Team Building

It has been said that the fam­ily that prays together stays together. I agree with that, but extend it a cre­atively sim­i­lar direc­tion: the church that plays together stays together. For all that we do in our for­mal wor­ship expe­ri­ence, it is when we play that the team build­ing hap­pens. When the pri­mary expres­sion is effort plus laugh­ter, you know you are on the right track.

Yes­ter­day after­noon, we were the only church involved in a small town cof­fin race (the rest were from busi­nesses and social clubs). Sure, we were help­ing raise funds for a ceme­tery fence. We were also doing much more. We were play­ing. We were doing some­thing just for fun. Yes, it helped raise money for a much needed project, but it did so much more. It gave us an oppor­tu­nity to laugh at our­selves as we did the absurd. We raced home-made coffins on wheels. There is noth­ing cra­zier than that!

Non­sense helps us make sense of every­thing else. It is the nec­es­sary con­trast to the lives we con­sider so reason-oriented. Logic needs the irra­tional. Our con­trolled daily rou­tines need a lit­tle insan­ity. Bal­ance is every­thing. The first stage of insan­ity is being totally seri­ous. When peo­ple quit play­ing, they go nuts.

Being human is a bit absurd. We share the world of ani­mals and angels. We are lim­ited by our bod­ies but not our imag­i­na­tion. We clean house, but we also dream. The con­trast time between the seri­ous side of us and the mod­er­ate insan­ity of play is when the soul can smile. Pity the work-a-holic and the Vic­to­rian that does not see the lighter side of God.

Jesus sent his peo­ple two by two on lit­tle mis­sion trips. They came back talk­ing about how the demons fled in front of them. Team build­ing! Peo­ple doing things together! It makes the demons in our lives really crazy. Laugh­ter is the sound of demons run­ning for their lives. In the midst of the feigned seri­ous­ness of absurd liv­ing are those with a twin­kle in their eyes push­ing a cof­fin on wheels ridi­cul­ing death itself.