Comedy Central at Church

Here is a thoughtful editorial from Christianity Today on the subject of church, and how entertainment has become so commonplace that we forget to question if it really fits with the purpose of our worship and discipleship.

I should start out by saying that we have hosted comedy nights at our church, but never as an alternative to a worship gathering. The point of this article, and the reason I enjoyed it, is because of these two paragraphs, commenting on the use of an instructional video to encourage people to be baptized:

The baptism video, though it was posted on the internet, was clearly designed to be shown in a worship service. ("If you haven't signed up yet," says the pastor, "I'm sure that after this video you'll be really excited about it and want to sign up. So don't everybody rush to the information center at once after the service. Be careful. Please form a line.") The pastor cannot help using the ironic vocabulary of cheap comedy. And the video is subject to the temptations inherent in the medium: words that have to be bleeped out, pushing a baptismal candidate off the edge of the pool, showing a (thankfully) blurred image of what is supposed to be a naked candidate, and getting drenched when a candidate cannonballs into the pool. This is the vocabulary of Comedy Central, not the discourse of discipleship.

It's not that humor should be banned from worship. Hardly. As Frederick Buechner reminds us, the gospel is a comedy; who has not experienced grace as so wonderfully absurd that at times we cannot help but laugh? And it is one of life's joys to be amused (and distracted) in the cycle of work and rest. But the church must take its cues about humor not from the entertainment culture as much as from the gospel itself. Baptism, the watery half of the "by water and spirit" new birth, is joyous, even hilarious, as much as any birth can be. But the joy of baptism does not comport with an ironic smirk, and definitely not with pratfalls.

I agree. The church should embrace humor, but not the humor of our culture. I fear that living in an entertainment culture we sometimes forget there is joy to be found in the serious things of life. The humor of sitcoms can be funny...I'm not denying that. But it's a cheap imitation of the real thing...