The Pastoral Virtue of Playfulness – Randall Greenwald

Walking into our pastor’s study for our premarital-counseling appointment, my fiancée and I found Pastor Mike spending his free moments reading. It wasn’t a Puritan classic, nor the latest release on church growth.

“It’s a book about mushrooms,” he chuckled.

He muttered something about mining for sermon illustrations, but I think that was a decoy. He was reading a book about mushrooms because he enjoyed reading about mushrooms.

Pastor Mike’s church couldn’t have been an easy one to pastor. I’m sure there was heaviness and leadership difficulties. And yet what I remember about Pastor Mike was his playfulness. His frequent chuckling revealed not just a joy in Christ but a deeply playful spirit.

Playfulness just might be one of the greatest unspoken, yet necessary, attributes for a pastor.

Playful Obedience

It’s common to think that pastoral lifein fact, the obedient Christian life—is always to be purposeful and goal-directed. So unstructured leisure, daydreaming, or reading about mushrooms might raise suspicions. Some of us unfortunately assume unstructured activities like these are unsuited to the seriousness of pastoral life. But I need to be reminded of models such as Pastor Mike.

Early in my ministry I stumbled across Calvin Seerveld’s reflections on what he calls “aesthetic obedience.” In his book Rainbows for the Fallen World, Seerveld argues for playfulness as a necessary contra-practice for our deeply embedded Protestant work ethic. He challenges us who rightly take sin and work seriously to consider:

God wants playful, imagining, and comic incidents to take place in his world. The Lord made room for a sense of humor, for fantasies of winged horses, for the fun of making-believe as when children “play house.” And God saw that it was good.

Reading Seerveld in 1985 encouraged me occasionally to stop in the middle of my sermon-making just to stare out the window and let my mind follow the paths it needed to travel. Studies 35 years later show that such playful, non-directed daydreaming serves creativity. But to justify daydreaming or other types of play by saying it serves productivity is to risk corrupting it. God invites us to enjoy this spectacular world.

But, Seerveld observes, we don’t often go on bike rides just for the delight of the thing itself. We do so because we are training for a race or building our cardiovascular health. We have forgotten how to play for the sheer enjoyment of it.

Born to Laugh

Play is full of a lighthearted curiosity. It is curious about the good things of God’s creation. A playful spirit is the lack of restraint that characterizes a child; it is a refusal to let the darkness of sin and the world’s brokenness strip away the goodness yet existent in the world.

Though my son is 40, he will arrange the blueberries or chocolate chips on a pancake as a letter or a smile because he’s playful that way. A 3-year-old at church a few weeks ago twirled her dress and then was spotted with her hands barely above the congas accompanying the musicians as they rehearsed.

We are often so purpose-driven that we will only twirl our dresses and play the congas if there is a justifiable reason. And that is our loss. A playful spirit serves joy, allowing us to freely explore life as more than just business and responsibility.

A playful spirit serves joy, allowing us to freely explore life as more than just business and responsibility.

Pastor Mike could be serious. His rich, deep, faithful Reformed preaching was something so new to me, and so transforming, it left a legacy I’ll never live up to. But his putting on music and dancing happily with his teen-age daughters is also part of his legacy. His playfulness took nothing away from his pastoral influence, and probably deepened it.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not talking about an adult acting like a child in order to win children. I’m not talking about adults acting in foolish, sinful, or offensive ways. A grown man belly dancing leaves the sphere of the playful and enters the obscene. Maybe when I have burping contests with my grandsons, I have done the same. I hope not. Adults need to know they are adults. They need to know when behaviors are appropriate and when they are not.

I understand how difficult playfulness can be when we’re struggling with church conflict or watching a ministry teeter on the edge of oblivion. But perhaps that’s when we need playfulness most. In the Over the Rhine song “Born” we are reminded that though “I was born to laugh / I learned to laugh through my tears.”

Live in Grace

To learn to laugh at all, and especially through our tears, takes a reacquaintance with grace. Playfulness arises from feeling secure. Children dance and twirl and chase ducks because they feel safe. To know our security as children of a heavenly Father is the absolute prerequisite for pastoral playfulness. Author Marilyn McEntyre suggests, “To play is to claim our freedom as beloved children of God. . . . Children who feel completely safe and loved are playful. To play is to live in grace.”

Playfulness is a reflection of how secure the gospel has made us feel. It is to live in grace. We need to be freed to learn to play.

Playfulness is a reflection of how secure the gospel has made us feel. It is to live in grace.

So go for a walk, but not to count steps. Buy a tree and marvel at its growth. Go to the beach and collect seashells (this is not always a tragedy). Learn to tap dance. Put whipped cream on your spouse’s ear. Write a line in your sermon that no one will ever see just because it makes you laugh. Write a letter longhand and end it with a goofy hand-drawn picture of yourself. Do it just because it is fun. Put the office trash can on the other side of the room just to see how many three-pointers you can sink. Hang a bird feeder outside your window and watch the squirrels furtively eat.

Read books about mushrooms. Dance with your daughters.

“And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Gen. 1:31).

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