Book Review
- Jacob Collins
- May 4
- 3 min read
Engaged: Preaching that Draws People Closer to God (Lloyd Etheridge)
(LS91), The Latimer Trust, 2026
Lloyd Etheridge offers an important guide to the most important duty of the pastor: to preach. When a pastor preaches well, he brings the souls in his care closer to God. In his book, Etheridge doesn’t give public speaking tips or extol the virtues of ancient Greek rhetoric. Instead, he provides an accessible guide to the principles that underpin the way pastors should read the Bible. If pastors first learn how to read the Bible with the right end in view—to draw people closer to God—then their preaching will be fruitful, engaging, charismatic, and authoritative because it is built on the foundation of God’s Word.
Etheridge’s book is directed primarily to pastors and clergy, and he provides a host of important reminders and insights easily accessible to busy pastors and to preachers who want to elevate their teaching. However, laymen interested in biblical interpretation and the art of preaching should also pick up this book. It’s a foundational guide for Sunday School instructors, Christian school teachers, parents, seminarians, missionaries, evangelists, and mentors—in short, anyone who teaches and disciples others ought to read this latest offering from The Latimer Trust.
Etheridge begins with the foundation of biblical interpretation by asking an important question: “How do we know that we are interpreting the Bible correctly?” Though he never directly cites him, Etheridge adopts a rule like Anselm’s in the Proslogion: if a pastor’s heart is not right before God, he cannot apply the text to his people because his ministry does not consist of love.
Pastors must also be careful not to fall into any error. They do so by two related means. First, Jesus must be at the centre of every sermon. If the true message about Jesus is not the centre of the sermon, pastors will preach a false gospel. Second, the “Rule of Faith” is a guardrail to make sure modern teaching aligns with the teaching of the Church; innovative preaching is rarely correct.
Pastors can then begin the hard work of exegesis, attempting to discern what the human author and what the divine author intended, taking the entire canon of Scripture in view. Etheridge pulls from a host of preachers throughout history to make this point and to show how pastors faithfully exegete the text so they can exposit it in preaching. He begins with the earliest biblical preachers, and he walks through the history of preaching as well: Augustine, Aquinas, Irenaeus, Ignatius, Tertullian, Calvin, Cranmer, Chrysostom, Luther, and many others. He weaves them all together with an appropriate nod to modern scholarship but with the aim of making preachers who engage the soul because their teaching is built on the foundation of God’s Word.
Most useful of all, Etheridge includes practical exercises, some open-ended and others he has walked through. For example, he doesn’t leave readers at “discern the divine author’s intention.” Instead, he devotes substantial time to going through his process for doing so, pulling insights from Scripture and the Church to show pastors how they can do something similar on their own. He concludes by walking through the story of Joseph, showing how careful exegesis in turn leads to more careful preaching which can actually draw a person’s soul closer to God through the events at the end of Genesis. If preaching is to be effective, then it can’t follow its own path. Instead, it must be built on the sure foundation of Jesus Christ.
Etheridge offers pastors and laymen a useful and accessible primer on foundational truths with an eye toward preaching. The book balances theoretical and practical concerns and walks readers through biblical interpretation so that they will be better and more faithful preachers, which means they will be better pastors. Engaged should be a welcome addition to any teacher’s library.
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