An extended review of a 2025 book by Mark R. Glanville
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IVP Academic, 2025. 238 pages. $40 (ebook $17)
Following closely on the heels of his previous book Improvising Church (IVP Academic, 2024) pianist and director of the Centre for Missional Leadership in Vancouver, Mark Glanville, riffs on two themes: preaching and jazz. His message is simple: whether people attend church or not, assumptions about faith in Jesus and the authority of Christian Scripture can no longer be taken for granted. Furthermore, homilies are meant for communities.
Buoyed by a wealth of pastoral experience, Glanville maps out a preaching model, illustrated with personal stories about people. One such narrative centres on a young artist named Kate. Her account of leaving the church provides a convincing reason why preachers need to take this post-Christian societal shift seriously. The writing is expressive yet straightforward. Designed as an introductory textbook for newbie pastors and seasoned clerics, the book’s audience is broad. Its message engages both groups (to some degree) with all readers guaranteed to come away with an aha moment or two.
Glanville captures the fundamentals of expository sermonizing but swaps the traditional lens for a post-Christian one. Whereas Hadden Robinson’s classic book Biblical Preaching (now in its fourth edition!) starts by helping readers zero in on a biblical passage’s “Big Idea,” Glanville’s goes in a slightly different direction. He encourages readers to immerse themselves in the Bible, not as a quest to find next week’s sermon summary statement, but for the preacher to explore their inner lives.
Zeroing in on the pastor’s interiority, he extracts principles from Betty Pries’s The Space Between Us (Herald, 2021) citing the masked “selves” that preachers don. His insights are golden. In part two called “Craft,” Glanville details the art of approaching a text, exegeting it, and drafting the sermon. The cartoon drawings and sidebar notes are surprisingly helpful and very creative, particularly chapter seven’s “Preaching Sketchpad,” where the book’s teachings get pieced together into a single diagram.
While some chapters seem like standard expository preaching fare, “Posture” feels fresh and timely. Glanville draws on Sarah Travis’s book, Unspeakable (Cascade, 2021) to introduce trauma-informed preaching, suggesting religious instruction itself could be re-traumatizing for some people. His approach to spiritual trauma is both sensitive and constructive.
One of the book’s unique contributions is a rather novel expository concept: communal preaching. In his “Deeper Church” chapter Glanville writes, “when the church is at its best we play together in an evolving conversation” (p. 49). Glanville describes ways preachers could encourage congregational participation in sermon preparation and during the preaching event (p. 188-190). He encourages readers to “decenter ourselves as preachers” and “preach and engage in communal conversations” (p. 204).
While these are interesting ideas, those needing to reorient their preaching to this post-Christian communal framework may crave some anecdotes and additional examples as they attempt to break free from their trusty Sunday monologues.
For all the emphasis on expository preaching, one appendix on thematic preaching seemed slightly out of place for its non-expository approach. Expository preaching, with its focus on biblical texts and careful exegesis, is often contrasted with thematic or topical forms of preaching. Glanville’s thematic preaching appendix fits with the jazz motif but not with the book’s expositional emphasis. A simple explanation as to how thematic preaching fits with crafting expository sermons would have helped.
This book offers creative and practical insights that will freshen up traditional and stodgy expositional preaching. It provides some very helpful tools for the seasoned preacher, and it would be a good addition to any preaching syllabus. Glanville handles the task of explaining both a post-Christian world and the principles of expository preaching admirably, yet not without points of disconnect.
But then again, disconnect is the term Kate, the book’s guide to understanding the post-Christian mindset, uses about her experience of the church. Perhaps that is Glanville’s unwritten goal: to invite preachers to think about the traditional sermon like Kate thinks about the church. If so, a new paradigm is needed.
For preachers new and old, ready to embrace a new paradigm of preaching Christ in this post-Christian world, pick up this book. Soon you will be preaching in a new key.
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