What Is the Holy Laughter Movement?

Question 4159.

The holy laughter movement is the label attached to a wave of charismatic experience that surged through certain churches from the early 1990s onward, in which whole congregations would dissolve into prolonged, helpless laughter presented as a direct outpouring of the Holy Spirit. I do not come to this as a stranger looking in from the cold. I have watched the footage, I have spoken with people who were caught up in it, and I have read the defences offered for it.

You may have seen a clip and felt a knot of unease without quite being able to say why. That instinct deserves a hearing rather than a scolding. So let us look honestly at what the holy laughter movement actually is, where it came from, and whether the Bible gives us any reason to receive it as a work of God.

Where the holy laughter movement began

The phenomenon is usually traced to the ministry of Rodney Howard-Browne in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and then to the meetings at the Toronto Airport church from 1994, often called the Toronto Blessing. People would fall, shake, and above all laugh, sometimes for long stretches, and this laughter was taught as evidence that the Spirit had come upon them in power.

From Toronto it travelled quickly. Visiting pastors carried it back to congregations across the English-speaking world, and within a couple of years holy laughter had become a recognised feature of a certain strand of renewal. I remember the conversations at the time, the excitement, and the assumption that anyone who questioned it was quenching the Spirit.

What the defenders of holy laughter say

Those who promote holy laughter point to the joy of the Lord as our strength, and to the apostles at Pentecost who were thought to be drunk. They argue that an encounter with the living God might well overflow into an uncontainable gladness, and that we are too buttoned-up, too British, too cerebral to let the Spirit move us.

There is a grain of truth worth honouring here. Our God is not grim, and a faith that has lost all its gladness has lost something the Bible plainly commends. I have no wish to defend a cold, joyless religion that treats every smile as worldliness. The question is not whether God gives joy. It is whether the holy laughter movement is the genuine article.

Testing holy laughter by Scripture

When I test the holy laughter movement by Scripture, the first thing I notice is silence where I would expect noise. There is no passage anywhere in the New Testament where a congregation is gathered and the mark of the Spirit is mass, uncontrollable laughter. Pentecost produced bold, intelligible preaching that three thousand people could understand and respond to, not a room full of people unable to speak.

Paul gives a whole chapter, 1 Corinthians 14, to how the Spirit works when the church assembles, and his governing concerns are intelligibility, order, and the building up of others. A visitor walking into a meeting given over to holy laughter would struggle to say he had been instructed, convicted, or edified, which is the very test Paul applies. The accusation of drunkenness at Pentecost was a mockery that Peter immediately corrected, not a pattern to imitate.

The trouble with a switched-off will

The deeper concern I have with the holy laughter movement is what it does to the will. The experience is presented as something that overrides you, that you cannot help, that takes your self-control away, and that surrender to this loss of control is itself the spiritual act. Yet the fruit of the Spirit, as Paul lists it, ends with self-control, not the abandonment of it.

The Spirit of God does not work by switching off the mind and the will He redeemed. He fills, He leads, He prompts, and the person remains responsible and awake. When I see a phenomenon that requires you to stop thinking and let something take over, I am not looking at the Spirit who gives a sound mind. This is the same instinct I have written about regarding being slain in the Spirit and being drunk in the Spirit.

The joy that Scripture actually commends

Biblical joy is a sturdier thing than the holy laughter movement suggests. It is the joy that Paul knew in a prison cell, the joy that the persecuted believers of Hebrews kept while their property was seized, the joy that is set before us as we endure. It is rooted in what God has done and promised, and it holds steady when there is nothing in the room to laugh about.

That kind of joy can certainly include laughter, warmth, and real gladness in worship. I have known services where the gladness was tangible and entirely healthy. But it is not hysteria, it is not contagious collapse, and it does not need a platform personality to release it. It rises from the gospel itself, which is why it survives the hospital ward and the graveside.

Discernment without becoming a cynic

I want to be careful here, because the danger runs both ways. It is possible to react against the holy laughter movement by becoming a hard, suspicious critic who would quench a genuine work of God for fear of being taken in. Paul tells us to test everything and hold fast to what is good, which means neither swallowing everything nor spitting out everything.

So weigh it. Does the experience leave people more in love with Jesus, more hungry for the Bible, more holy, more useful to others? Or does it leave them chasing the next meeting, dependent on a particular speaker, and strangely unchanged in character? The tree is known by its fruit, and that test can be applied calmly, without rancour, by anyone willing to look. For the wider movement behind it, see my answer on third wave charismatic theology, and the related practice of soaking prayer.

When the spectacular becomes a substitute

There is a hunger in us for the dramatic, and it is not all bad. We want to know that God is real and near, and a manifestation we can see and hear feels like proof in a way that quiet faithfulness does not. I understand the pull. The trouble is that the spectacular can quietly become a substitute for the very things that actually form us into the likeness of Jesus.

A believer who has come to measure their walk with God by the intensity of their experiences will always be hungry for the next, stronger one, because the last one has worn off. That is the treadmill the chase for phenomena puts people on. The ordinary means by which God grows us, the reading and preaching of the word, the breaking of bread, prayer, and the patient love of the fellowship, start to feel dull beside the fireworks.

Yet it is precisely those ordinary means that the New Testament dwells on. The early believers devoted themselves to the apostles teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer, and it was in that steady soil that the Spirit did His deepest work. A church that learns to treasure the ordinary is a church that will not be tossed about by every new wave of excitement.

Alive without being chaotic

I long for churches that are alive. A congregation can be so frightened of excess that it becomes a museum, correct and cold, where nothing is expected of God and nothing is received from Him. That is its own kind of unbelief, and it grieves me as much as the chaos at the other end. The answer to fanaticism is not deadness.

But aliveness in the New Testament looks like conviction under preaching, joy in worship, love poured out among the members, and lives visibly changing, not like a roomful of people who have lost control of themselves. The Spirit who fell at Pentecost left people clear-headed enough to repent and be baptised that very day. A genuine work of God makes you more yourself before Him, not less. Hold out for that, and you will not have to choose between a graveyard and a circus.

So, now what?

If you have been part of a setting where holy laughter was the measure of spirituality, and you found yourself either faking it or feeling left out, let me say this plainly. Your standing with God has never rested on whether you could laugh on cue. It rests on Jesus, and on the Spirit who sealed you the moment you believed.

Pursue the real thing. Pursue the Spirit who fills the yielded heart, who makes the Scriptures come alive, who grows patience and kindness and self-control in you over years. That work is quieter than a roomful of laughter, but it is the work that will still be standing when the meeting is over and you are back in the ordinary week. Would you rather have the noise, or the fruit?

For God is not a God of confusion but of peace. As in all the churches of the saints.

1 Corinthians 14:33