Bryson's book will not only find a place in college and seminary classrooms; it will find a welcome place in the library of any preacher seeking to preach the Word more effectively.

Robert H. Spain, Getting Ready to Preach (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 104 pages, paper.

In this slim volume, Robert Spain seeks to encourage preachers to work more effectively and efficiently in their task of proclamation. The title is self-explanatory: the majority of the text offers counsel for the preacher in preparing to stand in the pulpit.

Spain, a former pastor and now Bishop in the United Methodist Church, appropriately begins with the preacher's divine calling. Ministry is worthless unless God has placed His call upon the minister. Spain quotes Pierce Harris: "The ministry is a poor profession but it's a tremendous calling."

Ten "roadblocks to effectiveness" in preaching are cited, including: isolation, callousness, popularity, procrastination, busyness, dryness, compromise, attitude, Holy of Holies ("our familiarity with holy things in general that we who are clergy touch and live near every day"), and sin. The treatment of each topic is brief -- a bit superficial at times -- and often leaves the reader wishing for a deeper analysis than this brief volume provides. One often wishes that Spain, an experienced pastor, would have "dug a little deeper" in exploring issues of such concern to fellow pastors.

The author describes the preacher 's office and needed equipment -- something that may be helpful for beginning pastors -- and discusses keys to successful work habits, such as "Set Your Priorities Carefully." Once again, readers may be frustrated at the lack of depth; for example, they are told they need to set priorities but receive no suggestions or ideas for how to go about that task.

Spain suggests several ideas for creating illustration and sermon files. Probably the strongest part of the book is the chapter on designing a sermon plan; here Spain offers detailed ideas and examples that will help preachers in considering their own planning process.

The few pages dealing with the actual sermon preparation process are so brief as to be nearly useless; they would have been better used in expanding on the ideas earlier in the book, and leave sermon construction to another book.

As a book for beginning preachers, Spain's text has much to commend it. It will be a helpful introduction to a number of concepts. Experienced preachers, however, will find it useful mostly for the collection of interesting illustrations scattered through its pages.

Book Notes

Richard L. Eslinger, editor, Intersections: Post-Critical Studies in Preaching (Grand Rapids: Wm. B Eerdmans, 1994), 156 pages, paper, $12.99.

Intersections is a fascinating collection of essays by a diverse team of mainline scholars. The title reflects the interplay of homiletics, theology and literary criticism which takes place in these essays, including chapters by Thomas Long, Tom Troeger, David Buttrick and others. My favorite was the concluding essay, "Toward a Hermeneutics of the Solo Savior: Dirty Harry and Romans 5-8" by New Testament scholar Bernard Brandon Scott -- a fascinating discussion of some of the mythological ideas implicit in the "Dirty Harry" films of Clint Eastwood, contrasting those ideas with Pauline concepts.