A Coaching Session:
Phil Miglioratti Interviewed Mark Glanville, Author of "Improvising Church"
Dr. Mark Glanville works as the Director of the Centre for Missional Leadership at St. Andrews Hall, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. He is an Old Testament scholar, and has written five books, including
Preaching in a New Key: Crafting Expository Sermons in Post-Christian Communities.
Mark’s vocational goal is to research, teach, write, speak, and play music to nourish Christian leaders to creatively reimagine what the church can be and do in post-Christian societies, with the Bible in our hands.
Mark is also a professional jazz pianist, active on the Vancouver jazz scene. Mark’s podcast is Blue Note Theology, which he hosts from the grand piano. His personal website is MarkGlanville.org. Sample/Purchase his new book "Impovising Chruch" here>>>
"Every church needs to improvise a fresh melody on the biblical tradition,
enlivened by the creative energy of the Holy Spirit."
Mark Glanville. {and following quotes}
PHIL>>> "Improvise" is a thought-provoking word ... And I know you intend by it much more than simply adding a fresh coat of paint to the premises. Why did you select that precise term for your title?
MARK>>> Well, I am both a jazz pianist and also a pastor and a biblical scholar. but it took me some years before I realized that I was kind of engaging in the same activity when I'm playing piano and when I'm preaching. After some years I slowly began to realize both things I'm busy doing, playing jazz and leading churches, are rooted deeply in a tradition ... and yet both at the same time require improvisation on their tradition. As jazz musicians we've spent thousands of hours getting jazz music into our bones, tapping through them and humming its melodies. Each time we come to play jazz music, the very nature of the tradition is that we improvise out from the tradition. We never leave the tradition; we're playing fresh melodies on that tradition: something that hasn't been heard before.
In a similar way as churches, we are rooted deeply in the tradition of Scripture. We spend thousands of hours learning its characters, exploring its themes. Sometimes our journey with Scripture is easy, sometimes we might even rage against Scripture, and then sometimes we come to a place of peace in our relationship with Scripture. It's the very nature of Scripture that demands we improvise on the traditional Scripture, creating something new in our shared life, in our particular neighborhood. Just think of the book of Acts. This book is a series of improvisations, as, by the inspiration of the Spirit, the gospel goes out into the world from one Jewish culture to many cultures.
"I have written this book for people who are seeking a fresh vision for the church and
who are curious to see if Scripture can resource their imagination."
PHIL >>> Describe the “improvise” process; what is it and what is it not?
MARK>>> I think when it comes to doing church there are some givens; the tradition offers us some givens. For example, there is always the sacraments, there is always prayer, there's always fellowship, there's always trinitarian worship, and there's always witness. It's the same with jazz; there are a whole lot of givens. If I was sitting at the piano right now I could show you. So improvisation doesn't mean that everything is new. Rather improvisation means that, being up close and personal in our neighborhood with the Bible in our hands, were discerning how to play our part faithfully in the biblical story and we can do that with incredible creativity.
Just think of the creativity of the biblical authors! I’m an Old Testament scholar and my mind often goes to the metaphor of a covenant in the Old Testament. Anyone who knows anything about Old Testament theology knows about God's covenant with God's people. Well, the covenant didn't start with the Old Testament. The covenant or treaty was the covenants between the kings of the ancient near east. The greatest kings, say the king of neo-Assyria, would conquer a weaker nation state and would subjugate and even terrorized the conquered nation under a treaty which must be obeyed on pain of death. It was a militarised and traumatizing metaphor. But the Israelites scribes by the inspiration of the Spirit had the bright and crazy idea of taking up this metaphor of a covenant to reveal something about the grace of God! The first time the master scribe suggested this people must have thought he was crazy! And yet they took up this traumatizing metaphor of a covenant to communicate that our God is the God who gives the land instead of taking it! That kind of creativity and improvisation is found all throughout Scripture, both the old and New Testament. We need to have this kind of creativity and bold risk taking today, as we live as God’s people, displaying Jesus’ tenderness to our neighbourhoods.
