The Jazz of Preaching, 20th Anniversary Edition: How to Preach with Great Freedom and Joy

By Kirk Byron Jones

Learn to preach from your soul!

What if preachers were as contagiously joyful in their preaching as Louis Armstrong was in his playing and singing? As rich in their sermonic renderings as Sarah Vaughn was in her virtuosic vocals? As honest about heartache as Billie Holiday every time she sang the blues? As alluringly clear as the voice of Ella Fitzgerald? As tenaciously uninhibited in the action of creating as Duke Ellington?

This may be too much ask, even of persons who are "called by God." However, as Kirk Byron Jones demonstrates, preaching can be enhanced by an understanding of the inner dynamics of jazz. The forms, rules, and styles of jazz can inform one's practice of preaching, and its simultaneous structure and spontaneity can help preachers better understand their own art.

In his classic text for students and practitioners, Jones explains how preaching is dramatically improved with the application of key elements of jazz, including innovation, improvisation, rhythm, call and response, honesty about heartache, and delight. This 20th Anniversary Edition includes a new element—preaching from your genuine soul. Chapters include instruction and exercises for applying the jazz elements to preaching preparation and performance. This edition also includes an Introduction, in which the author sets the context for the new material and articulates his conviction that this approach to preaching is needed now more than ever.

The Jazz of Preaching 20th Anniversary Edition introduces the rich and rewarding possibilities that arise when preachers tap into their own creativity—and their own soul--when constructing and delivering the sermon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Abingdon Press
• Release date: Mar 4, 2025
• ISBN: 9781791036492

Kirk Byron Jones

Kirk Byron Jones holds a doctor of ministry degree from Emory University and a doctor of philosophy degree from Drew University. He is the author of several best-selling books for those seeking to grow spiritually in an ever-challenging world. Jones serves as adjunct professor of ethics, preaching and pastoral ministry at Andover Newton Theological School. Throughout his thirty-year pastoral ministry, he has also served on various religious and civic committees at the local and national level.

Book preview

Introduction to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition

What’s Soul Got to Do with the Preaching We Need Now?

In this profoundly precarious moment characterized by global crises, emotional and psychological overload, AI proliferation, and widespread socio-political division and strife, what kind of preaching are you drawn to? Personally, I need something more than what I have heard before, conveyed through a sound capable of standing up to this moment while offering something freshly substantive to reshape it.

I perceive that this preaching gets manifested not just by increased, intense thinking, but by more time and space to soulfully wander and wonder resulting in proclamation as graceful provocation. Such preaching has an alluring quality more adept at coaxing and prompting than convincing and declaring dry as dust points that have been bellowed before. I need now preaching that invites more than it tells and is satisfied with guiding listeners toward new questions more than it is with presenting overly certain answers. This kind of preaching, radically open to evolving, can keep up with up with our changing world and help change it for the better.

The essential force behind such preaching is something that, initially, may not sound spiritual enough: fluidity. By fluidity I mean continual formation informed by external context and circumstances, but even more deeply and continually, by an internal essence of free creativity. Jazz has this nature about it. The essential might of jazz is its life-insistence, its forwarding vitality and fashioning vibrancy while resisting absurdity and hopelessness. Behind its particular musical exposition and expression, jazz is melodic and rhythmic persistence with life, through it all no matter what.

I perceive soul, our hidden reservoir of limitless wisdom, peace, and joy, to be essential for fluidity, and preaching in a manner less weighted down by certainty. Soul, at home with essential uncertainty and deep questioning, produces preaching seasoned with imagination and hope. As we open the part of ourselves that most readily welcomes the eternal, we become better capable of preaching that surpasses hard bias, rigid knowledge, and stagnating repetition. Why so? Your mind contains your knowledge, while your heart encompasses your desires. Distinctive from these, your soul is the most receptive and abundant source for acquiring and sharing fresh understanding unclouded by prior knowledge and personal inclinations.

Soul is a necessary preaching partner for another significant reason. Due to the soul’s fundamental and all-encompassing nature in our being, soul-awareness can significantly enrich every other aspect of awareness that contributes to effective preaching, such as sensory, cognitive, emotional, social, and self-awareness.

One of the things I do to relax is play video games. An offshoot hobby from this one is collecting statues related to video game subjects. One morning, I noticed one of my statues was knocked off its base. When I picked it up to reposition it, for the first time I observed that the statue was flexible. I could bend it in the position I chose. After playing with it for a time, I decided to posture the figure rearing backwards. I imagined it to be a stance of inspired readiness having no hesitation with the use of personal agency and power.

Communion with your soul gives you permission to experience deep spiritual empowerment for living and for preaching. Your soul holds untapped creative energy and wisdom. To ignore your soul is not just to dismiss an isolated, esoteric quality, but to nullify the most in you that has the most to offer the world.

Preaching with Soul is the new chapter in The Jazz of Preaching. For a more comprehensive discussion of soul as essential source and energy for creative living, I recommend books and other educational and coaching offerings available at my website: kirkbjones.com. There you may also reach me with ideas and questions. I invite dialogue with you; let’s play together!

Kirk Byron Jones

December 2024

Chapter One

Let There Be Jazz

Jazz is about finding and sharing who you are.

