The following is an email we sent out in 2023 to a group of friends. It was the beginning of our “fun club.” We offer it here as inspiration for you to start your own fun club!

Hello friends!

Melissa and I are not going through a midlife crisis, but we have engaged in a whole lot of mid-life reflection over this past year. We had a surfeit of time last winter which only further stimulated our desire to subtract more busyness from our lives in order to open up more time for that which we find life-giving.

Lifestyle design sounds and can be boujee and we confess to digesting too much Tim Ferriss this past year. Nevertheless, it seems like obvious wisdom to align what you are doing in life with what you believe in and therefore want to be doing. With this in mind we have set up a number of systems or habits that prioritize time with our children, time with each other (weekly date nights), time with the body of Christ, time to exercise, time in Scripture, time that is completely unscheduled and open, etc. Simplifying life is not a simple endeavor, and there remains much that still feels like meaningless busy work. However, we continue to be amazed by how much of the busyness can be taken off the table if we are courageous enough to challenge society’s script for our lives. That is a separate conversation from this letter but a topic we are budding evangelists for.

This letter is the result of Melissa and I asking ourselves, what do we most want to add to our lives in this season of life? We came up with two things. One of which is the subject of this letter, which is “fun.” More specifically, play.

For those of you who know Jon and Necia, you know they quite publicly have “Work hard, Play hard” as their mantra and do a good job of living into that. Melissa and I are not sure that we have as much energy as they do and we keep saying our mantra would be “work hard, rest hard, play hard.”  The first we have always been great at, the second we are now doing quite well, but the third remains an area for growth. We are taking up some personal hobbies but Melissa and I both are the types that experience the most fun in a group setting. So we got to brainstorming…how do we find a group of adults who just want to have more fun? This seemed like an easy question at first glance, but the more we thought about it we realized that adults don’t engage in much that is playful. The demands of adulting naturally atrophy our imaginations and play muscles.

There is of course more to the question. For starters, people have very different ideas of what constitutes fun. Fun could be retiring every evening to Netflix or some alcohol. Maybe it is gaming or a sport. The possibilities are endless. When Melissa and I contemplated this more we came to realize that what we desired was not so much a particular activity that we deemed “fun,” as much as a posture and pursuit of doing new things to stretch ourselves and inject some playful mystery and novelty into life. New fun, new adventures, maybe some travel. What I mean by that is that we didn’t just want to join a swing dance club, we want to try all kinds of new things. Things we wouldn’t normally do- like bubble football, a paint and sip class, a virtual gaming night, a Halloween costume party, chartering a sail boat, etc.

Then we started having conversations about who would do this kind of stuff with us and how would we go about organizing it. Thankfully we had just read the perfect pair of books to answer these questions- The Art of Gathering, by Priya Parker  and  The Power of Fun: How to feel alive again, by Catherine Price. From these books we felt assured that structure is a must. If we sat back and wished for a group of like-minded folks to organically or magically appear we could be waiting for a long time. Life is chaotic for people. We live in a culture where married people, especially married people with children, almost never do things spontaneously. For better or worse, play, like everything else, needs to be put on the calendar for it to come to pass.

So this is the invitation:

Would you like to join a club to keep yourself accountable to playing more? We read that when naming events or clubs that specificity is helpful, so how is this for the name- “Married couples seeking regular doses of fun club”?

Some potential club rules…

1.    I will bring my spirit of adventure with me, ready to try new things, and contribute to a positive group energy even amidst a diversity of opinions.

2.    We will come to at least 8 of the 10 yearly outings. Outings will take place on the ______ (TBD) of each month, unless otherwise determined.

3.    I will turn my phone off and be present.

4.    I will lean into the principles of two cornerstone books for this group: The Art of Gathering, by Priya Parker  &  The Power of Fun: How to feel alive again, by Catherine Price.

Now the sticky and awkward part. We made a couple of lists of friends to invite. Congratulations, you all were on our first list J. Priya Parker recommends a group size of roughly 12 so we are hoping there will be 5 couples who feel a similar ache and drive to schedule in more play. If we can’t get 5 from our first list we’ll start reaching out to the second. The main thing we want to say though is that there is absolutely no pressure whatsoever to join and we will in no way feel hurt if you decline. The very last thing we want is to put any pressure on anyone to join something that is going to add more stress or busyness to life. What is life-giving to one couple may be a burden to another. Or maybe the timing isn’t right for you. All of our circumstances are different, so we don’t pretend to know what would be healthy for any of you. This is merely an invitation. If it doesn’t fit, don’t wear it.

When we started a book club in 2017 we invited some of our closest friends and most of them couldn’t commit and instead a hodgepodge of other friends / acquaintances ended up coming. Looking back I wouldn’t trade out these people for the world- it was the perfect group and it continues on to this day and we love it! We trust people to discern for themselves what makes the most sense and God has a way of orchestrating it from there. That all being said, we didn’t put a million people on this list because realistically this kind of group would fail if it was too large. There are many friends we didn’t send this out to and that was difficult but logistically unavoidable. So we ask for your discretion and we hope we won’t be offending anyone. Another thing to note, we love single people and in so many ways seek to embody a radical inclusiveness, yet we acknowledge that this space, this group, is serving a different purpose. We’ve wrestled with this too, but in the end feel that there can be times and places for those in similar stages and circumstances to gather with intentionality and that is okay.

Talk this over with your spouse and let us know your thoughts by October 5th.  We have a few more thoughts on how to democratically determine the groups’ outings and adventures but this is already a crazy long email. And please do note, we are very, very open to suggestions and your brainstorming. Thanks for taking the time to read this!

Cheers!