am one called to preach the Word, so I read books that will help me grow as a preacher. Preaching resources generally fall into one of two categories (other than good or bad). Some preaching books focus on ‘preaching technique.’ Other books major in looking at the message of preaching and helping preachers attend to the text before them. Rare books accomplish both objectives. Daniel Overdorf has written a book which does.

One Year To Better Preaching compiles fifty-two exercises to help preachers preach as they practice. You can go through this book in a year by doing one of these exercises as part of your weekly sermon preparation. Alternatively, these exercises focus on eight different areas, so preachers can focus on areas of weakness in their preaching. Topics covered include:

Prayer and Preaching
Bible Interpretation
Understanding Listeners
Sermon Construction
Illustration and Application
Word Crafting
The Preaching Event
Sermon Evaluation (from page 11 of the introduction).
Overdorf also suggests focusing on one or two exercises a month or reading this with a group of preachers. However you read (and practice) this book, these exercises will help you grow in your ability to proclaim God’s Word. Each chapter has a description of a preaching component, a corresponding practical exercise, testimonials from other preachers, and suggested resources (i.e. articles, books, websites) to help you continue to grow in that area.

Seasoned preachers will have honed their skills in some areas already; however we can all grow in our preaching. I flagged several of these chapters to come back to and work through for the next times I am in the pulpit. Overdorf has a gift for writing pithy chapters which pack a punch. There is a lot of practical wisdom here! I enjoyed the chapters which talked about ‘word craft’ in preaching. Overdorf helps us not waste words as we proclaim the Word. Using language well is something I am passionate about and still need to grow in. Other chapters remind preachers of the basics (i.e. the importance of prayer, learning the historical and literary context of the passage, preaching from the big idea, considering your audience, etc). These suggestions are made by just about every preaching book, but by attaching the message to a hands-on practice, Overdorf makes his message stick.

The copy of this book that I read through was in PDF format. I read books in electronic format and enjoy them.; however I think that if you decide to read through a book of exercises like this, you will want to read through the physical copy (Available from Amazon starting September 16th). I find practical manuals like this are most helpful when you can mark them up, dog-ear pages and underline a lot. This isn’t a book made to look pretty on your shelf or take up space on your hard drive. This is a book for preachers to practice what and how they preach.

I give this book five stars and plan to put it into practice.

Thank you to Kregel Academic for providing me a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. ( )

September 7, 2015

One Year to Better Preaching: 52 Exercises to Hone Your Skills
Daniel Overdorf
Grand Rapids: Kregel Publications, 2013 pp 315 (soft cover) $16.43 (Amazon)

According to Feeding America, the largest food bank in the United States, one in seven citizens in this country suffer from hunger. In a country of our affluence, this statistic is surprising. And yet, how many of our fellow citizens suffer from spiritual malnourishment? I am not referring to those who despise the organized worship of the church and make no effort to be fed spiritually; rather those who faithfully attend church on Sunday, make every effort to participate in the weekly bible studies of the church, and who seek to draw near to God through personal devotions.

The effects of physical malnourishment are serious; but the effects of an inadequate spiritual diet are deadly. Instead of receiving the full meat of the Word Sunday after Sunday the individual who partakes of a thin, weak gruel will become spiritually listless and apathetic. Just as a soldier must receive the proper nourishment to take on the enemy, so too must believers in Jesus Christ receive the proper nourishment to face their three fold enemy. There are times when this lack of spiritual growth and banqueting is because of the man behind the pulpit. Old habits, poor style, or a lack of zeal can stand in the way of the message that is being preached. Put simply, poor preaching is the reason the believer is not fed. It is this problem that Daniel Overdorf seeks to address with his new book One Year to Better Preaching: 52 Exercises to Hone Your Skills. In the estimation of this reviewer he does an excellent job.

Overdorf points out in the introduction that just as a lumberjack needs to periodically sharpen his axe, so too preachers need to sharpen their homiletical tools. The lumberjack needs to “cease battering the oak with his dull ax just long enough to sharpen his blade” and the preacher needs to stop heaving tired old sermons at his flock long enough to sharpen his skills.

The book provides 52 exercises to work on over the course of year to enhance a minister’s sermon creation and delivery. These exercises range from balancing your biblical diet, to assembling a feedback group, to suggestions on how better to employ illustrations in your sermon and how best to apply the sermon to the lives of those gathered there. Speaking on application, Overdorf writes poignantly about the busy mothers of the congregation; “On Sunday morning, this woman offers her preacher thirty minutes from her hectic life, during which she hopes to hear something from God’s Word that will help her live for God from the Monday morning alarm until the Friday dishes are cleared. She appreciates broad concepts but hungers for the practical applications of those concepts. “How does your theology,” she wonders quietly, “make a difference where I live.”

