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An Undeceptions Podcast.
Right.
Woo! Thanks, mate. All right, mate. That's awesome. Well done. Thanks for joining us. So, I mean, this is a good place to pick up some... I'm chatting with Mark Glanville, Dr. Mark Glanville. He's an Aussie living in Vancouver. By day, he's a Bible scholar at Regent College. By night, he's a jazz muso and a good one.
Between researching, teaching, rehearsing, performing and being a family man, Mark found time to write Improvising Church: Scripture as the Source of Harmony, Rhythm and Soul. It's about Christianity in a post-Christian culture.
And it draws on the lessons of music in general and jazz in particular to probe how Christians and doubters alike can make sense of God, of Christ and even the church. Mark is sitting at his piano, his happy place, for the entire unscripted interview.
So, I mean, this is a good place to pick up straight away. Let's talk about jazz. Yeah. Okay. Because the joke among musicians, usually lower level musicians like me, is that if you hit a wrong note in a performance, you just go, oh yeah, that was some jazz. You know, anything goes, anything goes, but there's more to jazz than that. Right, right. That's jazz. That's good. That's great. Yeah. I heard a joke the other day, John, a rock musician plays three chords,
to an audience of 3,000, a jazz musician plays 3,000 chords to an audience of three. I believe it. That's totally right. I believe it. That's a good place to start. Jazz is rooted in tradition, and that's what a lot of people maybe don't realize, that jazz musicians are playing out of the tradition, and we spend literally thousands of hours, maybe 5,000 hours playing
rooting ourselves in the tradition, learning to sing its harmonies, to tap its rhythms. And each time we come to play, we're being creative. We're playing out of that tradition creatively, but yet it's deeply rooted in a tradition. And the reason why my book's called Improvising Church is because as Christians doing church, we're rooted in that tradition of scripture, a tradition that, in my view, a bit like jazz, demands improvisation.
Yeah, I mean, that's the thing that people often don't know about jazz is that it is super highly technical and grounded in the highest level of musical knowledge. And it's precisely that rigour that gives you the freedom, right? It's not a contradiction of the rigour.
It gives it the depth, you know, it gives it that depth. The jazz musician knows straight away if what's being played is from the tradition. And if someone hasn't learned the tradition, but we're on the bandstand together, it drives us nuts if they're not immersed in it. And that tradition, you know, at the heart of it, as you probably know, is the blues.
The blues started in the 19th century on North American plantations. It was born from the work songs of slaves. It was a counterintuitive mix of African work songs, field hollers, and even hymns. It created this unique sound of what they called blue notes, those out-of-key notes that give the blues its emotional depth.
The blues likely started around the Mississippi Delta and then travelled upriver to the cities. As it spread, it evolved and laid the groundwork for modern styles of music like R&B, rhythm and blues. Think Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, and also rock and roll. But here's my point. The blues also gave us jazz.
Jazz emerged in the early 20th century in New Orleans. It blended Afro blues rhythms with European instruments and harmony, but it ditched the classical rigidity and it championed improvisation and personal expression, which is not very classical. The history of jazz is directly linked to the history of black America.
It's that black American music of the blues that's birthed in the horrific reality of slavery in North America. But that genius, that resilience, I mean, just to illustrate, if I may, you know, the blues, you know.
And jazz is always connected to the blues, or the rhythm, the harmony is always coming out of that. And that's the tradition that we learn, but it takes thousands of hours.
I've got a question, though, that arises directly from that. Because people will think of church, you know, all those God-botherers getting together, as more like classical music, you know, strict, highly organized, hierarchical. Some might even say it's not even classical music. It's more like scales. Yeah, right, right, right. Rigid and boring. Right, right, right. So in what sense do you think church for post-Christian world
could and should be a little more like jazz. It's of course the nature of Scripture itself, John, and there's lots of lenses we could go to, but the lens for me as an Old Testament scholar is that the biblical authors themselves were incredible improvisers, incredibly creative. So for example, going to the Old Testament, because that's my area of expertise, think of the Old Testament metaphor of the covenant, which no one would disagree is a central metaphor in the Old Testament.
