Saving Eutychus: How to Preach God’s Word and Keep People Awake
Book Review • Gary Millar and Phil Campbell, Saving Eutychus: How to Preach God’s Word and Keep People Awake, 2nd edition (Sydney: Matthias Media, 2022), Kindle. 180 pp. $9.99.
Read time: 6 min
Introduction
Too many sermons fall flat not because they lack content but because they lack clarity and power. Gary Millar and Phil Campbell address this tension head-on in Saving Eutychus: How to Preach God’s Word and Keep People Awake. Millar, the Principal of Queensland Theological College and a seasoned Old Testament scholar, brings a commitment to biblical fidelity to the project. Campbell, a long-time pastor and former preaching lecturer at QTC, complements Millar’s academic pedigree with decades of pulpit ministry shaped by a desire for sermons that are both faithful and engaging.
Together, they craft a guide for preachers who wish to preach clear sermons that affect the heart and proclaim God’s grace in Christ. The book offers practical sermon preparation, delivery, and evaluation strategies, all rooted in an aim to proclaim Christ with winsome conviction. Millar and Campbell’s contribution stands as a helpful primer for novice preachers. Still, its lack of theological rigor limits its readership to those needing a basic introduction to the preaching task.
Summary
Saving Eutychus is an accessible guide to gospel-centered preaching that wakes the sleepy. They argue that the chief aim of preaching is not simply to retain attention but to faithfully proclaim the heart of the biblical text so that it reaches the hearts of listeners. Conversely, the preacher’s job is not merely to ensure that the Word is heard and responded to savingly but to deeply engage and delight congregations with revealed truth. They insist, “Preaching that changes the heart, then, is simply preaching that allows the words of God to speak” (31).
Millar and Campbell target pastors, seminary students, and Bible teachers, particularly those desiring to grow in communication effectiveness. The book’s structure moves logically from theological foundations to practical tools. Early chapters emphasize prayerful dependence, which the authors describe as the only posture capable of sustaining faithful preaching. They suggest that a diminished prayer life often stems from ministry self-reliance and cultural distractions (18). Millar reminds readers that “God doesn’t use people because they are gifted. He uses people (even preachers) because he is gracious” (20).
Subsequent chapters build on the premise that faithful preaching should affect the “heart”—what the authors define as the “essential me” (25). Preaching to the heart is not sentimental manipulation but proclamation that allows the words of God to speak. According to Campbell, preaching should match the emotional and rhetorical tone of the text, enabling listeners to feel and respond to the gospel’s urgency (29). Through examples from Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Second Timothy, and Hebrews, the authors show how Scripture itself is a “preaching book” designed to produce change (41).
Clarity is the preacher’s essential virtue. Campbell critiques “unnatural scripting” and recommends “natural scripting,” defined as writing in the way one naturally speaks (43). Sermons often fail because they are too dense, disorganized, or essay-like. A well-prepared sermon is governed by the big idea—the “freshly-squeezed essence of the passage” (62). This unifying idea should shape both content and delivery. They argue that application must be “what the passage is really saying,” driven by gospel motives rather than moralistic demands (69).
Preaching Christ from the Old Testament poses unique challenges. The authors recommend a “stereo reading” that holds together the text’s meaning for its original audience and contemporary believers through a biblical and theological lens (75). They present a hermeneutic modeled on 1 Corinthians 10:11—“it happened to them… but was written for us”—to ground their approach to redemptive-historical interpretation (79). Furthermore, they emphasize the need for biblical-theological gospel trajectories such as temple, sonship, and new creation to link Old Testament texts to Christ without collapsing into abstractions or moralism (83).
The authors also provide tools for improving vocal delivery, using a “delivery sphere” model of pace, pitch, and volume to encourage more expressive and agile communication (99). Finally, they advocate for communal growth through critique. Preachers need peers willing to offer “faithful wounds” to correct mishandled texts, self-centered applications, or gospel absences (108). The book concludes with a complete sermon-building walkthrough, demonstrating the movement from exegesis to application using Acts 8 as a case study (118). Saving Eutychus urges preachers to depend wholly on grace, pursue clarity, and proclaim Christ with humble and winsome boldness.
Critical Evaluation
Strengths
Millar and Campbell’s Saving Eutychus succeeds as an accessible, theologically grounded introduction to preaching, poised to equip preachers to keep their hearers awake and alert to the transforming power of the gospel. First, the authors establish their core conviction that faithful preaching must be both spiritually vibrant and scripturally rooted. They argue that “our challenge is not just to avoid being deadly dull. Our challenge is also to be faithful, accurate and clear” (14). With this idea, they set the tone for a book that consistently exhorts preachers to raise the bar toward authentic transformation.
