Humor is great, but there’s some bad humor that needs to be removed from pulpits …

Laughing together through life adds to the joy a family can experience.

Humor can be a great thing!

“A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a broken spirit saps a person’s strength,” Proverbs 17:22.

The same is true in the family of God — it’s good for us to laugh together! Occasionally peppering sermons with humorous stories (applicable to the text, of course!) can provide opportunities for us as a spiritual family to laugh together. Humor can be of great benefit to a congregation … until it isn’t.

In spite of a constant mantra among church leaders today that “leadership is influence,” too many pastors give little consideration to their influence when it comes to sharing “bad” or negative humor from the pulpit. When pastors purposely seek to get their congregations to laugh at something they shouldn’t be laughing at, then that bad humor can be detrimental to the church.

There’s some bad humor that is consistently coming from pulpits which should be removed, such as:

A healthy diet isn’t a laughing matter – For some reason, laughing about good nutrition and eating “clean and healthy” seems to be a favorite topic of humor, especially among unfit, overweight, and even obese ministers. Could it be because they’ve given up on being good stewards of their own bodies, and try to cover over that by making good nutrition a laughing stock, that they routinely lead their congregations into laughing at the idea of eating well, or embracing the temptations of eating poorly, even to the point of gluttony? Obesity and poor nutrition are serious, even dangerous problems in our country, and a serious spiritual matter regarding stewardship of the bodies God has given us. Pastors need to stop influencing their congregations to laugh at good nutrition and to stop their influence toward eating poorly and the sin of gluttony.

There’s nothing funny about mental illness, but that doesn’t stop many ministers from telling jokes where they call people “crazy,” “wacko,” “insane,” “nuts,” “out of their minds,” and other terms relating to mental illness. Pastors, if you’re telling a story that involves someone who is truly mentally ill, do not make a joke of it! Even today, the church is still guilty of feeding negative stigmas pertaining to mental illness and still lags behind in what we should can could do to serve the mentally ill. The one thing that doesn’t serve them is laughing at them — mental illness is never a laughing matter.

Men are stupid. Our culture — and Hollywood in particular — purposely and in a focused manner works to build the narrative that men are dumb, especially husbands and fathers. Whole sitcoms are based on “man dumb, woman smart” and devaluing the value of husbands and fathers to families because they’re just dumb blocks of wood! So many pastors today feed this stereotype that works against biblical ideas of manhood and family, all for a laugh. It isn’t worth it, because it really isn’t funny.

Breaking the law – It has stymied me for many years how many ministers think it’s cool and funny to tell the tales of their lawbreaking. Perhaps it isn’t serious — they tell of their bent for speeding, for example. But they don’t tell these “humorous” stories with remorse, or to direct their congregations away from breaking the law; no, instead, they tell these stories as if breaking the law is of no matter at all. But it is! You provide a negative example to your congregation when you make a joke of breaking the law.

A disciplined life – Just about any pastor can tell you one of the most difficult things to help the people of their flocks accomplish is to learn to live a disciplined life. Yet, so many pastors make jokes of the idea of living disciplined lives. A person can find great joy, and much room for laughter, in living disciplined lives, but you couldn’t tell that by how so many pastors make the very idea to be nothing more than a joke.

It can be such a rich, satisfying, and deeply bonding experience for a church family to be able to laugh together. But it’s important to laugh at what is funny, and not “make funny” the things that really are seriously important in life. Preacher, share those funny stories, but be careful about what you’re influencing your flock to laugh about.

Scotty