Reading Time: 8 minutes
When Preaching Sounds Like Jazz
When I was in my twenties, I took saxophone lessons . . . for about a year. I had become enamored with the great jazz saxophone players like Bird himself, Charlie Parker. I loved the soulful tones of David Sanborn’s smooth jazz, and I accidentally bought a Kenny G. album when I didn’t return a card from Columbia House fast enough. The masters pulled me in, and I wanted to play like them!
Then I started saxophone lessons. My very patient teacher had me work through the scales repeatedly. I got them down, but playing the scales sounded nothing like the music that drew me to the instrument. My attempts to add hot licks to “Polly Wolly Doodle” were unimpressive. My saxophone lay forgotten in its gig bag a year later, until I passed it on to the next student.
Years later, I realized that the same fascination and frustration I had with the saxophone also plagued my preaching. I wanted to preach like the masters but struggled to practice my scales. Instead of doing a poor imitation of Fred Craddock, I should have focused on the fundamentals to find my own voice.
“Preaching in a New Key” Gets Me
Mark R. Glanville is associate professor of pastoral theology at Regent College. In a previous lifetime, though, he was a professional jazz pianist. In Preaching in a New Key, he brings those years of practice and performance to the fundamentals of preaching. He speaks to those desperate to find their voice behind the pulpit. As Glanville describes it, Preaching in a New Key “is an introductory textbook that teaches the craft of expository preaching from the ground up. It is also written for practitioners who have been traveling the road of preaching for a long time and recognize that it is time to reset their compasses” (page 7).
Resetting Our Compasses
I’m a bit of an explorer myself. Like Daniel Boone, I’ve never been lost, “but I was bewildered once for three days.” So I appreciate Glanville’s compass metaphor. We reset a compass when we’ve lost our bearings or realize our map no longer reflects the terrain.
In today’s cultural climate, the landmarks of Christendom have faded, and the path forward isn’t always clear. Glanville suggests it’s time for preachers to do more than reorient themselves. It’s time to chart a new course entirely. “The cultural shift,” he writes, “requires much fresh imagination for the church in all its aspects, with the Bible in our hands” (p. 21). That doesn’t mean abandoning biblical literacy, but reimagining how Scripture can form communities of hope in neighborhoods where its authority is no longer assumed.
This is not just course correction—it’s exploration.
Charting the Course
Glanville begins his book’s journey with this exploration. In the introduction, he proposes that responding to the cultural shift of our post-Christian world requires two key shifts in our preaching.
First, we must acknowledge the complexity of faith in this season and learn to hold out the Word of life with sensitivity and effectiveness. The assumptions of Christendom no longer shape the world into which we preach. Our listeners carry skepticism, inherited trauma, and deeply personal questions—often without the framework or vocabulary for faith that earlier generations shared. Preaching in this context demands careful, Spirit-led nuance.
Second, Glanville argues that preaching should aim to nourish communities of hope, rather than individual private spiritual needs. This is a crucial and often overlooked distinction. In his words, we are called to form “communities that receive and extend the healing of Christ in particular neighborhoods.” The pulpit is not just a platform for personal encouragement—it’s a tool for communal formation, shaping people who live out the good news together.
Finding the Groove
Glanville structures Preaching in a New Key in four parts. I especially appreciated where he began—not with sermon structure or exegetical technique, but with the preacher’s heart. He opens with a reminder that too often the pulpit becomes a place where unprocessed pain spills out.
He caringly puts words to a feeling I’ve found myself processing while listening to some preachers. “Are you called to preach, or are you offloading trauma?” Glanville insists that before we dare speak into the lives of others, we must first examine our own.
It’s a wise and timely starting point. In an increasingly trauma-informed world, the call to self-awareness in preaching isn’t indulgent—it’s essential. There’s an echo of “Physician, heal thyself” here. If our souls are unattended, our sermons can become more about projection than proclamation. Glanville’s invitation to look inward before stepping outward is a valuable and necessary reset.
From this place of personal honesty, the book expands to the life of the church and the culture it inhabits. He invites us to preach with theological precision, cultural attentiveness, and communal imagination.
Tools for the Journey
One of Preaching in a New Key’s strengths is the tools it provides to equip the preacher. Each chapter ends with reflection questions and practical takeaways, making the book an excellent resource for a preaching cohort, a staff team, a seminary classroom, or around a coffee table. The prompts invite honest dialogue and real-world application. They’re designed not just to be read but wrestled with.
