Is it a Sin to Have Too Much Fun at Church?

Last updated on: May 22, 2017 at 5:29 am by Josh Daffern

Is it a Sin to Have Too Much Fun at Church? 2017-05-22T05:29:24-06:00 Josh Daffern

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18528102_10158700854050471_2330097376192973201_n We had fun at our church yesterday. So much fun, in fact, that several folks jokingly apologized for it afterwards with comments like “my grandmother would never have approved” to “we’re all going to hell for this.” Obviously this was done in a lighthearted manner, but it revealed a deeper issue in our churches today: it is a sin to have too much fun at church?

What did we do? I’ll explain, but without context it’s hard to fully grasp why we had a Sunday like we just did. I’ll describe what our church looked like yesterday, and as the judgment begins to well up within you as you’re tempted to scoff, ask yourself: where is this coming from? Why is it a sin to celebrate in church?

So, every year we have a tradition at the end of the school year in May and have a Sunday dedicated to honoring our volunteers called Hey Thanks!. It’s a pretty big deal and serves several purposes: it’s an end of the school year party for the church, it allows us to let our hair down and do some creative things, it reinforces our cultural values of what makes us ‘us’ as a church, it gives me another opportunity to cast vision, we go out of our way to honor volunteers and I make a pitch to recruit more. Just for reference, we’ll have 700+ adults come through our doors on a given month. Currently 461 of them are serving, and we’ve got spots for 216 more. Serving is a BIG deal at our church. Which is why we go out of our way to make Hey Thanks! what it is.

So, for the fun part. Our staff filmed a video segment that parodied James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke with some old school youth group jams. Think group sing along with DC Talk and Audio Adrenaline. Our worship band did a cover of the main theme to the popular 90s show Friends (“I’ll be there for you”). I did a bit based off of Jimmy Fallon’s High School Superlatives titled “Volunteer Superlatives” where we honored a dozen of our volunteers with off the wall and intentionally funny awards (all pre-approved by them, of course). I did an extended welcome at the top that explained the nature of the service that day and tried my hand at a bit of comedy.

All that took about thirty minutes, then we transitioned into a highlight video of some events we did the past year, sang three worship songs and I preached an abbreviated sermon out of Ephesians 4 where Paul highlights the value of serving (just wrote a blog about it, actually: 5 Incredible Things That Happen When You Serve). We had all 677 current and future volunteer needs visually represented on the front walls of the sanctuary and invited people who weren’t serving to come and grab a card and commit to serve in the Fall. With all of that over, we had an old fashioned dinner on the grounds. Because of rain we didn’t have the inflatables up that we’d rented, but we shoved everyone into the Fellowship Center and a local band provided live music with covers to about every favorite 80s song out there.

We laughed, we sang, we celebrated, (some might have even started dancing towards the end but that’s neither here nor there . . .). And that’s where the comments came in about grandmothers and going to hell. We were having so much fun at church some of our folks began to jokingly apologize for it. And honestly, that’s a shame. Now, I get why they did it. A good number of churches in our area think we’ve lost our way. They’re still living under the mindset that church is something to be endured rather than enjoyed, almost as if church isn’t church unless it feels like a visit to the dentist’s office.

But I make no apologies for the celebration we had yesterday at church. Look in Luke 15 and the parties that were thrown when the lost sheep, the lost coin and the lost son were found. There is a time to celebrate. We celebrated what God has done in our midst over the past school year, and celebrations are supposed to be fun. Ecclesiastes 3:4 says there is “a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance.” We don’t do this every week, but at key moments throughout the year we intentionally celebrate. (Sometimes we act like Jesus is still on the cross dying for our sins instead of alive and risen from the dead. Look even to the Old Testament and the amount of feasts and festivals that were prescribed by God to the nation of Israel as a reminder to celebrate God’s goodness).

And we make no apologies for leveraging culture in our church. I believe that we’re called to redeem culture, not reject it. By leveraging popular segments from late night television shows and playing songs from the 80s and 90s (both mainstream and Christian), we made a deeper connection with our attenders and created a shared memory of laughter and celebration in the church. There is a bonding and a community that can only develop through laughter. I talked with three different first-time guests who all showed up for the first time yesterday. With two I was able to catch them beforehand and give them a heads up about the different kind of service. All three of them absolutely loved the service and the entire day. One said she wished she didn’t live three hours away so she could come every week.

All that to say, I don’t think we should ever apologize for celebrating in church. Church is something to be enjoyed, not endured. Jesus celebrated so much that he was condemned as a “drunkard and glutton” by the religious leaders that thought he was enjoying life a little too much. So I guess we’re in good company.

(As always, I welcome your comments, but remember that if you’re just going to use the comment section as a way to disparage and judge others, remember that your comments ultimately say more about you than they say about me).

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