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Galatians 5:22-23 says, “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control and seriousness.” 

Not really. Seriousness is not a fruit of the Spirit, but do you know what is? Joy! 

As leaders in ministry, it can be easy to get pulled into the serious and weighty parts of our work. There certainly are high stakes, people are hurting and solutions are needed in the world. The good thing is, the Gospel always offers the solution! Jesus said, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.”  

The hurting world doesn’t need followers of Jesus who take themselves too seriously, they need people that are full of the Holy Spirit who gives joy to us in the midst of the difficult things we experience in this broken world! The world needs people who don’t carry the same heavy burdens, but approach the world and its challenges with hope.

At Fishhook, we certainly aren’t perfect at this, but we try our hardest! One of our team’s internal core values is Buffoonery. Buffoonery literally means “behavior that is ridiculous but amusing.” This value exists because we know that, if left to our own devices, we could get caught up in the difficult things of life and work. So, we choose to inject buffoonery into everything we do!

How are you finding ways to infuse joy into your work and the teams you lead and work with?

Here are some ideas you could try that we have found work pretty well at Fishhook!

Nerf Guns

If you think I’m joking, I’m not. We all have a nerf gun and a stash of ammunition in our desks awaiting an unsuspecting victim who is late to a meeting, is celebrating a birthday, finished a project, comes back on vacation – really, just about anything is cause for a Nerf ambush at Fishhook! Find a way to bring some toys - Nerf or otherwise into the office and have fun as a team!

Slido

Play games as a team! We love to use an online polling app called Slido for fun, interactive games with the team. It’s really simple and easy to use, and it’s a good way to bring some laughter and competition to a team meeting!

Snacks

At Fishhook, we have an informal value called snacks. If you ever stop by our office, you’ll find there are always great snacks ready to consume. This just shows a level of care and value for the team, and it’s always helpful for creativity to take a break and fuel up!

Creative Brainstorming

We don’t just have meetings where we talk about stuff, we love to facilitate activities that get everybody creatively engaging with the discussion. It helps your brain work a little differently, and it makes the discussions more lively. 

Some things we do regularly include using sticky notes for brainstorming, play-doh to represent our answer to a prompt, drawing a picture that illustrates how we think, using FigJam in Figma to play games and collaborate, and many other things.

Find ways to make meetings creative, collaborative and lively to bring joy to the work!

Celebrate Everything

Our team loves to celebrate - we celebrate when somebody says a joke (we have a “Silly Goose Tally'' that's always running and on our whiteboard), we celebrate when somebody does great work, we celebrate when someone finishes a meeting on time and we celebrate when we had a great conversation that forced the meeting to go long! We celebrate each other’s personal lives and work achievements, we celebrate when the snacks get refilled, we celebrate when people come back from vacation … you get the point, we celebrate!

I don’t know who coined the phrase, but it’s really true that you cultivate what you celebrate. For us, it matters that joy is a part of our culture, and we want to cultivate that, so we celebrate.

Remember

It’s true that joy and fun aren’t the same. They certainly have overlap, but ultimately, we understand that joy is a fruit of the Spirit not something we can just drum up on our own. So, when the days are hard (because there are those days!), when the projects aren’t going how we’d hoped, when our personal lives are heavy – when joy is hard to come by, we remember. 

We remember God’s faithfulness, we remember that His presence is the source of our joy and we remember that He is with us and gives us everything we need for what’s in front of us.

What is the temperature of joy on your team? How are you working to instill this in your culture?

My prayer for you today is that, first, you would find joy in Jesus as an individual. May you experience His presence in your life, and may it become a well of joy. And second, I pray that as you receive joy from the Holy Spirit that you’re able to see opportunities to let that spill out into your team and leadership. The joy of the Lord is your strength (Neh. 8:10)!

If you’re familiar with Rend Collective, they produced a short film about the art of celebration that’s always an encouragement to me, and I hope it does the same for you!

We’re with you, praying for you and celebrating all that God is doing through you today!