A covenant is just a binding agreement between parties with various obligations to each other. It's sort of a contract. You could find yourself in a financial covenant, a marriage covenant, or even, pretty often, military covenants. In the ancient Near East, powerful nations would enter into covenants with less powerful nations. We'll keep you safe if you give us lots of tribute. That's the basic idea.
Covenants could be brutal, but Mark points out that the Old Testament uses covenant language and gives it a really creative twist.
Yes, God's covenant with Israel wasn't really an agreement between equals, but the striking thing is the way God continues to pursue his side of the covenant despite the constant covenant breaking of the people on the other side of the agreement, the Israelites. And that is basically the whole Old Testament story.
I know people get lost in the details and they think it's so depressing and violent and so on, but the basic plot of the Old Testament is awesome. It's basically that God intends to keep his side of the bargain, to bless the world through the Israelites, even though his people fall short of the covenant stipulations.
The first time the master scribe in ancient Israel suggested that, they must have thought he was batty. They must have thought he was nuts. But here it is, this central Old Testament metaphor, you know, so creative, so creative. And in a similar way, you know, with the Bible in our hands, for our context today and the diverse context, I'm in the West, I'm in Canada, I'm an Aussie and a Canadian, where
improvising church in the sense that with the Bible in our hand, we're playing our part in the biblical story with creativity in ways that are meaningful today in the name of Jesus. You also think, just by the by, that churches should be more open to the arts. This is a giant question I
I know, but where did the church go wrong on the arts and what can be done about it? Man, I'm not sure, you know, like it's easy to be simplistic, you know, you say the rationalism of the Enlightenment or something like that. I'm not sure what went wrong. I mean, there's maybe, you know, it's the iconoclasm, the suspicion of visual images back in the Reformation. People often cite that and maybe that's a part of it.
But I think that the creativity of the Bible itself, you know, the tremendous creativity of the Bible itself, it shows me that we need to not just know God with our minds and we need to hold on to that, but we need to know God with an artistic intuition.
Hey, this is a good time to tell you to go check out our episode titled The Artist with Makoto Fujimura and Russ Ramsey. It's episode 70 to be exact. Beauty is a key theme of that episode and it's one of my favourites. I think that's the one where I might have shed a tear in the recording studio or I probably just got something in my eye.
So beauty is a theme you strike on. The church should be aiming for this and at its heart embodies this. You've got this sort of tripartite approach. You've got stuff that comes from harmony, stuff that's to do with rhythm, stuff to do with soul, right? That's how you think of the good song, right? So under harmony, you talk about beauty. So that's a great theme. I was almost going to put you on the spot and say, give me a definition of beauty. Yeah, well, I think beauty, man, I mean, gosh, it's...
I mean, I think what I'm shooting for is an artistic intuition. You know, it's knowing God with an artistic intuition and doing things with care. You know, instead of doing things like just slapping something together in the kitchen, doing something with care and full-heartedness, attention to grace, attention to what inspires, that artistic intuition that every human being knows is
that curiosity that we all have. But when we come to the church, we can easily kind of put it aside because we're in old ruts. But with the survival itself that inspires, I think, this improvisation, I think that beauty is one of the most important things for the church in post-Christian societies, that we seek beauty first.
that we lift up our artists but we become artistic all of us in the way we do many things in our life together and with the bible in our hands we need to bring that artistic intuition as a way of knowing into our shared life together
Yeah, into every aspect of our shared life. You know, so just to illustrate on the piano, you know, I could throw some musical theory and spatter it around the living room where I'm sitting here and play in F major, say. You know, when you and I know about this, we know that that's an F major chord and there's not a lot of complexity there.
But let's just stay with that level of complexity, just an F major chord for all those musicians who are listening in. And let's make it beautiful. Let's play the same theory but make it beautiful, you know. It's just the F major scale. You get a bit hairy. You know, and beauty is a glimpse of God, John. You know, beauty is a glimpse of God.