"Scripture has inspired imagination of the communities of which I have been a part
and I want Scripture itself to inspire your imagination."
PHIL>>> Most readers would say they desire a fresh vision for the church but, if asked, I believe many would say they are not certain how to re-engage Scripture to reimagine how to recalibrate their ministry. What do we do first? What comes before adopting a new plan or simply adapting what someone else has designed or merely refreshing a traditional program? How do we rethink how we think about Scripture?
MARK>>> I think one place to start is to think through how we understand the gospel. In my book "Improvising Church" I speak about four key questions: One, what is the biblical story? Two what is the gospel? Three, what are biblical ethics? and Four, what is the witness of the church? I think we need to address these four questions freshly in the western church.
But let me just speak about the gospel. I think it's common when we think of the word gospel to short circuit the discussion by going to a gospel presentation that perhaps we learned as a teenager or as a young adult. In our minds, that is the gospel. But actually, we'll have a much richer answer if we define the gospel according to how that word is used in the New Testament. Check out for example Mark 1:1, 15-16. The gospel according to the New Testament writers is that now at last, in Christ, God's long-awaited Kingdom is coming in power. and this means the reestablishment of God's people for witness and the renewal of the very creation and of every aspect of human life within it. And it certainly means reconciliation between humankind and God. The gospel is as wide as the creation itself.
This has huge implications for the church because it means we are called to live in such a way as to bear witness to Jesus' healing restoring rain, and we can be a conduit, a pipeline of that healing Jesus is bringing to the whole world, in our life, word, and deed.
"I am convinced that the key to unlocking fresh imagination is not a new strategy
but a rich understanding of the biblical story,
alongside with embracing the invitation to improvise on the tradition.
I want Scripture itself to inspire your imagination (so) this book contains personal stories
of mistakes and delights, experiments, discoveries."
PHIL>>> Our theological foundation is constructed by reading biblical content and researching scholarly instruction. How do we renew our mind to be open to the inspiration of the Spirit that is embedded in "stories, experiments, and discoveries?"
MARK>>> One way to do this is to read the Bible together as a community In my book on preaching, called preaching in a new key, I encourage preachers to ensure that in every sermon there is some opportunity for people to actively engage the biblical text themselves. We can use the sermon time to open up people's imagination, so that we're reading the Bible together. For example, sometimes when I'm preaching, I'll invite people to turn to one or two people next to them to answer a question about the text. I'm especially interested in how the text is opening people’s imagination. What kind of imagination do we have for the neighborhood? How can we display the tenderness of Jesus in response to this passage?
We can get really creative as preachers. For example, we can invite people to write down on a post-it note a prayer for the neighborhood, or a prayer for our church. People can post those sticky notes on the sanctuary wall during prayer after the sermon. I think dialogue is crucial. By that I mean an expectation that people's voices will be heard, and people can bring their best ideas to the table.
"Many passionate lay Christians are aching for more from the church.
They know intuitively that the compassion and solidarity they see in the life of Jesus
should be seen in the life of the church but they do not find it there.
Many have an instinct to leave the church."
PHIL>>> At what point does my quest become more than my personal vision? How do I identify and when do I engage other appropriate stakeholders in the process? How do I invite them to participate? How do I serve/lead in that process?
MARK>>> In my book, "Improvising Church," I have a chapter entitled "Leader Full." I argue that the most appropriate leadership pathway for a church according to Scripture, is a pattern of leadership where every person can bring their best skills and gifts to the table, where key leadership is open to the ideas of others. This is a kind of dynamic community where we hold different aspects of Christian discipleship for one another.
