Last nights youth service was a disaster. Everyone was late including me, ten minutes after we where supposed to meet, I realize that all the dates on next months program is wrong and I had just cut up 120 flyers by hand, so I had to start from the beginning. We didn’t have time to practice the worship songs properly so the band was out of sync, consequently the prayer time got squeesed out the window and to top of that Angelina kept pulling at the guitar cord atfirst then switched to try to steal my microphone.
All through the teaching about eviloution [[[sic]]] I had to struggle to get the words out and it was apparent that we where in the thick of a spiritiual battle. When we got to the end of the teaching , wich was very low key for being me, a troubled young man came up to me (first time there) and told me that he had a problem with my message. At first I thought (The language barrier making communication difficult) I had personally offended him and I appologized if I had. but he said no that was not it. Then I thought he had misunderstood my message or disagreed with my view on evolution or creationism, but he patiently explained that I had made my points very clear.
Then it dawned on me he was telling me that the fact that I joked about matters of faith, that I made jokes in wich God was one of the characters, that I made the audience laugh in church, this was my error.
I tried to gently explain that I do love God with all my heart and that I was not mocking God or anyones faith but that I believe that God has a sense of humor. At that he shoock his haid and said that the bible sais no. I left that meeting saddened, I know that my preaching style reaches more people than it turns off, but still here was one person who had missed the message from God because of my preaching style…
This leaves me with the hardest dilemma I have ever faced, How do I keep a preaching style that reaches young people, inspires and motivates and still is transparant enough to let the light of Jesus shine through even to those who believe that church is no place for mirth or laughter.
It reminds me of the sign in front of the catholic church in Hannas home town, it reads: Shhh! God lives here.
Does God have humour? Oh, yeah! What does the parables that Jesus tells us (for example) tell us? “You pharisee guys are like tombs – nice looking on the outside, but full of death on the inside”, “You see the mote in your brother’s eye, but have lost the fact that you have a beam in your own?” – are these not jokes? Jokes to tell us something important about God and Us, sure. But jokes, none the less. God the Father even shows a very ironic, sarcastic sense of humour when He jokes with Jonah to correct him (read the last chapter) and with Job.
I think that NOT joking, NOT using humour is simply to not incarnate Jesus. Read that again – you are commiting sacriledge by not using your God given humor. And by looking at a boring you, people will miss a laughing God.
I know the Bible says services should be orderly, but as far as I recall there is nothing in there that says it is wrong to tell jokes when teaching. As Macken says Jesus certainly seems to use humour to put his parables across sometimes.
At the end of the day the message of Jesus can reach everyone, but you cannot necessarily do it yourself! If your preaching style reaches people and they come closer to God through the things you say, then you should stay faithful to that.
Thanx guys, incidently sitting in church today, I had to restrain myself really hard to stop myself from shushing Angelina as she was playing in the church hall during the meeting.
Everytime my mouth was forming a shh, my mind subtitled it with shh, God lives here, and I just could’nt do it.
Ps 8:2 (8:3 in Swedish bibles)