How can we show the beauty of Jesus, the tenderness of Jesus in our neighborhoods by attending to aesthetics? Yeah. Under the theme of rhythm, you've got a whole bunch of notes that you hit in the book. But one of them is healing. It's healing, kinship, and something else. But I just want to focus on the kind of mending thing, right? Because I want to ask, in what ways do you think the church is a place of mending? Because a lot of people think of it as a place of harm.
Yeah, the church has done harm and that'll come up later. But when we encounter Jesus, we encounter Jesus' love, don't we? And we encounter Jesus' love not in the abstract but as the creator of all things and as the one who has secured a future for us with God and for the creation itself, including our bodies, you know.
So as the church bears witness to that Jesus, to the Creator, to the Recreator, to the One who redeems even our bodies, we're bearing witness to a healer. In my book I speak about this remarkable text in Exodus 15 that just struck me once when I was reading through the book of Exodus. They're there at the waters of Mara, at the bitter waters, just fresh out of Egypt. They're so thirsty, but the water's bitter. The water becomes sweet again.
miraculously and Yahweh says, "I the Lord am your healer." Then Moses led Israel from the Red Sea and they went into the desert of Shur. For three days they traveled in the desert without finding water. When they came to Marah, they could not drink its water because it was bitter. That is why the place is called Marah. So the people grumbled against Moses saying, "What are we to drink?"
Then Moses cried out to the Lord, and the Lord showed him a piece of wood. He threw it into the water, and the water became fit to drink. There the Lord issued a ruling and instruction for them and put them to the test. He said, If you listen carefully to the Lord your God and do what is right in his eyes, if you pay attention to his commands and keep all his decrees, I will not bring on you any of the diseases I brought on the Egyptians, for I am the Lord who heals you.
Then they came to Elim, where there were twelve springs and seventy palm trees, and they camped there near the water. You know, it's actually a pretty rare metaphor in the Old Testament that God is our healer. But here it is. All that God is, all that God calls us to in Christ, the scriptures that are shaping us are shaping us to be a community of healing.
Yeah, and it's a huge idea in the New Testament, right? I mean, obviously Jesus wandering around healing, but that's more than just miraculous healing. Those healings in the Gospels are clearly previews of the kingdom. It's little microcosms of all things being made well
as a picture of the final kingdom. So mending, healing, in that broader sense, is right at the heart of it, isn't it? Absolutely. And so when I think of recontextualizing church in the post-Christian West, it's hard to find words and phrases to drive at, I think, what the Bible calls us to. But
Probably maybe the closest phrase I can come for myself is a community of people who are receiving and extending the healing of Jesus in a particular neighborhood. Can I put you on the spot and give us a musical rendition of this mending idea? Because, I mean, it's so core to music, isn't it? Except for maybe sort of postmodern music that sort of glories in not resolving.
But if you've got, give us something that really speaks to tension coming to resolution. It's great. From one musician to another. I mean, and just to say, you know, when music speaks of that anger, you know, like so much of jazz has in its story or unresolution, there's healing in expressing our anger, isn't there? Sometimes there's healing in leaving questions unanswered. No, thanks. I'd love to. Here we go. ♪
I'm so pleased you got to that final chord. I can breathe.
That's the kingdom come. Yeah, oh, man. Oh, man. Hey, under soul, you talk about conversations, okay? And this also takes us to jazz music, and it's something that's quite, not quite unique, but it is distinctive of jazz music, that it is, when you're watching it live, it is actually a conversation. Yeah, man. It is musos talking to each other. Yeah, it is. In a way, you know, like when I played in a sort of pop rock band. Yeah.
We had fun on stage, but there was not much conversation in the music going on. It was like we all knew where we were going and we were all playing it. But jazz musos?
They don't know what's coming in the next 30 seconds. It depends on what the other guy says. So tell us about this musically first, and then why this is a good metaphor for what the church should be doing. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. We're responding to one another and creating something in the moment. So rooted in the tradition, paralleling, being rooted in the tradition of Scripture, here we are on the bandstand. I'm doing a gig tonight, John, called The Seven Last Words of Christ.
