Calvin Miller, Marketplace Preaching (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1995), 188 pp., paper, $12.99.

Calvin Miller -- professor of communications and homiletics at Southwestern Baptist Seminary and a contributing editor of Preaching -- is known for years of successful pastoral leadership in Omaha as well as for many insightful books and articles. As his new portfolio at Southwestern now includes specific time for research and writing, we may well expect more materials of significance from his pen to appear on publishers' lists in the future.

If so, Miller will need to strive hard to reach any higher plain than he has achieved with this new volume. Marketplace Preaching is truly an apogee among all the fresh orbits into which our homileticians launch preaching theory today. Here is a powerful rocket blast against pulpit boredom, and a brilliant application of new homiletic technologies which also carries a valuable payload of intensely practical ideas.

Yet unlike some others, Miller carefully crafts his new volume to be a practical instrument which enables preachers to gain the kind of shopping-mall accessibility today's congregations demand. He presents his plan in a user-friendly fashion which makes it come alive as a companion to walk beside us along our sermonic journeys. Miller helps us learn the arts of focus, relevance, motivation, and packaging.

Here is a volume which may well be described as a consumer-oriented map to pulpit reality. It honestly faces issues of personal spirituality, the orientation of themes for the contemporary ear, the values of a casual and colloquial vocabulary, and the practical usefulness of verbal pace and projection. It could also be defined as a look behind and beyond the current emphases of seeker-sensitive services based on understandings of the paradigm shifts in today's culture, but one that is liberally sprinkled with handles which the average pastor can grip with ease.

But Marketplace Preaching is much more than this. Miller clearly tells us exactly where worship, humor, illustrations, images, narratives, form and style fit best within our contemporary culture. He calls on preachers to proclaim the Good News in the spirit of the marketplace even as Christ and Paul did before them.

He illustrates his themes well, then summarizes them with in-text headings and diagrams. His pragmatic approach even extends to the drafting of a typical Monday through Sunday schedule which allows for the application of his ideas. He advocates preparing a thorough written manuscript, then abandoning it in delivery.

You can use this volume inch-by-inch to lift your sermons into a new relevance, applying a page or two to each until the skills are mastered. Miller is something of a new car salesman, who carefully introduces us to the latest model sermon just released. He ushers us into the showroom, watches us gaze in awe at the brilliant splendor of its finish, and explains the power behind its super-modern drive. He explores the delights of its low-resistance design so artfully that although we tremble at the technology, we still reach for our wallets determined to acquire it for ourselves. He convinces us that the tires will grip well in any situation and that, with such a vehicle in our possession, its traction cannot slip and skid off unbelieving heads and hearts.