I’ve sung songs with the Christ Church Cathedral Choir in Oxford as I sat in the congregation. I sang along with the “Hallelujah Chorus” at the end of a performance of Handel’s Messiah in the Sheldonian Theater. I’ve sung songs with Matt Redman and Chris Tomlin in the throngs of tens of thousands. But I believe the happiest song I ever sang was in a dirt-floor home in Kikuyu, Kenya. After being hosted for dinner, Abigail and I were seated on the couch and told that the young lady in the house—a shy, sweet girl who was kept in the house by mercy because her own parents could not afford her care—wanted to sing a song for us.

She came out, stood before us trembling and began to sing:

God is so good;
God is so good;
God is so good;
He’s so good to me.

Five of us there, in a two-room house of left-behind wood and corrugated tin, joined to sing together. I believe it was the most beautiful song I’ve ever heard, and I can still hear it today. A happy song. A marker of the true church and a banner in the colors of heaven. She gave us a taste of our eternal home, and my heart burned to see the kingdom come. There is such a song in your church.

Tim McConnell . Happy Church: Pursuing Radical Joy as the People of God