Improvising Church: Scripture as the Source of Harmony, Rhythm, and Soul

by Mark R. Glanville

Plenty of books diagnose our post-Christian malaise. Here's a dynamic solution. The post-Christian cultural turn is creating the conditions for a crisis of confidence in the church and in pastoral ministry. While such changes can be disruptive and disconcerting, our new cultural reality makes the present moment a uniquely exciting time to reimagine churches that bear witness to Christ. How do we move beyond cookie-cutter approaches (which may have worked in the past) to building the creative, compassionate, and incarnational churches we long for? Biblical scholar and accomplished jazz pianist Mark Glanville plays with a metaphor of improvisation to chart twelve themes as the key "notes" on which Christian communities play as they bear witness to God in the world today. Building on these two dynamic traditions―jazz music and Christian community― Improvising Church unfolds a biblical, practical, and inventive vision for churches seeking to receive and extend the healing of Christ.

Genres: Christian, Ecclesiology, Church

224 pages, Paperback

Published February 13, 2024

About the author

Dr Mark R Glanville is Associate Professor of Pastoral Theology at Regent College, Vancouver, and an Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) scholar. Mark's recent scholarship explores dynamics of kinship and ethics in the Old Testament. Prior to joining Regent, Mark pastored for 14 years in both Canada and Australia. Mark has been bi-vocational, combining reflective (justice-seeking) pastoring with biblical scholarship. He has published in numerous top tier biblical studies journals (including JBL, JSOT, and CBQ). He is an Aussie, and he likes to express his masculinity by snapping a crocodile's neck with two fingers. Mark is also a trained jazz pianist who plays on the Vancouver jazz scene.

Reviews

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book really is a primer on how to embark on church ministry in post-Christendom, a practical vision for church in our new era. It’s so good.

Mark’s writing is energetic, yet thoughtful. Reading it is like listening to a jazz show, alternating between tapping my feet and thoughtfully meditating on the music. My copy is littered with penciled check marks, hearts, exclamation marks, and points to come back to. I love the balance between theology, hard-earned reflections on sociology, and practical advice.

This book is such a resource for both church leaders and laity. I hope it is widely read!

(Mark leads the MDiv program at my seminary. His approach to pastoral leadership is one of main reasons I switched into the MDiv program (and one of the main reasons I’m still glad to be at this seminary).

[Ben Fair · Rating 4 out of 5]

As an Australian pastor and jazz pianist myself, I really connected well to Mark’s creative perspective! Well done!

[Panda Incognito · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book about pastoral ministry flows from the author's experience in ministry and his background as a jazz musician. He uses jazz music as a metaphor for Scripture and Christian living, and although this flows very naturally for him, this framing device did nothing for me. I'm not a musician, and I barely scraped by in my childhood piano lessons. However, I at least have a passing knowledge of music theory. That helped me understand some of the jazz stuff, but other parts were still too esoteric for me. Someone with little to no knowledge about music theory will struggle to follow these all-pervasive metaphors.

The author shares some interesting perspectives about how churches can reach their communities and pivot to a more organic, less programmed version of church life. He explores various teachings from Scripture and shares personal illustrations to show how churches can better engage lay leadership, meet more community needs, and become an incarnational presence in the community, instead of an insular special interest group.

There's some really helpful stuff here, but the author's concerns divide along predictably political lines, and parts of the book seemed really heavy on virtue-signaling. Surprisingly, I didn't feel that way about the chapter about colonialism. Despite the hot-button topic, that one feels very thoughtful and sincere. However, many other elements of the book felt very preachy and politically holier than thou, and even though the author argues that these issues all connect to biblical teaching and aren't merely political, he shows his hand by not addressing issues of human life that fall into more politically conservative categories. If this book was really just focused on how biblical teaching applies to all of life, then it would have cast a much broader and more nuanced net, instead of focusing on the party line.

Also, some aspects of this book seem out-of-touch with the amount of care and effort it takes just to keep a smaller church running, especially when members have major needs. Glanville gives lots of examples of things his church has done, and although he writes about how people shouldn't look at the size of a congregation to determine its success, his practical exhortations seem geared towards medium-to-large churches who have sufficient members and economic resources to run all of these community initiatives and social justice ministries, in addition to providing all kinds of support to current members.

