The discipleship team at GCF recently decided that during the Easter Season (between yesterday and Pentecost Sunday at the end of May) that we would focus on joy as a church-wide theme.
I just finished doing a bit of searching at Amazon.com to find out what books on joy are floating around out in the world. After parousing several pages at Amazon, I was horrified to find that I turned up at least 20 books on the topic of joy written by Buddhists or followers of other eastern religions. There were also a large number of books on joy written by pop-culture, post-modern spiritual gurus. I found only 3 books on joy by Christian writers. One was a book that described the use of cognitive-behavioral therapy as a tool for discovering joy. On May 1 of this year, Calvin Miller will release a book on joy in his “fruits of the spirit” series and, of course, there was C.S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy which is an autobiographical book of his early spiritual journey into the Christian faith.
Something is wrong here.
While working with Uday, our worship pastor at GCF, last week to pick out a few hymns for the Wilmore Community Sunrise Service, I came across a hymn I could remember from my kid-hood days: Easter People Raise Your Voices. Shouldn’t there be more than 3 joy-exploring books written by a group that refers to itself as “Easter People”?
As of yet, I don’t know how our teachings over the next several Sundays will explore joy or where they’ll go, but I think we owe it to ourselves and to our Lord to get the joy out.
