Saturday coffee: Is God fun?

A few weeks back, I wrote this piece for our open mic night at church. I wanted to share it today for my Chrisicisms subscribers because starting this week, I’ll be doing a series through December about movies that have a sense of humor about faith. I hope you enjoy it!

Is God fun?

For most of my life, I didn’t think so. Holy? Sure. Righteous. Yeah. Compassionate? Of course. But suggesting that he was fun bordered on heresy. And since God wasn’t fun, we should probably be careful about it as well.

I grew up in a strict Baptist church. The kind where men wore ties, women wore dresses, and if you raised your hands during the service, it better be because you had a question. Our weddings didn’t have dancing or alcohol; the only difference between a Baptist wedding and a funeral is a white dress. When my Dad became a deacon, he signed a form promising that no one in our family would dance, listen to rock music or go to the theater; I am the only person alive whose mom had to sneak him into the Care Bears movie. I couldn’t watch He-Man because “only God was the master of the universe” and when friends invited me to play Dungeons and Dragons, my youth pastor sat me down for an intervention.

That’s not to say we were joyless. We laughed, and I made good friends in my youth group. But there was the overriding sense that fun was an exception to the rule and intended for kids. We couldn’t have an activity just for fun – we always had to circle back to prayer, devotion, and talks of sin, hell and how many of our friends were going there. Life was serious business, God was a serious god, and sooner or later you had to wipe that grin off your face and put away childish things. ‘Cause the devil, he was out there, and fun was how he got you.

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