A Review of One Year to Better Preaching

One Year to Better Preaching, cover photo from Kregel.com

One Year to Better Preaching is an excellent book for pastors and communicators who want to improve their preaching, communication skills, and teaching. The book provides the reader with fifty-two experiential exercises designed to hone the craft of preaching and communicating the gospel effectively.

As communicators and teachers of the gospel, we must take our calling and craft seriously and seek to improve and do our jobs with excellence. Continued professional development is essential. This book offers fifty-two helpful exercises, one for every week of the year, to help develop the necessary skills needed to execute an effective sermon or teaching time.

Communicating and preaching is an art, but is also a skill that can be developed. One Year to Better Preaching provides an assortment of engaging, diverse and creative exercises, tools, suggestions and resources for the following eight categorizations of preaching: Prayer and Preaching, Bible Interpretation, Understanding Listeners, Sermon Construction, Illustrations and Applications, Word Crafting, The Preaching Event, and Sermon Evaluation.

The versatility of the book’s use is described on the publisher’s website; “Readers can complete the exercises in the order presented, which address different categories week to week, or they can sharpen their skills in a particular category over a period of weeks by using the chart provided. They might also work through the exercises in collaboration with other preachers.” The author, Daniel Overdorf, really seeks to serve pastors with this work and caters to their need for versatility.

The author, Daniel Overdorf, who has a Doctor of Ministry in Preaching from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and over ten years of pastoral experience, is well positioned to speak with authority, clarity, accuracy and skill on the subject of homiletics, the art of preaching. He presently teaches preaching and pastoral ministries and is a member of the Evangelical Homiletical Society. He has also previously written on the subject of preaching in his book Applying the Sermon.

Kregel Publication, the book’s publisher, has the following description of Overdorf’s book, One Year to Better Preaching, on their website:

The book is designed particularly for those who preach each week—and have been, perhaps, for some time—to help them get out of the rut of the routine and infuse their preaching with new sparks of creativity, fresh approaches to sermon preparation and design, and sharpened verbal and nonverbal communication skills. Novice preachers, also, will find the exercises useful in developing their preaching abilities.

I highly recommend One Year to Better Preaching and think it is a wonderful resource that will serve any pastor, Bible teacher or communicator well and agree with the publisher that “One Year to Better Preaching will leave a preacher reinvigorated and better equipped to proclaim the Word of God skillfully, passionately, and effectively.”

In exchange for this non-biased review, the reviewer received a free copy of the book, One Year to Better Preaching. This review is also published on My Two Mites, Examiner, Amazon, and Christian Book.