As faith leaders, we do serious work. We lead institutions, shepherd souls, labor for social change, care for the suffering and handle many other “duties as assigned.” With such important work to do, we may be tempted to think we should always be solemn and somber. But I don’t think so.
Humor and play are not optional but essential aspects of ministry, indispensable to the well-being of ministers, ministries and congregations. I would even say that the more serious the work, the more we need times of lighthearted play. (If you think our times are too troubling for laughter, I encourage you to check out “The Book of Joy” by the Dalai Lama and the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu.)
The local church can be a space for learning the holiness of humor and exploring the connections between playing and praying. Here are some ways that leaders can nurture a spirit of playfulness in our congregations.
Play alongside your people
Ministry works best when our people know us as both competent and relatable. As it turns out, this relatability is built on small mistakes and embarrassing moments. In social psychology, “the Pratfall Effect” occurs when a respected leader (it doesn’t work unless the leader is viewed as competent) becomes more likeable after making a mistake or sharing a vulnerable moment. In other words, it’s good for congregants to see our humanity. Gaffes are humanizing.
So don’t be afraid to tell dumb jokes, share embarrassing stories and play games with your people. At my church, we have done trivia contests, group games, dad joke battles and more. I once dressed up as Quaker founder George Fox, and the kids have talked about it ever since. Folks know my penchant for puns and have heard several of my embarrassing stories during sermons that inspired them to share their own human moments.
You may have heard the monastic maxim Ora et labora — “pray and work.” What if we tried “pray and play”? In the same way that Brother Lawrence and Teresa of Avila discovered God’s presence moving among the pots and pans, maybe we can also discover God moving among the toys on the floor or the balls and gloves on the field.
Get out of the building and play together. At my congregation, we made a tradition of going on a fall outing to a local corn maze and pumpkin patch as well as multiple pool parties in the summer. These are wonderful times of community-building play and, dare I say, as sacramental as anything we do on Sunday mornings.
We can also invite folks to do a “humor Examen” at the end of each day — naming and praying with anything surprising or funny that happened that day. Over time, we can learn to embrace the sacrament of the playful moment and abandon ourselves to divine playfulness, to paraphrase Jean Pierre de Caussade.
Play with Scripture
Pastors can model that it’s okay to be playful with Scripture. Often, it’s not only permissible but more faithful to the original text. Due to our gap in time and setting, we usually miss the humor of the Bible, but it’s there! As Quaker D. Elton Trueblood pointed out, the Gospels are full of the “humor of Christ” that we completely miss if we read it with pious solemnity.
We can bring out the prophetic playfulness and inspired improvisation in stories like Elisha and the widow’s oil and Jesus with the loaves and fishes. We can read the stories of Jesus healing with spit or writing in the dirt with a smile of surprise. I recently preached on the story of Eutychus falling out the window during Paul’s infinite sermon; the Scripture reader laughed out loud while reading the passage.
If childlikeness helps us see the Kingdom, we should definitely engage our kiddos. I must confess that people in our church remember the children’s message better than my sermon. It’s partly the simplified exposition but it’s also the playful spirit of the teaching. The kids often get to play-act characters and imagine what it would be like to experience something from the story. We do well to incorporate some of that interactive and imaginative spirit into our preaching.
Play in the sandbox
Churches are family systems that have a tendency toward anxiety. When this anxiety reaches a certain point, we get stuck in what Rabbi Edwin Friedman called “imaginative gridlock.” When this happens, we can’t break through by thinking or trying harder. This only gets us more stuck, like a truck spinning its wheels in the mud. The only way out, argued Friedman, is through playfulness and “a spirit of adventure.” We have to reach the point of recognizing how doing what we’ve always done will only get us what we’ve always got. We need to enter an imaginative space where we can imagine a world with a wider range of possibilities. We need a sandbox.
“Playing in the sandbox” is a concept used by software developers to describe a mode where they can test out a code or application without the risk of doing permanent damage. We need similar kinds of spaces in our congregations — gatherings and practices that create space for “bad ideas” or “wild solutions” to be shared without ridicule or consequence. Who knows what good ideas or “God ideas” might emerge from the sandbox?
Whatever the benefits for our congregations, we should also keep our playdates for our own sakes. We cannot sustain the heaviness and seriousness of our work without any release or respite. Playdates can have many expressions: Playing with our kids or nieces and nephews, wrestling with the dog, pickleball at the community center, board games with friends, going to a ballgame, dancing, swimming and so on. Whatever your playdates look like, keep them! Even, especially, when you have serious and pressing matters to attend to.
Remember, his burden is light. So we can lighten up. And we can make our congregations into sandboxes of Scripture, spiritual formation and prophetic imagination. The sandbox becomes a foretaste of the new creation, where our weeping turns to laughter and all our tragedies are transformed into comedies.