The author writes in an interesting, engaging way, starting each chapter with a story or illustration that engrosses the reader. This is itself instructive. In the first few moments of the sermon, preachers should tell the audience why they should spend the next 30, 40, or 50 minutes listening to them. If they start with their head down and mumble a few things, it’s obvious even they themselves are not all that convinced that what they have to say is important. In that case, the congregation will find other things to think about while the minister drones on. This is emphasized in Exercise 15 where Overdorf quotes Harry Emerson Fosdick’s solution to uninteresting, insignificant sermons.

Within a paragraph or two after a sermon has started, wide areas of any congregation ought to begin recognizing that the preacher is tackling something of vital concern to them. He is handling a subject they are puzzled about, or a way of living they have dangerously experimented with, or an experience that has bewildered them, or a sin that has come perilously near to wrecking them, or an ideal they have been trying to make real, or a need they have not known how to meet.

In other words, tell us quickly why we should care.

As a minister with many years of experience preaching, and now serving as a Professor instructing young men who aspire to the gospel ministry, Overdorf is able to call things as he sees them. For example, when he points out that just because someone gets behind the pulpit that does not mean that what they are doing qualifies as a sermon. As Overdorf puts it, “Such sermons [that become merely an academic exercise] fall short because they miss the divine. In truth, a sermon devoid of the divine isn’t a sermon – it’s a speech, and probably not a good one.” Everyone in the audience knows when they hear a sermon that is “sparked by the Spirit” as it carries the “supernatural potential to inflame hearts and lives in Christ Jesus.” Or, as put by the Divine Author Himself, “Is not my word like as a fire, saith the Lord; and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?” Jeremiah 23:29.

The author takes certain things for granted of most ministers. One area has to do with how much preparation ministers are putting in their sermons. For example, in Exercise 7, he writes about preachers, “We carefully craft our sermons, fashioning each transition, illustration, and explanation. Once we complete the message, we practice it aloud – even three or four times.” If only that were the case! In this exercise he makes the point that the minister must also read the Bible text well. When the text is read publicly in a careless fashion, with no attention given to punctuation and words often mispronounced or missed entirely, this betrays “an unspoken assumption: the Scripture text is but a necessary step to reach what is most important – our own thoughts about the text.” And if they read the account of Jesus on the cross, or Abraham sacrificing his son, or the judgments that face the workers of iniquity with “flat voices and stiff faces” they “betray their [the texts] meanings and intentions.”

Many of the exercises have to do with elements of the sermon that are absolutely vital. A minister needs to polish his thesis so that as Haddon Robinson put it, their sermon resembles a bullet, and not buckshot. This is a point that Henry Jowett emphasized; “I have a conviction that no sermon is ready for preaching, not ready for writing out, until we can express its theme in a short, pregnant sentence as clear as crystal.”

The author rightly points out that the focus of each sermon must be Jesus Christ. One of the chapters is entitled “Make a Bee-Line to the Cross.” In the introduction to this section the author relates advice that one of his colleagues received when he made the decision to pursue the gospel ministry. “Son, preach Jesus, because when you quit preaching Jesus, you quit preaching.”

Overdorf devotes one of the exercises to stressing the importance of exegeting before sermonizing and another on how preachers can hone their delivery skills. This is a point also made by James Daane in his book, “Preaching With Confidence:”

“But if the ability to empower the Word does not lie in us, it is within our potential, alas, to obscure and becloud the truth of the Word. We can place stumbling blocks and unnecessary offenses in the path that leads to faith in Jesus Christ. We can hinder the gospel’s entrance into the human heart. Preachers today can set up obstacles to the hearing of the Word in many different ways: by reducing the gospel to moralism, by self-righteous pride, by lazy sermonic preparation, by turning the pulpit into a personal stage, by bad grammar, poor speaking, disregard of logic. Unable to empower the Word, ministers can still make it difficult to for others to hear the Word.”

This is not to say that I felt all of the exercises listed are necessary or even helpful. Analyzing a movie, encouraging texting during the sermon and employing purposeful humor would do more to detract from the well-crafted and well-delivered sermon than bring value.

Nor will all of the exercises be easy. The section on asking for feedback, and providing questionnaires (an excellent questionnaire is even provided!) to certain members so they can evaluate your content, delivery, and relevance will not come naturally to most preachers. None of us likes criticism. In the business world, work place reviews are commonplace, and the content of those reviews may at times sting. And yet, the reviews are not optional. Is this the case for most ministers? Are the elders of the congregation, those who are commanded to oversee the preaching, doing their job? And if not, how many preachers will have the humility and grace to ask for it?

