May I highly recommend Charles Bridges' volume on the Christian ministry for all interested in that calling. It never ceases to challenge and edify. The Banner of Truth website has the following:
Description: One of the best and most comprehensive books ever written on the work of the ministry. The revival of the Church seems to be closely connected with the condition of its ministry. Bridges sub-titled the study of the Christian Ministry, 'An Inquiry into the Causes of its Inefficiency', and, rightly used, it is well suited to promote a faithful and effective ministry. Bridges begins by considering the general and personal cause of ministerial ineffectiveness, and goes on to examine comprehensively preaching and pastoral work. This book was one of the few which the godly Robert Murray M'Cheyne took with him to the Holy Land, and, in its field, it is without an equal. Charles Bridges (1794-1869) was one of the leaders of the Evangelical party in the Church of England in the last century. He was vicar of Old Newton, Suffolk, from 1823 to 1849, and later of Weymouth and Hinton Martell in Dorset. "The Christian Ministry" is Bridges' best-known literary work, but his expositions of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Psalm 119 are also highly valued. "To enlighten the mind and affect the heart are the two main ends of the Christian ministry. The first demands wisdom and plainness, the second fervency, as the spirit of scriptural preaching. This combination exhibits the minister as 'a burning and a shining light' ... imparting the spiritual light of divine truth, as well as the spiritual heat of divine fervour ... Nothing, says Baxter, is more indecent than a dead preacher speaking to dead sinners the living truth of the living God." CHARLES BRIDGES, in "The Christian Ministry," p. 318.
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