The author's vision-casting for all the social justice initiatives the church should be involved in doesn't take into account the kinds of limitations that many of his readers will be facing, and his encouragement for pastors to be bi-vocational doesn't really help with this. Although bi-vocational ministry can certainly be the right fit for some, or can be necessary for a season of a church's life, splitting your time, energy, and emotion between a secular job and ministry can easily lead to burnout, and I don't think that the author made a good case for why he thinks it's a better approach.

He encourages people to have a "leader-full" church with major member involvement, and that can certainly expand the volume and types of ministries that a church can offer, but even when pastors aren't leading everything, they still need to provide oversight of something so large-scale, and the thought of trying to do everything this author suggests while being bi-vocational sounds like a recipe for disaster for me, even though I'm sure that some people could make it work.

Also, even though he has a lot to say about why it's so valuable to empower lay leadership, he doesn't get into the logistical challenges of this. I agree that it's important for church members to be involved in leadership and ministry in the church, but Glanville doesn't address how to determine someone's fitness for a lay leadership position, or how to handle performance issues and other challenges over time. Instead, in his admonition for pastors to avoid micro-management, he advises an approach that seems too hands-off to me.

The Bible is very strict and serious about who ought to be a pastor, and even though lay leaders aren't in the same role, they should still be held to high standards, and should be accountable to the church's pastoral leadership. My concern with Glanville's vision, at least in the way it's presented, is that it can lead to a bunch of lay leaders being petty tyrants of their own little kingdoms, splitting a church into factions with different people controlling the turf of the ministries they oversee. Although I agree with the overall vision of empowering lay leaders in the church, I think this book should have offered warnings about the downsides, and potential guardrails for people to consider when implementing this approach.

There were many different things that I disagreed with throughout the book, but one of the ones that rankled the most was about how men should cultivate a sense of maternal nurture. Glanville presents the concept of being paternal solely in the negative light of "paternalism," and makes a really weak argument against the concept of spiritual fatherhood, based on the idea that God is our Father. Of course, he ignores all of the many Scripture passages that show men in fatherly roles towards one another in the church, or which explicitly command that.

I found this whole section extremely off-putting, poorly reasoned, and offensive. Men can be nurturing, caring, protective, and kind out of their masculinity, because all of these virtues are part of being a good man. A man does not have to act like a mother in order to show love and care, and Glanville's socially and politically motivated argument ignores the immense need that many people have for a healthy, God-honoring father figure in their lives.

Overall, this book has some interesting points, but I found the framing device overly esoteric, thought that parts of the book were insufficiently practical, and wished that the author had addressed a broader range of topics and issues, instead of focusing on themes that fit with his own political persuasion. There were also multiple things he said that I thought were blatantly untrue and unhelpful. As a whole, this book is a mixed bag, and even though I found aspects of it insightful, this would be very low on my list of pastoral ministry books to recommend.

I received a free copy from the publisher through Amazon Vine, and am voluntarily leaving an honest review.

[Brian Fraser · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Improvising Church is like spending an evening in a storied jazz club. You will hear a new composition played over three sets, each set featuring four pieces. What you expect, this being a jazz club, is respect for traditional themes integrated with courage in exploring new ways of being entranced by the sanctifying significance of the call of the message and your responses. You will get all of that and more by reading this book.

Mark is an accomplished jazz pianist and a provocative theologian. In this book, he is writing about and for the church, using jazz as a helpful analogy for seeing churches as a traditioned, improvised, nuanced, conversational incarnational art forms in post-Christian societies. He is inviting us into a dance composed and choreographed in triplets, a jazz “feel” that many experience as sacred:
• there’s a triplet in his formation as a pastoral theologian – the missional conversations that are reformulating the church, especially with Leslie Newbigin and Michael Goheen, his scholarly work on kinship in the Old Testament, and his collegial leadership in incarnational church communities;
• there’s a second triplet in the three sets into which he has organized this prose concert – harmony, rhythm, and soul; and
• there’s a third triplet from which his creativity in and with the Christian faith proceeds and is sustained – the Holy Trinity of Father, Son, and Spirit (though he has an intriguing sidebar on the gendering of God on pgs.115-116).

