I like to believe that joy transcends circumstance. Happiness needs to be renewed. For instance, I might be happy when my favorite team wins a big game, but that will only last until the next big game. Joy, on the other hand, is the gift that keeps on giving; an experience which provides meaning in perpetuity.
When I consider joy, I think of Esther, Richard, David, Debra, Lessie, Paul, Julie, Kenny, Ken, Mark, Cheryl, David, Bill, Shirley, Danny, and Chris. Who are these people? In brief, they are the church. Obviously, they aren’t the whole church, but they represent the church to me. When I think of the saints, as they are called in Scripture, I think of these and many other people. I have spent my life inside the church, and this has been a blessing because I have witnessed others live out their life’s calling and share their gifts and passions with me.
My life experience tells me that there’s a connection between joy and church, even if there are often messy human relationships as well. Despite this connection, a recent study has found that many pastors struggle to find joy in their work or relationships. The Hartford Institute for Religious Research, commissioned by the Lilly Endowment for Religion, studied the pandemic’s effects on congregations. In their most recent update, they have found that churches have largely rebounded from the challenges of the pandemic, but clergy’s stress and burnout remained stubbornly high:
“Our surveys of approximately 1,700 religious leaders revealed high levels of discontentment, with nearly half entertaining thoughts of leaving their congregations and over half contemplating exiting ministry altogether. The primary factors driving this disaffection weren’t general dissatisfaction with ministry but relational disconnection and conflict within congregations. Younger clergy, particularly millennials, reported lower levels of well-being compared to older colleagues.”
I think it is fair to say that many pastors immersed in the day-to-day vicissitudes of ministry struggle to find joy in their work or relationships. In other words, it’s complicated.
Nonetheless, it is important for all of us, not just clergy, to never lose sight of the gift and potential of church. When Paul sat in prison, he thought of his own list of saints, and he wrote to them in Philippi. He called them his “joy and crown,” and the memory of them kept him strong in a very challenging situation. “I thank God every time I remember you,” he wrote, and I believe we know what he meant.
I suspect even the most jaded pastor has their own list of names who have changed their life for the better. Given the readership of this publication, I assume most people reading this have been positively impacted by the faith and service of at least one other person. It is important, then, that we keep this list of saints at the forefront of our minds.
Joy can be difficult to summon these days, and I concede that the church is not often the first place people turn. This is to our detriment. I wonder if Paul wrote, “I remember you,” as a reminder to himself just as much as it was an encouragement to the receiver of the letter. Did he forget his friends while he was consumed by the gloom and despair of prison? Was he worried they forgot him?
Paul was human just like the rest of us, and we can imagine that he took a hard look at his life when he was secluded in that Roman prison. His ultimate answer, we can assume, is captured in his letter to his friends in Philippi. If we think of joy as enduring in ways happiness does not, we can begin to understand how the most important spiritual relationships of our lives are a deep well of joy in troubled times.
When the church becomes something abstract to us or is experienced as a dysfunctional or inert institution, we cannot find joy there (notably, Paul does not seem to have been reminiscing about meetings). When we think about that holy list of people who have shaped us and formed us and supported us, we may find that the church always was and always will be our joy. Those people who have shaped us and formed us, and to whom we have tended and ministered, are our joy and our crown, just like the Philippians were for Paul. They were brought to us not through our own ingenuity or charisma, but by the grace of Jesus Christ. There are many things which are uncertain in the world today, but we should never lose sight of that which we know to be true, that our lives have been enriched immeasurably by the saints of the church. They are our joy indeed.
