What if the worship service you planned this week left people full—but full of the wrong thing?
Here is a thing I have noticed. Some churches do serious really, really well. Every song is weighty and reverent, every word chosen with theological precision, and the whole experience feels like standing at the foot of a mountain. Beautiful. But after a while, you realize nobody is smiling. And when nobody is smiling, you start to wonder if anyone is actually enjoying the God you are all supposedly there to celebrate.
Other churches swing the other way. High energy, brilliant production, laugh-out-loud moments from the stage. People love it. But after a while, you walk out wondering—did we actually encounter God today? Or did we just have a really fun Sunday morning?
And then there is the church that is all information. Dense, careful, thorough. Every theological base covered. But your soul is somewhere back in the parking lot.
Worship leaders, here is the truth. God is not one-dimensional, and the people you serve are not, either. A gathering that only hits one note—no matter how good that note is—will eventually leave people hungry. What we need, what Scripture actually models, and what the earliest believers practiced together, is three distinct kinds of moments woven into every service. Moments of awe. Moments of aha. And yes, moments of haha.
Stick with me, because this is going to be good.
Awe — Standing in the Presence of Something Much Bigger Than Yourself
Awe is not atmosphere. It is not dimmed lights and a fog machine, though those things are not necessarily wrong. Awe is that sharp, almost physical sensation of realizing that God is holy and enormous and altogether Other—and that He knows your name anyway. It holds two things in impossible tension at once: the trembling and the wonder.
The Bible is full of it. Isaiah walks into the temple and the building is shaking, filled with smoke, and seraphim are calling to each other in voices that could shake a foundation. His response? “It’s all over! I am doomed!” (Isaiah 6:5). Not exactly the kind of opener you’d put on a bulletin. But it’s real. And after that moment of undoing, Isaiah is commissioned, cleansed, and sent. Awe does that. It dismantles us so God can rebuild us.
Job describes a different awe encounter—fear, trembling, hair standing on end, left utterly mystified (Job 4:13–17). The disciples at the Transfiguration were gobsmacked—Moses, Elijah, the voice of the Father, and their rabbi shining like the sun, all at once. They didn’t know what to do, so they offered to build cabins.
Here is the science, if you find that helpful. Research consistently links a regular experience of awe—the genuine, God-is-enormous variety—with lower depression, higher life satisfaction, and a deeper sense that life actually means something. Studies have even found that people who recently experienced awe were measurably more generous with their time and money than people who merely experienced happiness. Think about that for a second. Not happiness. Awe.
And the good news is that awe can be cultivated. Scripture actually encourages it. Isaiah 29:9 tells people to “be stunned and amazed.” Job 37:14 says to “stop and consider God’s wonders.” This is not passive. You can create the conditions for awe through music, through silence, through the Lord’s Supper, through reading Scripture aloud in a way that lets it land. The early church knew this. Gathered around the broken bread and the shared cup, they were regularly undone by what it meant.
Plan for it. Every single week, plan for it.
Aha — The Moment the Light Comes On
Aha is different from awe, though they sometimes arrive together. Awe is an encounter with who God is. Aha is the moment you suddenly understand what that means for you and your life. It is the penny dropping. The theological penny, or the relational penny, or the “I have been doing this all wrong” penny. Sometimes it is deeply comforting. Sometimes it is a little uncomfortable.
Jesus’ teaching in Nazareth is a case study in the aha moment that goes sideways. The people grasped exactly what He was saying—they got it so sharply, so personally, that they tried to throw Him off a cliff (Luke 4). Now, that is perhaps not the response you are hoping for on a Sunday morning. But you have to admit, that congregation was not passive. They were engaged. Something landed.
The best aha moments do both things. They comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. They take a truth that has been sitting in someone’s head as a theological concept and move it down about eighteen inches into the heart, where it changes things. The early church in Acts 2:42 devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching—that is the aha component of their gathered life. Doctrine was not background noise. It was the freight train of transformation.
