Laughter, fun are signs of a healthy congregation that celebrates the joy and hope of the Christian story, Baptist pastors say.
A few years back, after Erin Conaway preached his first sermon as associate pastor at South Main Baptist Church in Houston, he received a surprising comment from a fellow staff member.
“Our music minister said, ‘I was surprised by your sermon — I thought you would have been funny.’”
It’s an understandable question from anyone who knows Conaway. He is always the center of fun and frequently in laughter mode cracking jokes — or being the butt of them.
If that’s who you really are, the minister explained, why isn’t it part of our pastoral care and preaching, too?
Over the next few minutes, hours and days, Conaway came to see that he had drawn a line between calling and fun — both of which are integral parts of his life and calling.
“Here I was closing off a part of me to ministry because I always thought that what we were doing is serious,” Conaway said.
Erin Conaway
Fun — it’s not just for everywhere but church anymore. That’s the lesson Conaway and other ministers have learned during years of ministry.
And far from being the efforts of a few jokesters imposing their personalities on congregations, the evidence is that humor and fun are signs of healthy churches, strong relationships between members and clergy and an asset that could be attractional to non-members.
‘We really need to laugh’
The importance of laughter was a serious enough subject for Jason Coker to pen a recent Baptist News Global column titled “Theology of fun.”
“I think we take ourselves too seriously,” wrote Coker, the pastor of Wilton Baptist Church in Wilton, Conn. “We need to laugh more, especially in church.”
Why? Lots of reasons, he said. One is that the world is such a scary, violent place that depression would result if it weren’t for the God-given quality of humor.
“There are so many evils that we rightly need to confront: racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia, human trafficking, payday lending, the list goes on and on and on,” Coker wrote. “Every one of these evils deserves our attention and our seriousness.”
But while doing so, Christians also must avoid the temptation to become a glum lot.
“And we really need to laugh. Maybe it’s just me that needs a good laugh, but I think we all need a good laugh break.”
‘It was funny’
In an interview with BNG, Coker said a lot of laughter and fun in a church, planned or spontaneous, suggests a healthy congregation.
“When you have the capacity to laugh at yourself, you are comfortable with yourself,” Coker said. “That kind of self-understanding is healthy whether you are an individual or a group.”
At Wilton Baptist, the fun often spontaneously erupts, he said. Recently an adult and some children hit the trap door beneath the organist’s feet while she practiced.
“It freaked her out and when she found out what was going on everybody got a kick out of it,” he said.
Jason Coker
And on this past Christmas Eve, one of the college-age adults home for the holidays shuffled the pages of Coker’s sermon, which he placed there ahead of time.
“A church full of people on Christmas Eve and my sermon is out of order,” he said. “It was funny.”
Visitors who witness such exchanges are often impressed, which can make humor and laughter, in their own way, tools for evangelism.
“There’s something in us that gravitates toward something that is more fun,” Coker said.
Plus, it’s even biblical, he added.
The wedding at Cana, where Jesus performed his first public miracle by turning water to wine, demonstrates Jesus’ openness to fun in the context of ministry.
Anyone who has been to a Jewish wedding knows they are joyous events, he said. Jesus’ miracle functioned in part to keep the fun going.
“I think it’s an important part of who we are as human beings,” Coker said. “Fun is an integral part of our humanity.”
Permission to laugh
It took Conaway a few years to learn that lesson – especially after growing up Southern Baptist.
“I was very serious,” he said. “It wasn’t a place where you could laugh.”
But he made a lot of progress by 2011 when he interviewed via Skype with leaders at Seventh and James. Afterward, Conaway’s wife, asked him how it went.
“I said I think it was incredible because we laughed the whole time,” he said.
That moment revealed that humor is more than a sign of healthy churches and an attractional element for congregations.
“That was the first time I thought of laughter as a method of discernment,” he said. “It told me a lot about the church and the search committee.”
Humor now is ingrained in Conaway’s pastorate at Seventh and James, where laughter and joking can break out anywhere from the pulpit to prayer meetings – even if the pastor isn’t present.
“People are able to tease each other,” he said.
Often, the humor is directed at Conaway, too.
“It’s important to me that people at my church feel free to make fun of me when I do something goofy,” he said. “It means there’s not this separation of clergy and laity.”
It’s not all about hijinks, but about the message of hope embedded in the Christian story, Conaway said.
“It’s all on this trajectory of hope that ought to give us permission to laugh even when everyone else is crying,” he said.