In the set/section on harmony, his pieces/chapters explore:
1. how the story of Scripture grants us an understanding of God's recovery of the divine purposes for all of the creation and the whole of human life, and of God calling a people to bear witness to God’s redeeming love in Christ;
2. how incarnational communities are full of members who are empowered to use their gifts and creativity within the community and neighbourhood;
3. why particular places of Christ’s grace and truth are crucial in cultures of dislocation, disassociation, and loneliness; and
4. why it is important for churches to excel at creating art and living artistically.

In the set/section on rhythm, his pieces/chapter explore:
1. practicing the flow of festive worship (lament, gift, thanksgiving & creative kinship) in the overlapping polyrhythms of the biblical story, our church communities, our neighbourhoods, and the global and historical church;
2. composing a new shared kinship in eating, dwelling, resting, playing, caring for creation, advocacy, celebration, and grief across cultural and economic barriers;
3. finding fresh vision for compassionate witnessing in the biblical motifs of healing, kinship, and maternal nurture; and
4. fostering an enhanced appreciation for and appropriation of God’s covenant with creation in Genesis 9 and the responsibilities that come with a deepening realization of our interdependencies with all creation.

In the set/section on soul, his pieces/chapters explore:
1. cultivating a genuine improvising voice that aligns mind, heart, face, and speech in speaking about Jesus with coherence and acting with Jesus in compassion;
2. convening conversations within incarnational communities that generate maturity in pursuing what God is calling them to do in their neighbourhoods;
3. receiving with humility Christ’s healing by learning about the ongoing story of colonialism and reordering our lives to live differently together; and
4. nourishing communities of prayer.

The conversations that led Mark to these compositions are broad in their scope and rich in their inspirations and insights. Each piece/chapter will introduce you to some of the most provocative voices reformulating the missioning of the Western church today. That is a gift to every reader and their communities. I especially appreciated his pieces/chapters on decolonization (‘Sins of Our Kin’) and leadership (‘Leader-Full’).

Mark and I come from different streams of Presbyterianism and different experiences of jazz and church. There are interpretations of the gospel and the church’s calling that we will continue in dialogue about. That’s the jazz of companionship in Christ. It emerges around a core question. “What would it feel like if we understood and undertook it this way?”

We’d love to have you join us in that ongoing conversation about the best ways in our various contexts of being ambassadors of the forgiving and reconciling love of our Creator revealed most clearly to us in their Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, and generating a transformative groove in our midst through the energy of the Holy Spirit. A good place to start is to read this provocative book and convene conversations about it among your colleagues and neighbours. Then let us know what the Spirit is improvising with and through you.

[Trisha Hatfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal! I cannot say enough good things about this book. At first I was like oh no, he's going to keep using jazz concepts I don't understand, but as I went on he totally melded them together and it made sense. I can't wait to pass it along to a friend.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is a encouraging and inspirational book full of exciting and new ways of Christian living.

[David Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

In „Improvising Church“, Mark Glanville shares his vision of practical ecclesiology and, as an acclaimed jazz pianist, weaves in some vignettes from his life as a musician.

This book was awarded as The Englewood Review of Books Best Theology Book of 2024.

Overall I quite liked his vision of church and found his voice and approach faithful and commonsensical. I guess I expected something different, though, and would have loved to have more reflections on music in the book.

[John Dekker · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was intriguing to me, since I have a similar background to the author. We were both ordained as ministers in the Presbyterian Church of Australia, before moving to North America, where our wives were born. We both have experience in both Old Testament academic work and pastoral ministry. There the similarities end, however. Glanville is really into jazz music, and uses its concepts to structure his book - I am not, and the metaphor does nothing for me. Most significantly, Glanville describes his new approach to preaching after he had received criticism from his congregation: "When I came to preach, I sat down on a stool instead of standing... I simply *offered* my sermon" (emphasis original). It is this that has led Glanville into all sorts of wokeness and liberalism, such as backing away from the metaphor of Christ's kingship (p. 107) and male pronouns for God (p. 116). This book feels like it ought to be part of the emerging church movement, which flourished twenty years ago, and Glanville seems to be late to the party.