What Books are Recommended for Pastors?

Question 11026.

Asking for recommended books for pastors is a bit like asking a builder which tools he would keep if the van were stolen. The honest answer is that a few things do the heavy lifting and the rest are conveniences, and the danger is buying the conveniences first.

I get asked this often enough that it is worth setting down properly, along with the reasoning behind each choice, because a recommendation without a rationale just moves the problem along. What follows is what I would actually put in a young minister’s hands.

Start with the book that makes the other books for pastors useful

Before any commentary, get a Bible you will actually mark, wear out and replace. I use the ESV and have done for years, and the whole text is freely readable at ESV.org if you want to compare readings quickly. A wide-margin edition earns its price within a year.

Alongside it, a decent concordance and lexicon habit will do more for your preaching than any shelf of secondary literature. The Blue Letter Bible lexicon tools are free, and getting into the habit of checking a word rather than assuming it is one of the cheapest upgrades available to a preacher.

I say this first because the books for pastors that get read most are usually the ones bought most recently, and that is exactly backwards. The Bible should be the book you are always behind on.

Systematic theology worth owning

Every minister needs one systematic theology he knows his way around, even if he disagrees with parts of it. For my own dispensational convictions, Lewis Sperry Chafer’s eight-volume Systematic Theology remains the fullest statement, though it is a reference work rather than a read-through. Charles Ryrie’s Basic Theology is the one I would actually hand to a new pastor, because it is clear, honest about where positions divide, and short enough to finish.

Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology is broader in sympathy and useful precisely because it will not simply agree with you. Reading a careful writer you differ from is how you find out whether you hold a position or simply inherited it.

If you want the dispensational framework laid out with care, Ryrie’s Dispensationalism and J. Dwight Pentecost’s Things to Come are the standards, and Arnold Fruchtenbaum’s work at Ariel Ministries is the best modern treatment of Israel’s place in prophecy that I know.

Commentaries: fewer and better

The great mistake with commentaries is buying a whole set. Sets are uneven by nature, and you end up with twelve volumes you consult and forty you do not. Buy per book, and buy when you are about to preach that book, which also means you buy with a real question in mind.

For any given book, aim for three: one that works the original language, one that handles the argument and structure, and one that is frankly pastoral. That combination stops you producing sermons that are accurate and lifeless, or warm and wrong.

The study notes at NET Bible are worth having open while you work, because the translators show their reasoning rather than hiding it, and seeing why a rendering was chosen teaches you more than the rendering itself.

Books for pastors on the work of ministry

Richard Baxter’s The Reformed Pastor is nearly four hundred years old and still uncomfortable, which is a good sign in a book about ministry. Charles Bridges’ The Christian Ministry belongs in the same category. Neither will teach you technique. Both will ask you why you are doing this at all.

On preaching itself, Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ Preaching and Preachers is the one I return to, though I do not follow him at every point. It is a book about the man behind the sermon more than the sermon, which is why it lasts.

For the ordinary grind of pastoral care, I would rather a minister read good biography than another manual. The lives of men who served long in small places will do more for your perseverance than any chapter on time management.

What to be careful with

Be wary of any book that promises church growth as a method. The New Testament gives us means of grace, not levers. Be equally wary of the current flood of leadership literature dressed in biblical language, which frequently imports business assumptions and baptises them afterwards.

I would also counsel care with authors whose theological framework quietly reshapes everything they touch. That is not a reason never to read them, but it is a reason to read them awake. My own reservations about certain popular writers are set out where I discuss how to detect false teaching.

And a practical warning: a large library can become a substitute for study rather than an aid to it. I have known men with magnificent shelves and thin sermons.

How to actually read them

Read one substantial book slowly alongside whatever you are consulting for sermon preparation. Fifteen minutes a day finishes more books than three ambitious hours on a free Saturday that never comes.

Keep a notebook, and write down not summaries but disagreements and questions. The books for pastors that shape you are the ones you argued with, and an unmarked book has usually gone in and out without touching anything.

Reread. Most ministers have read a great many books once and none of them twice, which is why so little of it sticks. A book read three times over ten years becomes part of how you think.

Reading outside your own tradition

Every minister builds a reading list that quietly confirms what he already thinks, and it takes deliberate effort to break the pattern. I would encourage a young pastor to keep at least one author on the shelf whose framework he rejects but whose scholarship he respects. You will sharpen your own position far more against a serious opponent than against a straw one.

That said, read with a settled foundation first. A man who reads widely before he has thought carefully tends to end up with opinions borrowed from whoever wrote most persuasively. Get your bearings from Scripture and a good systematic theology, then venture out. The order matters as much for books for pastors as it does for anything else.

I would also read outside theology altogether. History, biography, some fiction, something about how ordinary people actually live. The preacher who reads only theology ends up illustrating everything from theology, and his congregation lives in a world he has stopped observing. Ecclesiastes 12:12 warns that of making many books there is no end, which is a caution about weariness rather than a prohibition on breadth.

Building the library on a small budget

Most ministers I know are not well paid, and the recommended books for pastors on any published list would cost several months of income if bought at once. So build slowly and buy secondhand without embarrassment. Theological libraries are full of excellent volumes going for a few pounds because the covers look dated.

Use what is free. The whole ESV text is available at ESV.org, lexical tools are free at Blue Letter Bible, and a great deal of older scholarship is out of copyright and legally downloadable. A minister today has more study material within reach than Spurgeon did, and at a fraction of the price.

Ask your church, too. Many congregations would gladly fund a book allowance if anyone told them it existed as a need, and a deacons’ meeting that has just approved new carpet will usually not blink at fifty pounds for a commentary. It also does a congregation good to know their pastor is still studying, a point that connects to how pastors should be trained and called.

One last word on how to choose. When somebody recommends books for pastors to you, ask them which one they have actually reread, and why. That single question separates genuine recommendations from repeated ones, and it will save you a good deal of shelf space and money over a ministry.

And do not let a list intimidate you. Every experienced minister has gaps he would rather not admit to, and the books for pastors he never finished outnumber the ones he did. The point was never to have read everything. The point is that the people God has given you are fed by a man who is still learning, and that is a far lower bar than the bibliographies suggest.

So, now what?

If your shelves are thin, start with a good Bible, Ryrie’s Basic Theology, Baxter, and three commentaries on whichever book you are preaching next. That is a genuinely serviceable start and it will not bankrupt you.

If your shelves are groaning, the question is different. Which three books have actually changed how you preach in the last five years? If you cannot answer, the problem is not acquisition but attention, and no further purchase will fix it.

Either way, remember what all these books for pastors are for. They exist so that the people in front of you on Sunday hear God’s word more clearly, not so that you sound better informed. What else would we want them for?

“Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching.”

1 Timothy 4:13 (ESV)