James O. Gilliom, Walking on Water: Sermons on the Miracles of Jesus (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995), 96 pages, paper.
The latest edition in Abingdon's Protestant Pulpit Exchange series contains fourteen sermons which use miracle stories to teach important spiritual truths to contemporary congregations. Walking on Water offers interesting and helpful sermon models for preaching ministers.
Gilliom is pastor of Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ in Des Moines, Iowa.
Barbara Brown Taylor, Gospel Medicine (Boston: Cowley Publications, 1995), 161 pages, paper.
Barbara Brown Taylor plays a unique role as one of the few nationally-known models of women in the pulpit. As such, she stays busy as a writer and lecturer -- she has been a frequent contributor to The Protestant Hour radio program -- in addition to serving as rector of Grace-Calvary Episcopal Church in Clarkesville, GA. Gospel Medicine is a collection of her sermons which demonstrates her gifted handling of both the biblical text and contemporary language. For many readers, the biggest frustration with her sermons will be that they end too quickly!
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D. Stuart Briscoe, Expository Nuggets from 1 Corinthians and Expository Nuggets from the Epistles (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1995), 128 pages and 160 pages, paper, $9.99 each.
Stuart Briscoe is one of the most gifted communicators in the church today, and preachers who confront the biblical text week after week will welcome the assistance of this pastoral mentor through these first two volumes in the "Stuart Briscoe Expository Outlines" series from Baker. Each sermon is presented in outline form, demonstrating the approach to the text taken by this contemporary preacher-teacher. Each book contains more than 50 outlines "or "expository nuggets" which will provide useful exegetical insights to other preachers.
Briscoe is pastor of Elmbrook Church in Brookfield, WI, and is a Contributing Editor to Preaching.
Ruth C. Duck, Finding Words for Worship (Louisville: Westminster-John Knox Press, 1995), 145 pages, paper.
Leaders who are called on to write prayers, hymns and other liturgical resources will find this a helpful book. The book is targeted to mainline churches. The one chapter on preaching is too brief to be particularly helpful; Duck would have been wiser to leave such a significant topic to another book and kept the focus of this volume on non-homiletical resources.
Duck is Associate Professor of Worship at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, IL.