Black Preaching from the Great Migration to Civil Rights

By Kenyatta R. Gilbert

The narrative of Civil Rights often begins with the prophetic figure of Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s. City squares became a church, the body politic a congregation, and sermons a jeremiad of social change—or so the story goes. In A Pursued Justice, Kenyatta Gilbert instead traces the roots of King’s call for justice to African American prophetic preaching that arose in an earlier moment of American history.

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The Homiletical Plot:  The Sermon as Narrative Art Form

By Eugene L. Lowry

Now in reissue with a new foreword by Fred B. Craddock and afterword by the author, Eugene L. Lowry, The Homiletical Plot, Expanded Edition follows in the same solid tradition of its predecessor. Upon its release, The Homiletical Plot quickly became a pivotal work on the art of preaching. Instead of comments on a biblical passage, Lowry suggested that the sermon follow a narrative form that moves from beginning to end, as with the plot of a story. This expanded edition continues to be an excellent teaching resource and learning tool for all preachers from introductory students to seasoned clergy.

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The Homiletical Beat:   Why all Sermons are Narrative

By Eugene L. Lowry

Promoting the idea of sermon as narrative, Eugene Lowry's first book, The Homiletical Plot, became one of the most influential preaching books of the latter part of the 20th century. While the sermon as narrative has become conventional preaching wisdom, it is largely misunderstood.

Sermons are, by definition, narratives and as such, they have plots. At the same time, the sermon is not a story. While similar in many ways, narratives and stories are distinct. Therefore, to think of narrative preaching as merely one of many homiletical styles is to misunderstand and reduce the nature of the sermon. The sermon is more than just an option for the preacher; rather, it is, by definition, a narrative because it happens in time, not in space.

This changes everything because the sermon ceases to be something a preacher constructs, like a thesis or even a painting. Instead, it is more like a piece of music - something a preacher plays within intuitively, to a constant beat - time after time, week after week.

In light of this revelation, what are new strategic aims for sermon preparation and delivery?

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The Witness of Preaching (Third Edition)

By Thomas G. Long

This is a newly revised edition of one of the standard introductory preaching textbooks on the market today. Beginning with a solid theological basis, veteran preacher and best-selling author Thomas G. Long offers a practical, step-by-step guide to writing a sermon. Long centers his approach around the biblical concept of witness. To be a preacher, Long posits, is to be a witness to Gods work in the world—one who sees before speaking, one whose task is to ""tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about what is seen.""

This updated edition freshens up language and anecdotes, contains an extensive new analysis of the use of multimedia and its impact on preaching, and adds a completely new chapter on plagiarism in preaching. Included for the first time are four complete sermons, with Long's commentary and analysis. The sermons were written and originally preached by Barbara Brown Taylor, Cleophus J. LaRue. Ginger Gaines-Cirelli, and Edmund Steimle.

With this third edition, The Witness of Preaching reaffirms itself as the essential resource for seminary students as well as new and experienced preachers.

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Stewards of the Story:  The Task of Preaching

By James Earl Massey

In this insightful study, James Earl Massey offers an expanded version of the Twelfth Annual William E. Conger, Jr. Lectures on Biblical Preaching that he delivered at Beeson Divinity School in February 2004. Through a unique collection of informative lectures and illustrative sermons, the highly esteemed teacher and preacher considers four dimensions of the preacher as steward of the gospel story. Pastors will warmly welcome this book as it provides them with both practical guidance and insight about their identity as preachers.

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Introduction to the Practice of African American Preaching

(Release Date Nov 15, 2016 - Released Early October 2016)

By Frank A. Thomas

The Introduction to African American Preaching is an important, groundbreaking book. This book acknowledges African American preaching as an academic discipline, and invites all students and preachers into a scholarly, dynamic, and useful exploration of the topic.

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Preaching With Sacred Fire:  An Anthology of African American Sermons, 1750 to the Present

By Frank A. Thomas

A groundbreaking anthology, Preaching with Sacred Fire is a unique and powerful work. It captures the stunning diversity of the cultural and historical legacy of African American preaching more than three hundred years in the making. Each sermon, as editors Martha Simmons and Frank A. Thomas reveal, is a work of art and a lesson in unmatched rhetoric. The journey through this anthology―which includes selections from Jarena Lee, Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Gardner C. Taylor, Vashti McKenzie, and many others―offers a rare view of the unheralded role of the African American preacher in American history.

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The Strength to Love

By Martin Luther King, Jr.

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God’s Trombones

By James W. Johnson

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Spirit Speech:  Lament and Celebration in Preaching

By Luke A. Powery

That the Holy Spirit is present in preaching is something we take for granted. How the Spirit is present is a question we seldom ask. Luke Powery suggests that we fail to ask that question to the detriment of our preaching. Drawing on the tradition of African American preaching, he locates the Spirit’s activity in the sermon in two primary places; First, in celebration, the joyous acceptance of God’s gifts to the church and to the world. But equally as powerful is the expression of lament, the lifting up of our sorrow, grief, and suffering. In these two experiences the Spirit plays the decisive role, enabling the preacher to lay the congregation’s joys and sorrows at the feet of the living God, and announcing God’s presence in both our celebration and our lament.

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The Preaching Event

By John Claypool

John Claypool is one of this country's foremost preachers. In "The Preaching Event, the text of the Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching, delivered by Claypool in 1979, he talks about the what, why, how, and when of preaching. What are the basic objectives of the preacher? Why do we preach? How should we preach? When is it done? Claypool's book is an excellent companion for new or seasoned preachers.

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The Joy of Preaching

By Phillips Brooks

(Introduction by Warren W. Wiersbe) A source of instruction and encouragement for all ministers of the gospel. Highly recommended by Warren W. Wiersbe.

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