"Have you heard the one about ... ?"

Over the past few years as my wife and I have sought God’s direction back to full time pastoral ministry I have visited quite literally thousands of church web pages of just about every stripe there is in our present day. Of course too I have seen church postings for pastors and church staff by the same literal thousands so that as I sit here today wondering what on earth is going on in the church of the twenty first century I often think to myself that I have seen everything there is to see in this regard. That is until just the other day when I opened up a well known web page devoted to helping pastors and churches get together for mutual ministry, and there listed under openings for “Senior Pastor”, I came across the following wording, and this is a direct quote:

“pastor-comedian
Senior Pastor
The Comedy Hour
23165 north western
Edmond, OK”

The posting then went into brief detail about the newly forming church; what they have and what they are looking for, in their words: “We have many ideas God has put on our hearts, would like to hear about yours and see if we feel like a match to grow God’s Kingdom together.”

These words sound good and have been repeated in a great many such postings, but as I read them I kept coming back to the words at the top of the page, “pastor-comedian” and wondered if in fact there had been some kind of “typo” by whoever placed the posting on the net. So I read on and under the word Organization found this:

“Developing new age church. The idea is to use humor and comedy to bring people to Christ. With the right Pastor we plan on becoming a rapidly growing mega church soon.”

Perhaps the most revealing part of this posting, albeit the shortest, was under the "Job Requirements" section.  Ordinarily a church is looking for a certain amount of previous experience or a particular level of education.  Not so in this case.  These are precisely the words that this church inserted as to what they expected from their new pastor:

"Must be very funny!!"

Fascinating. Perhaps somewhere along the line we can hear on Sunday mornings an announcer (you know a deacon or an elder with a little moxie) introduce the pastor from the sidelines with the words, “And now, for your worship entertainment, education and elucidation, he- e – e - re’s Pastor Johnny ...!!”

Pastor Johnny would then run up to his plastic pulpit with the morning’s “Praise Team” singing and the band playing at full tilt something like “When the Saints Come Marching In!”. The opening monologue would be filled with great humor and of course to keep in line with the occasion (Sunday morning worship and all that), there would be a good share of St. Peter and the Pearly Gates jokes. Of course the introducing deacon would stand by just to provide a little straight man stuff. I would suppose, and of course I could be wrong, but somewhere along the line the Bible just might be opened or at least alluded to for the sake of keeping up with the church’s stated purpose of “...bring(ing) people to Christ”. Comedy is just there to “attract un-churched Harry” into the service and once they’ve got him there and all full of mirth and merriment then the gospel will be preached and Harry will get saved. Maybe.

Boy, I’ll bet if the Apostles and all those dowdy old church leaders down through the ages had gone at their evangelistic efforts with a little more of this style, their churches would have been even fuller than they were. Oh well you’ve got to move with the times and get people with whatever devices are available to you.

I wonder if they’ll expect their new pastor to smile broadly at the conclusion of the “service”, wave his hand and sing out, “Th ... tha...that’s all folks!” Nobody’s going to have this guy for Sunday lunch.   They'll be too busy laughing.