Just to illustrate, let me tell you about my neighbours–we all used to attend the same church (I live in east Vancouver in Canada). Our household, the Glanville household, has gone pretty deep in refugee welcome. The house next door is very engaged in just food systems. They partner with local farmers and bring food into our neighborhood, so that about 30 households can eat the food grown on local farms. And then the next house up the hill has turned their garage into an urban prayer space. They hold hours of prayers, and we can book that space for prayer. As a pastor in our community, the way that our three households functioned really challenged the ways that I conceived of myself as a leader. I started to realize that as the pastor, I'm not necessarily the expert on everything. I don't know everything about food systems for example. And I have plenty to learn about prayer. A vibrant Christian community is a leader full community and so as leaders we need to find ways to have that soft, relational touch, to make space for other people to bring their best gifts and imagination to the table. We need to make space for other voices. To be sure there is plenty of space for key leaders, but the role of key leaders is to bring out the best in the community—to gather the community so that we can discuss together the pressing issues that are facing our congregation as we bear witness in our neighborhood.
√Reimagine.Network Related Resource
"The post-Christendom turn demands that we reexamine our practices as the church.
We can't simply assume that all we do as churches is demanded by Scripture,
for so much of what we do is cultural."
PHIL>>> What are the barriers we must remove if we are to truly improvise ministry-transforming ideas? What scriptural interpretation or traditional teaching must we unlearn in order to reimagine paradigm-shifting insights?
MARK>>> I think one shift that we need to make, is to understand the Bible's communal address. we need to understand that while we in the West list a hyper individualistic society, the people of the Bible lived in Mediterranean communal societies. The Bible is relentlessly addressing and shaping communities. So every single biblical book in the Old and New Testament was shaping God's people into a community, or as a family, to live as a sign to Jesus' tenderness in their particular time and place. Just think of the way the apostle Paul begins each of his letters: to the Saints in Galatia, to the Saints in Thessalonica, to the Saints in Corinth. To be sure the Bible addresses us as individuals, but this is secondary. First the Bible addresses us as communities.
So as leaders as preachers and as Christians we need to understand that the Bible is shaping us as the particular people sent to do life together in our neighborhood, to show our neighbors the tenderness of Jesus in the way we live together and the way we lived for our city. That shift from an individualistic reading of Scripture to reading Scripture as a community is a crucial shift and it is essential for faithful Bible reading.
" The shift to post-Christian societies is here to stay.
And the disjunction people feel between their vision for justice, beauty, and community won't go away."
PHIL>>> One more coaching tip to equip us to equip the saints for this important work.
MARK>>> Every Christian leader knows this is a very fraught time culturally. The culture wars can mean it's very difficult to read the Bible, to preach, and to lead in a way that's pastorally sensitive but also faithful. I think the most important pathway through this current dilemma is to ensure that as leaders, as preachers, and as Christians we are displaying unapologetically the compassion and tenderness of Jesus. This compassion, this love is found throughout Scripture. In fact it is the heart of the biblical story. Just think of Deuteronomy 15:4, “there are to be no poor among you.” Or think of how Jesus lived: he had a reputation for eating with all the wrong people—who are actually the right people through the eyes of the Kingdom of God. Luke 15:1-2, “this man befriended sinners and eats with them!” In the biblical story God's people are always to bring the weakest among them into the centre of the community. That is God's way. That is at the heart of biblical ethics, seen up close and personal in Jesus. We need to preach for that, we need to lead for that, and we need to live like that.
" In light of Jesus' ministry, for you,
I don't pray for a large church,
I pray for a faithful church."
PHIL>>> Mark, write a prayer for us, asking the Holy Spirit to coach us on a Scripture -fed journey of improvising the why-and-how to build and become the church” …
MARK>>> I pray but the Spirit would fill you as a Christian, as a leader, and perhaps as a preacher, with the compassion of Jesus, with the wisdom of Jesus, with the relational intuition of Jesus, with the love of beauty and creativity of our creator ,and with patience to love your people on the slow journey of pastoral leadership.
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