For worship leaders, this means the teaching in your service matters immensely, even if you are not the one delivering it. It means choosing songs with theological content that stretches people, not just reassures them. It means allowing tension to exist before the resolution comes. The best stories do this. The best sermons do this. You set up the problem honestly before you offer the good news. And when the good news arrives, people feel it in their bones.
Aha moments help people own the truth, rather than merely inherit it. And that ownership changes everything.
Haha — Being Real Enough to Actually Connect
Okay. This is the one some of you are side-eyeing.
But hear me out. Haha is not about being a comedian. It is about being a human being. It is about letting the people in your congregation see that you are real—that you have had a ridiculous morning, that you once said something deeply foolish, that faith and laughter are not enemies. It is the fellowship part of worship. The koinonia. The “we are doing this together and we actually like each other” part.
Elijah, one of the great serious prophets of the Old Testament, mocked the prophets of Baal with what can only be described as savage wit. Maybe Baal is busy. Maybe he is on a trip. Maybe he’s in the bathroom. (1 Kings 18:27). God did not strike Elijah down for this. The fire fell. The moment was holy and hilarious at the same time. That is a thing that can happen.
Jesus used absurdist imagery that would have gotten a laugh in any century. A camel through the eye of a needle. A man walking around with a plank sticking out of his eye, helpfully offering to remove your speck. He was making points, yes. Serious points. But He was doing it in a way that made people lean in.
Martin Luther, not exactly known as a stand-up comedian, said that laughter is sometimes the brightest weapon of righteousness, lancing both gloom and sin. And research backs him up in a surprising way. Humor and fear cannot coexist in the human brain at the same time. Many churches have inadvertently built their entire theology on fear and then wonder why humor feels irreverent. It is not irreverent. It is liberating.
There is actually a long tradition in the church of what early theologians called risus paschalis—the Easter laugh. For centuries, the week after Easter was observed with joy and laughter and playfulness, rooted in the glorious idea that God played the ultimate joke on death by raising Jesus from the grave. Death thought it had won. Spoiler alert. It had not. And that is funny. In the best possible way.
The haha moment in your service does not require a joke or a comedy bit. It requires authenticity. A self-deprecating story. A genuine smile. Eye contact with real warmth behind it. The willingness to let your congregation see you as a person, not a performer. When people feel safe enough to laugh, they feel safe enough to cry, to confess, to open up. You are creating a space where they can be themselves.
And that is not a distraction from the gospel. That is the gospel making people free.
What Acts 2:42 Has Been Trying to Tell Us All Along
Look at how the early church described their gathered life. They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching—aha. To the breaking of bread and prayer—awe. To fellowship—haha. It is right there. Three rhythms, woven together, inseparable.
And when they prayed together, the place where they were meeting was shaken. That is an awe moment that would be hard to manufacture with any amount of production budget. But the conditions for it were created by communities that were committed to all three. They were learning together, they were encountering God together, and they were genuinely with each other together. The fullness of that created space for God to move.
These three things are not a sequence to follow or boxes to check. They are rhythms of a gathered life that is actually alive.
A Simple Audit for Your Next Service
Before you finalize your plan this week, ask three questions.
Where is the awe moment? Is there a place in the service where people have a genuine shot at encountering the holiness of God—not just hearing about it, but feeling the edges of it? If not, what could you add or shift to create that space?
Where is the aha moment? Is there a place where something will land—where a truth will move from someone’s head to their heart? Is there enough tension before the resolution? Is there substance underneath the style?
Where is the haha moment? Is there warmth? Humanity? A moment of genuine connection where people feel like they are with friends who are safe and real? If your service could be delivered entirely by a well-programmed robot without losing anything, you might need to add some haha.
One chronically missing element will eventually thin out what you are building. Not because you are doing the other two badly, but because people are whole people. They need awe for their spirits, aha for their minds, and haha for their belonging.
God made them that way. On purpose.
Worship leaders, you are not just program directors or theological curators or master-of-ceremonies types. You are creators of environments where God can meet His people—all of them, all at once, in all the ways they need to be met. That is an enormous privilege. And a serious responsibility. And occasionally, a really, really good laugh.
And that trifecta, dear ones, is a very good gift.
Acts 2:42
They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.
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