He also provides downloadable resources, including his Preaching Sketchpad, a visual and conceptual tool to help organize sermon preparation. It’s clear this method works well for him and may be what some preachers need to reframe or refresh their process. Personally, I’ve got my own approach (and I’m sure you do too). But don’t dismiss the Sketchpad too quickly. If you can’t adopt, adapt.
Glanville hits on elements you may not be considering—aesthetic choices, emotional posture, and community-based application—all of which deserve attention.
It’s easy to fall back into bad habits in preaching. Tools like the ones Glanville provides offer a fresh invitation to preach better sermons and approach preaching with renewed intention.
Not Everyone Likes Jazz
The great post-Christian cultural critic, Sheldon Cooper, once said, “I’ve always thought I hated jazz. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it’s great to hear all the notes at once!”
Honestly? I get it.
Reading Preaching in a New Key made me stop and ask myself, “Do I really like jazz?” Glanville leans hard into the jazz metaphor—so hard, in fact, that at times it nearly collapses under its own improvisation. In Chapter 9, he encourages readers to pause and listen to Charlie Parker’s “Donna Lee.” I found it hard to focus on the book while Charlie’s dizzying solo lines blared in the background. The experience left me wondering if my jazz appreciation was more theoretical than practical.
While creative and insightful, the metaphor gets pushed past its helpful limits. More than once, I found myself rolling my eyes and muttering, “Okay, we get it. Jazz.” It’s not that the metaphor fails—it just doesn’t always serve the clarity or accessibility of the book. This is especially true for readers who don’t share the same musical reference points.
How Many Licks Does It Take?
One example where the metaphor might be pushed too far comes in the section titled “Hone the Craft: Eight Licks.” Glanville offers “eight ‘licks’ that are super helpful for sermons calibrated to post-Christian neighborhoods.” Among them are “a smarts lick,” “a heart lick,” and “a participatory lick.”
Now look—I’m a grown man. I’ve preached for years. I hold a doctorate in preaching. But reading through this list, I realized I have the sense of humor of a twelve-year-old boy! The terminology may be musically accurate, but at a certain point, the metaphor distracts more than it illuminates.
My only other criticism echoes my friend Rob O’Lynn in his excellent (and considerably shorter) review of Preaching in a New Key. “I would have liked to see at least one full manuscripted sermon.” I agree, Rob! For all the creativity and conviction in Preaching in a New Key, I longed to hear it in action. I searched YouTube and podcast directories, hoping to hear his preaching voice and see how all this jazz plays out in a real sermon. A full example would have helped ground the metaphor and made the application more concrete for readers trying to translate theory into practice.
The Tag
Many years ago, I committed to reading at least two homiletics books a year. Whether or not you’ve made a similar promise, Mark Glanville’s Preaching in a New Key is well worth your time. It offers not only tools to sharpen your sermon craft but insights that speak to the preacher’s heart and deepen the connection with the congregation.
One of the book’s most important contributions comes early, in Glanville’s call for trauma-informed preaching. In a culture shaped by visible and invisible wounds—inside and outside the church—this call is timely and necessary. Rather than making preaching more clinical or guarded, it invites us to preach more compassionately, with open eyes and open hearts.
On page 5, Glanville writes, “The art of preaching grows out of a lifetime of serving, listening, studying, making, practicing justice, growing in self-awareness, forgiving, and being forgiven.” As I learned from my brief foray into saxophone lessons, there’s no shortcut to becoming a jazz musician. And after years of writing and preaching sermons, I’ve discovered the same is true for preaching—it takes time, discipline, and soul work.
Coda
Near the end of the book, Glanville quotes Fred Craddock, “When I was a young man, I wanted to be a good preacher. When I was a middle-aged man, I wanted to be a great preacher. Now that I am an old man, I just want to be a Christian.” I’m quickly approaching that “old man” stage myself. But instead of yelling at kids to get off my lawn, I find myself drawn to younger preachers. I’m eager to encourage them, walk alongside them, and offer whatever guidance I can.
Mark Glanville has given us an excellent tool for that journey.
No matter what stage you’re in—whether you’re learning your scales or riffing with confidence—there’s something valuable in this book for you.
