Laughter in the Pews : Humor: A new generation of clergy seeks to recapture the joyful world of the early Christians by adding jokes to sermons and cartoons to religious bulletins.

Nearly a decade ago, when Lutheran comic Merrilyn Belgum performed at a nursing home chapel, the altar was stripped of religious symbols. The unspoken message: “Now, we’re going to have some fun and humor, but it has nothing to do with the church.”

But today, when the “Queen Mother of Comedy” arrives with her trademark feathered boas, sequined dresses and oversize glasses, no one removes the cross and other trappings of faith.

In 1994, laughter is welcome on the pulpit and in the pews. Belgum is part of a new generation of clergy, theologians and, yes, comics, who seek converts to a faith that celebrates rather than endures life.

Their mission: to recapture what they envision as the joyful world of the early Christians, a world in which the resurrection was a living memory and centuries of church tradition had not relegated its celebration to one Sunday a year--Easter--and funerals.

Already, there are a number of signs that serious Christians no longer worry--as H.L. Mencken once wrote of Puritans--that someone, somewhere, is having a good time.

Jokes and cartoons have become common in religious bulletins, and an increasing number of clergy loosen up their congregations with funny stories.

“How do you disperse a threatening crowd?” asks the Joyful Noiseletter. “Take up a collection.” And according to the Parish Chute, “Anybody who has ever used the expression, ‘It was no Sunday school picnic’ has obviously never been to a Sunday school picnic.”

The Fellowship of Merry Christians, founded in 1986 with 250 members, now has 10,000. And another new group, the Assn. of Battered Clergy, finds healing in humor for the pressures most ministers face daily.

The movement to a more celebratory faith focusing on joy and fueled by humor is not based solely on theological grounds. Fear of losing generations of baby boomers and baby busters who find the church boring--along with research into the physical and mental benefits of laughter--are also persuading religious leaders to lighten up.

“We came from an almost puritanical type of attitude: If it’s fun, it must be wrong,” said George Goldtrap of Madison, Tenn., who left full-time ministry in the Churches of Christ to be a professional speaker.

“We’ve come almost 180 degrees,” Goldtrap said, “to the point where a positive mental attitude and a positive, happy demeanor is critical to one’s spiritual welfare.”

“A cheerful heart is a good medicine, but a downcast spirit dries up the bones,” says Proverbs 17:22.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells his disciples not to let his death overshadow his resurrection: “So you sorrow now, but I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.”

Scholars say the earliest Christians, for whom Christ’s death and resurrection were a recent memory, heeded that advice.

Those Christians would not have recognized all the fuss over Easter. For them, every Sunday was Easter in terms of celebrating their belief that Jesus rose from the dead.

It wasn’t until the 4th Century, when Christians who once risked death to profess their faith suddenly were given social cachet by the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, that the first Easter Christians began to show up in churches.

By the time of Gregory the Great early in the 7th Century, the focus of services shifted from celebrating the resurrection to commemorating Jesus’ suffering on the cross, said Catherine Gonzalez, a professor of church history at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga.

Look at hundreds of years of religious art and you’ll find plenty of depictions of the passion and crucifixion of Jesus--but few post-resurrection portrayals or even joyful scenes from his life.

The Messiah whose message was “be of good cheer” is often depicted as “a tormented depressive,” according to Cal Samra, editor of the Joyful Noiseletter.

In America, the Puritans and their descendants not only eschewed humor, but stripped churches of even the slightest ornamentation.

Even today, many say that one of the great paradoxes of American Christianity is how a religion that proclaims joy, peace and everlasting life turned out to be so somber.

People will intone the Eucharistic prayer celebrating the most hopeful belief of their faith--Christ is risen, Christ will come again--then solemnly file up to receive the Host.

It’s almost as if they believe a somber expression is necessary “to make it count,” said the Rev. Paul Lintern, a Lutheran humorist from Mansfield, Ohio.

Lintern is among a growing number of religious people who are teaching churchgoers how to play as well as pray together, in a variety of forums, from daylong “playshops” sponsored by the Fellowship of Merry Christians to social events for promoting fellowship. He started a “Saturday Night Alive” program at his old church in Doylestown, Ohio, in which prayer, skits, songs and David Letterman-like Top 10 lists are offered to an audience containing some who feel alienated from the church. Some of the Top 10 pickup lines at a Christian singles church: “What’s a charismatic like you doing in a place like this?” and “Don’t worry, I’m attracted to you purely in a spiritual way.”

Sister Mary Christelle McAluso, a popular speaker known as “The Fun Nun” (not an oxymoron, she insists), contends that those who are unfamiliar with Christian services would never guess such activities were celebrations.

“To picture religion as such a somber, dry and heavy thing,” she said, “it’s pitiful.”

McAluso earlier this month inducted 4,000 people into the so-called Order of the Fun Nun at a national conference of religious educators in Anaheim.

Their initiation was to recite “Mary Had a Little Lamb” with their right index fingers on the nose of the person to their right and their left index fingers on the nose of the person on the other side.

In McAluso’s theological world view, God is unfathomable love. When she helps another person feel better, she says, she receives a joy beyond human understanding.

It doesn’t matter if it’s 60 people at a small church or 4,000 people at the national conference in Orange County, says McAluso, a Sister of Mercy at the College of St. Mary in Omaha.

“If I’ve been able to make one other human being smile,” she says, “my life on this Earth has been well-rewarded.”