I mean, I'll just tell you real quick, I'm obviously a Christ follower. The composer's a Christ follower in his singing. Then two professional musicians here in Vancouver, two of the best jazz musicians in Vancouver playing with us. And they're not Christ followers, but they're going to be caught up in the joy of this. So we're playing this jazz suite, and even though it's composed and we know what the framework is, the chords, there's some lyrics. Each time someone comes to solo, but in every moment, even as we play the groove,
We're responding to one another. We're seeing, well, what is inspired in the moment. It's very exciting. And it's just fun to see the grin on the other musicians or the focus on the other musicians as they just listen so hard, you know, and,
And it's actually gorgeous to watch. Right. Like if you go to a really high level jazz concert and you know they're doing that, it is just a delight, even though you're not on stage. That's great. I love that. Yeah, my wife says that too. Yeah, my wife Erin says the same thing. She says, I love seeing you guys listen to one another. And we do, man. We listen so deeply. We're listening.
And when we're listening, that's when we're in the moment. That's when we're at our best, you know. So actually what I do literally sometimes, John, is because I have to listen to myself as well. Sometimes I literally physically seat myself back from the fat piano half a foot just as a way of embodying that listening to the whole so I can see what impact am I having on the whole and what are other people doing that I need to respond to. It's a weird thing that I do physically, you know.
But it does remind me of the church. God's word addresses all of us. And I think as in post-Christian society, you know, while we're used to maybe more of a monologue in the way we do church, listening to a preacher up the front. Well, that's what I was thinking. Some people listening to us will be going, man, church ain't a conversation. It's those guys just proclaim, you know, they've got the truth and I'm meant to listen. Right. Right.
I mean, man, I am endlessly fascinated by Ephesians 4 when Paul says, speaking the truth in love. There's a conversation going on there, and it's a call to unity. What I find fascinating about this is that Paul, the apostle in Ephesians 4, has very strong opinions himself. You know, with your Gentile things on the table, a whole lot's on the table that Paul really cares about. And yet this call to unity, this call to a conversation where we speak the truth, yes, but in love.
Paul just has that emotional flexibility, that kind of emotional span to have a conversation and to call the Ephesians, to have a conversation speaking the truth in life. I'm fascinated by that because Paul isn't short of opinions and that yet somehow in this unity, the church can be together and talking. It goes back to that first point we touched on about jazz. I mean, there is a musical theory. There is a high-level doctrine theory.
that is embodied in jazz music. It's a tradition. But it's actually, it's, it's precisely the tradition, as you say, or you could even say the science of music that, that is known and respected, but it's also the very thing you're interacting with and developing a conversation from. So true, man. So the church can be, can be dogmatic in the sense that it's, it represents its tradition and,
But it also has to do jazz, doesn't it, as it interacts with people's doubts and questions. That's right. And, you know, I mean, just to illustrate, you know, tonight we're playing this gig, you know, and just to illustrate, right, so remember that jazz standard? It's a jazz standard for us. Someday my prince will come from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, that beautiful Disney cartoon. So...
Every jazz musician knows that. And you know, so the bass player, the bass player might start to play in two all of a sudden. Let's say, so that he might do something. It's actually in three, you know. One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two. So he might start that, or she might start to play in two. One, two. And then that might affect the whole thing. One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two.
And then the drummer might do this percussive thing. You know, on the snare. And we might all do that. . . .
You know, I try and be a drummer as a pianist, you know, and that's the same with church, you know, and I think it's actually the challenge is an emotional one. It's hard, I think, for us all to have a conversation. I'm a pastor, I've been a pastor for well over a decade, and I can fear that people will say something that's
not according to Scripture. That could be my fear about having a conversation as a church. Other people might fear that someone might say something that triggers someone or that really upsets someone. There's fears in the room, and it's that emotional work of what John Keats has called negative capability, just that ability to sit with someone and to hear them say something that is quite different
from what I think and who I am and to have that capacity to let the other person be different from me. Negative capability. And I think, John, artists tend to have a lot of negative capability. Can we be artists in our conversations? Can we have that emotional spam? We're out of time, but can you give us a piece to take us out? Mark Glanville. Yeah, absolutely. ♪
Jazz is all about grace. That's amazing grace. Thank you so much. Thanks, John.
An Undeceptions Podcast.