—Betty Carter

What surprises there are! We are such planners! We decide how God must come into human affairs. We treat it all with a kind of public relations twist. We pick the time and the place. We insure that the right people are there to meet God. We get the news releases out as to what to expect. We even have some prepared quotes. But God has an uncanny way of taking care of times and places and entrances. While we wait at the airport, as it were, with a representative committee of dignitaries, an escort waiting for the coming, God has a way of quietly arriving at the bus station, walking up the side street, and slipping, unnoticed, through the servant’s chambers.

—Gene Barlett

Songs in the Night

It was Saturday night, and I didn’t have a clue about what to preach the next day. My situation worsened when I realized that I didn’t have it in me to get up a sermon, to at least start one that I could develop and polish a little in the morning. I had been in this place before. Having been a boy preacher, by this time, I had been preaching for over twenty years. This was not my first time being on E (for empty) on a Saturday night. But that night the emptiness was deeper than usual. In that moment, my calling was to get as far as possible from sermon preparation and the call to preach itself. I needed a ministry respite, a preaching reprieve. One of the greatest preachers of our time, or any time, once confided to me that there were times during his long ministry when the last thing he felt like doing was preaching. He said that in those moments a job as a sanitation worker seemed more appealing.

I was in as deep a preaching slump as I had ever been in. I found myself turning to music, but not the inspirational, soothing sounds of gospel music. Instead, perhaps as an act of defiance, I placed a jazz CD in the disc player, The Intimate Ella, and began listening to Ella Fitzgerald, accompanied by pianist Paul Smith. I do not recall searching for the disk, or wanting to hear Ella Fitzgerald in particular. I knew she was a noteworthy performer, but that’s all I knew. I didn’t know that I was listening to a singer commonly referred to as The First Lady of Song. I had no idea that she was once defined by Duke Ellington as being beyond category.

If you are a jazz enthusiast or a fan of Ella Fitzgerald, you can probably guess what happened next. As Ella Fitzgerald sang, something happened that was totally unexpected; I began to cry. Her angelic voice was simultaneously soft and piercing. Her singing, soulfully caressed the lyrics of songs like I Cried for You, My Melancholy Baby, and Reach for Tomorrow melted my misery. This was wonderful and scary at the same time. I had been revived before, but the mode was either gospel music, prayer, or inspirational reading. I had never been delivered by a jazz singer before. An hour later, I felt revived inside. I began preparing the sermon with fresh energy, and the next day I ministered with new strength and joy. No joke. Or, holy joke of the highest order.

In Listen to Your Life, Frederick Buechner writes, Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected ears, it is well to pay close attention.¹

I became deeply curious about what had happened that Saturday evening. How and why did this person’s singing move me so? How could something worldly like jazz music wield such spiritual power? Does all jazz music contain such potency?

The seed for The Jazz of Preaching was planted that Saturday night, or maybe many years earlier. Believe it or not, I was born and reared in New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz. Looking back on it all now: New Orleans, preaching, Saturday night blues, Ella, I think I was caught in a sacred setup. In fact, one of my youthful talents was doing a singing impression of Louis Armstrong. But apart from this minimal musical antic, I don’t recall any other connection to jazz while growing up in New Orleans. Perhaps this would have been different had I not concluded my drum playing at the end of sixth grade. My jazz roots meant nothing to me until Ella sang to me. I once heard jazz great, and fellow New Orleanean, Wynton Marsalis, say during an awards show, When you are ready to listen, the music is there to be heard. Unbeknown to me my melancholy mood had placed me in listening mode.

I began purchasing jazz music, mostly classic jazz. The music facilitated my entrance into another world inhabited by assorted musical mages. I began developing favorites, including Louis Armstrong, Mary Lou Williams, Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan, John Coltrane, Oscar Peterson, Billie Holiday, Lester Young, and an unsung sparrow by the name of Jimmy Scott. I became enthralled with their sounds and their stories. Along the way, I learned more about the history and hallmarks of jazz. I became especially interested in certain features of jazz (creativity, improvisation, dialogue, and more) that were common to various styles of jazz, (big band, bebop, free, and more). After about a year, two rivers began to converge. The river of preaching, one of my first passions in life, and the river of jazz, my newest passion. I began to sense that jazz had a good deal more to offer homiletics than a singular uplift to a lone preacher. What if preachers were as contagiously joyful in their preaching as Louis Armstrong was in his playing and singing? As rich in their sermonic renderings as Sarah Vaughan was in her musical vocals? As honest about heartache as Billie Holiday was every time she sang about the blues of life? As alluringly clear as the angelic voice of Ella Fitzgerald? As patient in pacing as the holy, hesitant singing manner of Jimmy Scott? As tenaciously uninhibited in the action of creating as Duke Ellington?

I sat with my curiosities for another year, and then our esteemed preaching professor at Andover Newton Theological School, Eddie O’Neal, announced his retirement after thirty plus years of service. I had been one of his students. Later, as his faculty colleague, I taught social ethics at Andover Newton for several years while pastoring Ebenezer Baptist Church in Boston. My intention was to keep preaching in Boston and teaching ethics at Andover Newton. Though I had been preaching for many years and had earned a Doctor of Ministry in preaching from Candler School