And that brings me to a criticism of the book. There are ministers out there who will not buy this book or any book that is designed to help with sermon preparation and delivery. They won’t buy them because they went through seminary training 20 or 30 years ago and this is the way they have always done it. And their ministry has not been marred by any great outcry. Sure, there have been some cranks along the way who griped about the preaching, but surely, even Chrysostom had his detractors. In my estimation, there needed to be a section on the elder’s responsibility for oversight of the preaching. It is the elders who are obligated by God to see that the preaching is done well. As Prof. Ron Cammenga of the Protestant Reformed Theological Seminary put it in his Protestant Reformed Theological Journal article (Spring 2015) on this topic, “From a certain point of view, this is not merely one of the duties of the elders [namely, oversight of the preaching], but is the most important calling that the elders have.”

There are no statistics of how many of God’s people are spiritually underfed because of poor sermon preparation or sloppy delivery. You will not drive down the highway and be confronted by this statistic on a billboard as we are confronted by the statistics of physical malnutrition. Yet consider the damage that is done! Consider the cost! The mother who is overwhelmed in the home finds no consolation from her Sabbath day church attendance. The young adults who face temptations on every side find no strength or sure defense from having heard the Word preached. The young person who is mocked at school for his faith and his confession, finds no friend on Sunday. The lonely continue to be lonely, the sick are not encouraged and those who walk on the razor wire of sin find no relief, and no reason not to give themselves over to their sin. There is no balm in Gilead, and no physician to be found; the health of the daughter of God’s people is not restored (Jeremiah 8:22).

Books like this should not be necessary. A minister has been entrusted with the word of God, and the delivery of that word to God’s people, and he takes it lightly? He puts it as third or fourth on his list of priorities for the week? A man that does this has no conception of the responsibility that has been laid on his shoulders. He knows very little of the Jesus that he claims to love, about whom we read in Matthew 9:3, that when Jesus saw “the multitudes, he was moved with compassion on them, because they fainted, and were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd.”
Books like this should not be necessary, but for those ministers (and elders) who recognize that improvements can, and must be made, this book will stand them in good stead.

(disclosure - I got this text as an Early Reviewer) As a minister, I am always looking for ways to breath new life into my messages, work the different angles, see through different eyes. Many of the methods shared are present in preaching courses and books, but it is handy to have them in one place, in synopsis form. While this format is set up to use each week, that method is a little harder to do, since different Sundays and texts require different approaches than what might be prescribed for that week. However, the book is formatted well enough to pick different approaches according to interest. Also a handy text to have available for a lay person who might want to try their hand at bringing a message/reflection within the congregation or in another setting calling for proclaiming the Word. ( )

The idea behind "One Year to Better Preaching" is a good one. The author, Daniel Overdorf, offers 52 ideas--one idea per week of the year--for the preacher to try in order to freshen up or sharpen his preaching.

Many of the ideas are actually things one might find in a better seminary class on preaching or in other preaching books. However, many preachers today have no formal training, which makes a book like this helpful.

In some ways the helpful chapter also reveals the books most glaring weakness. The chapter on prayer is needed today. Spurgeon said that most of his success in preaching and pastoring came as an answer to the prayers of his people. I think many church members don't think to do this as often as they should. Yet, one cannot read the Bible's description of preaching and see it as a spiritual activity and therefore in need of Spiritual assistance. Overdorf gives some helpful suggestions for getting people to pray before and even during the sermon.

At the same time, Overdorf fails to think of the pastor in prayer. Specifically, the pastor in prayer for his own holiness. Paul says that holiness makes us useful for the Lord's work--especially preaching (2 Tim 2:20-21). Likewise, great preachers of the past have believed what Robert Murray M'Chenye once said: "My people's greatest need is my holiness." A chapter (or more) would have made this a truly great book instead of a good book.

Great preaching requires study and technique and this book gives some excellent, practical helps in this direction. In the next addition, Overdorf should add more on the other, even more important, spiritual side of preaching.

3.5/5 stars

**I received this book as part of the Early Reviewers program in exchange for a fair, honest review.

Although I am not in pulpit ministry currently, I do have a seminary degree, and I have preached in the past. This book covers much of what was taught in my preaching classes and, surprisingly, quite a bit of the public speaking skills I learned in my three years in Toastmasters. The result is a great, practical book of assignments that will help any preacher grow in his or her craft. I would definitely recommend this gem and plan on using it myself in the future. ( )