Second, the book’s strength lies in its stylistic accessibility and pastoral humility. Millar’s transparency about personal preaching failures and the humorous framing of the book’s central metaphor of sleepy Eutychus create a self-aware tone without being self-indulgent. This tone makes the work highly relatable, especially for those early in their preaching career. In particular, their emphasis on scripting sermons in a natural, conversational voice offers an invaluable corrective to academic and stilted verbosity. Their instruction regarding “natural scripting” to enhance delivery without sacrificing theological substance is worth the purchase of the book.
Third, the authors excel in demonstrating that clarity is not mere simplicity but discipline: “Clarity comes from what you leave out. Clarity comes from focus” (47). Their top ten list for clear communication reinforces this principle with practical advice that reflects their rich pastoral experience. In this regard, the chapter on sermon delivery is notably strong. The concept of the delivery sphere—“the 3D mental playground of pace, volume and pitch”—illustrates their commitment to preaching as a communicative art (99). Ultimately, Saving Eutychus offers more than homiletical technique. It is a call to excellence in the science and art of homiletics. For all its brevity and basic approach, this book distills essential wisdom with practicality and a welcome touch of humor.
Weaknesses
While Saving Eutychus succeeds in offering practical encouragement and communication insight for preachers, its pages leave several areas underdeveloped. First, Millar and Campbell’s handling of biblical emotion is surprisingly thin, especially considering their stated aim to preach to the heart. While Millar asserts his desire for people “to be affected,” the authors offer little theological grounding for how the preacher should embody the emotional register of the biblical text (26). The affective dimension of Scripture deserves more than pragmatic treatment—it necessitates theological reflection that grounds speaking to the emotions in the text and not merely in the mode of delivery.
Second, the book’s reliance on clarity and simplification as homiletical virtues results in a method that may underemphasize interpretive depth. Their big idea model (i.e., “a single sentence summary that states the essence of a passage and its application”), while helpful for sermon focus, risks flattening biblical richness into sloganized propositions (49). Their call to “let [the Bible] loose” may presuppose that the meaning of the text is always immediately accessible, bypassing the hard work of syntactical-theological analysis or genre-sensitive exegesis (35).
Third, the book gives only surface-level attention to the role of the Holy Spirit in preaching. Despite a few theologically rich moments, the dominant emphasis remains on human technique. Though memorable, their metaphor of “keeping people awake” may reduce the preacher to a persuasive communicator rather than a Spirit-empowered herald (14). What is largely missing is a theology of preaching as a pneumatic event in which the Spirit raises the spiritually dead through the proclaimed Word. Without sustained attention to the Spirit’s work of illumination, conviction, and transformation, the book risks diminishing preaching to a refined craft rather than a divine encounter.
Conclusion
Despite its limitations, Saving Eutychus humorously and convincingly proves itself a readable, practical, and grace-saturated introduction to preaching. Millar and Campbell’s emphasis on clarity, gospel-centeredness, and rhetorical skills provides helpful guidance for preachers struggling with theological density or ineffective communication. Their humility and accessibility make the book especially useful for young pastors, seminary students, and lay preachers seeking to develop sermon-crafting acumen and delivery skills. While the absence of a robust theology of the Spirit and a more nuanced treatment of Scripture’s emotional register may frustrate those looking for a more profound homiletical theology, the book nonetheless offers a strong starting point for further study.
The book sharpened my awareness of how much clarity and delivery reflect the preacher’s spiritual posture—not just his technique. It also reminded me that the aim of preaching is not eloquence but gospel proclamation that depends wholly on grace. Faithful preaching is not less than a skill, but it is undoubtedly more. It is an invitation to encounter the God who not only awakes the sleeping but raises the dead. And that is a word preachers cannot afford to forget. ❖
Quote this Review
Footnote: Timothy J. Harris, “Saving Eutychus: How to Preach God’s Word and Keep People Awake,” Practical Theologian, February 27, 2025, https://www.practicaltheologian.com/blog/bookreview-a7cjp.
Bibliography: Harris, Timothy J. “Saving Eutychus: How to Preach God’s Word and Keep People Awake.” Practical Theologian, February 27, 2025. https://www.practicaltheologian.com/blog/bookreview-a7cjp.
