Thursday
We’re up to 1,939 people who have been Joyfest’ed! Some great stuff has been happening - you can see more photos below.
If you have photos, please send them in to churches@joyfest.org.uk
In today’s update we thought we’d feature the responses to Acts of Joy. Going out and doing an Act of Joy can be scary - it means breaking social conventions and, even with friends and colleagues, it can mean introducing a new element to the relationship.
One of the things that can add to our fear is the idea that people in general don’t like Christians. This vague sense often seems to hover around churches and gets reinforced by focusing on really rare incidents.
But it does mean that our imagination can sometimes get caught by this, meaning somewhere, rattling around our subconscious, is the idea that we’ll do an Act of Joy and the person will instantly shout at us about suffering, natural disasters, sexual ethics or religious wars!
One of the aims of Joyfest was for us all to get some real world experience of how open and warm people really are. And this is what the data is showing us.
By the end of Thursday 96% of people responded as Very Happy or Happy to their Act of Joy. Of course, they’d just had something nice happen to them, but it does show our fears about being rejected, or people’s objections and negativity are ill founded.
Really, we shouldn’t be surprised. As Jesus says, “The harvest is plentiful…” meaning people are interested and open to think about the bigger questions about the meaning of life - it’s a fundamental human characteristic - and now we have, in a very gentle way, introduced ourselves as a Christian.
There have been so many specific responses uploaded to the form. Here are a few to give you an idea:
A police officer said they often feel pretty battered by the world, so the Act of Joy goes a really long way
A gift was given to someone who had just experienced a bereavement and said it really helped them in a dark time
A number of people have said the Act of Joy had ‘made their day’
Lots of conversations - especially ones that gave an opportunity to talk about being a Christian - often for the first time, because it had never really had an opportunity to come up before Joyfest
There are stories of people being so touched by the random act of kindness that they’ve started crying!
One of you bought a bunch of flowers and prayed you would give it to the right person. The recipient turned out to be celebrating her wedding anniversary
Someone’s cleaner was given some chocolates as an Act of Joy and then really wanted to talk about church and find out more. Lots of other long conversations about church, faith and God following an Act of Joy
There are incidents of people being Joyfest’ed multiple times. Someone was offered a Joyfest coffee and doughnut on their way to work and arrived to find Joyfest chocolates in the staff kitchen
Of course, it’s not 100% positive. There are reports of people being suspicious and refusing to accept a gift.
One church home group went down the street, knocking on doors (terribly un-British!) and giving out bags of chocolate. One person slammed the door in their face (haters gonna hate) which was somewhat off-putting, but every other home (and a couple of girls in a parked car) received the chocolates with happy surprise. It then came up in the street WhatsApp group with people talking to each other about how nice it was the church was doing things like this.
In conclusion, perhaps it’s summed up by what someone wrote in their form, after handing flowers to a stranger on Exeter High Street - “Super scary but totally worth it".
