Mathew Ward said:
What books or resources have helped you in developing and honing your craft as a teacher or preacher of the Word of God?
I used to collect books on preaching. I think I collected about a half dozen or so before I had to stop.
My favourites:
- The Art of Prophesying by William Perkins
- Lectures to My Students by Charles Spurgeon
- Preaching and Preachers by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
- Biblical Preaching by Haddon W. Robinson
To this I would also add one university-level textbook on classical rhetoric. Mine was
Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student by Eugene P. J. Corbett. I used the third edition, but there's now a fourth. The value of such a book to supplement a preaching library is that it covers all the steps of creating and presenting a discourse: discovery of topics, arrangement, forms of argumentation, style, presentation, oratory, and so forth. Preaching is one of the few areas where classical rhetoric is still regularly practiced.
One thing I really appreciate about the older books (such as Perkins and other Puritans, and Spurgeon) is that they spend as much time, if not more, talking about the character of the preacher as they do the technique of preaching. Lloyd-Jones' book is that way as well, though it is a 20th-century work. Robinson's is excellent as well, but it's primarily a rhetoric manual-lite applied to expository preaching.
Finally, if you want an interesting take on sermons as a narrative artform, see if you can find
The Homiletical Plot by Eugene L. Lowry. I think the best essay I wrote in university compared the structure of MLK's "I've Been to the Mountaintop" with Lowry's technique (though the book was actually written about a decade after King died).