“A joyful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.” (Proverbs 17:22)

Joy and laughter are precious gifts from God, common graces, that can serve as a healing balm to a hurting heart. A good laugh can go a long way. Laughter can give us a break from the tension of life, help us relax after a stressful event and cast off our anxieties for a moment of relief.

As a rookie church planter (our church is less than 3 years old) and a relatively young parent (my kids are 3 and 5), I don’t know how I would get by in life without the gift of laughter—funny shows or movies, joking with friends and family, a good meme on Facebook—these things give me some much needed reprieve from the stresses of ministry and parenting. Laughter is such a blessing!

But what about in church? What about in sermons? Does laughter have a place in our weekly gatherings on the Lord’s day, or is it irreverent or unholy? Should our services be joyful or serious? Should preachers make use of humor in their messages, or should our preaching have a different tone? I think these are good, important questions and as a pastor these are conversations that I’ve had many times with congregants, friends, and other pastors.

Some pastors believe laughter has no place in church while others treat Sunday mornings like a comedy show. I believe there’s a healthy middle ground though—my conviction is that our church services should be marked by joy, and joy and laughter naturally go together. Therefore, with occasional exceptions, there should be a healthy dose of laughter in our regular Sunday gatherings. This is my desire for our church and my encouragement for all churches.

Every Sunday there are men, women, and children in our worship gatherings with crushed spirits, wearied from another week in our broken world. Life is hard. Satan wants to steal our joy, kill our faith, and destroy our lives (John 10:10). Joy is a fight, and some days we lose.

For our church in particular, we are located in the middle of several low-income housing communities full of struggling families who often see the brokenness of our world in painful ways each and every day. We have lots of young families who are exhausted from sleepless nights with babies and tough days with toddlers. If our church services are overly serious, we miss out on the opportunity to offer the “good medicine” of a joyful heart to our people. Now, it’s important to point out there must be a real element of seriousness in our church services since we are meeting with a holy God. There is a gravity to this reality that we cannot disregard.

“Consecrate yourselves, therefore, and be holy, for I am the Lord your God.” (Lev. 20:7)

Yet, at the same time, are we not also meeting with our friend?

“Thus the LORD used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend.” (Ex. 33:11)

“The friendship of the Lord is for those who fear him” (Ps. 25:14).

Through faith in Christ we are forgiven of all our sins, reconciled to God, and brought into relationship, fellowship, and friendship with him. Our holy God meets with us face to face as a man speaks to a friend. So there is a mixture of both friendship and fear when we meet with God. We revere him as holy while we rest in his love and grace. His grace frees us to be ourselves with him. We can come as we are. He receives us, loves us, and calls us friend. Even more, he calls us family:

“See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are.” (1 John 3:1)

We are his beloved children. The church is called the “household of God” (1 Tim. 3:15). So our weekly worship services are family gatherings. It should feel like home, and in a healthy home there is room for laughter! Whether corny dad jokes (my specialty), practical jokes, or children being silly, there is always laughter in a healthy home. Healthy families play together and joke together and laugh together. The tragic reality though is that many people in our cities have never experienced a healthy family or household. They came from overly serious and harsh homes, or homes where humor and joy were shallow and worldly and crude.

But our worship services can offer people the experience of a healthy, loving, familial community! We can create an environment that redeems both seriousness and humor as good gifts from God. There’s a way to take God seriously while not taking ourselves so seriously. We can worship and we can laugh. Considering and interacting with God should bring us joy, and joy gives way to laughter.

Laughter is what you do when you’re comfortable, when you feel at home, when you let your guard down because you feel safe and secure and in good company. What safer, more secure place is there than in the presence of God? What better company is there than the children of God? We should be bursting with joy and laughter when we gather with our brothers and sisters in Christ! Interestingly, laughter actually helps us learn too. When we laugh, our brain releases dopamine which increases our ability to pay attention, focus, learn, and remember new information.

I’m an advocate of humor for the sake of cultivating a healthy, familial learning environment in the household of God. That means my sermons will have a mixture of seriousness and humor—seriousness about God and his word mixed with humorous illustrations and personal stories about day to day life. Laughing together helps us feel more like family, it gives some relief to our crushed spirits, it drops our guard and lets us be ourselves, and it actually increases our ability to pay attention to the serious commands of Scripture.

Finding the balance between seriousness and laughter is kind of an art, and something that I still feel like an amateur at—I often feel my sermons went too far in one direction or the other—but it’s something I’m seeking to grow in as a pastor and preacher. I hope that by cultivating this kind of environment in the household of God, it will shape all of the individual households in our community. Anything we do repeatedly and habitually inevitably shapes us. Our gatherings and services are actually discipling our people.

So by God’s grace, I pray that our Sunday gatherings would disciple and equip our people toward healthy households that are full of both worship and laughter, joy and awe, seriousness and fun—and I pray you and your church would share the same vision!

If our church services are overly serious, we miss out on the opportunity to offer the “good medicine” of a joyful heart to our people. Click To Tweet