If you think Tauren Wells wrote a book just because he’s a pastor now—think again.
“A lot of people see like this pastor playbook where it’s like, all right, he’s going to become a pastor, plant a church or whatever… then here comes a book,” Tauren told me. “But that’s not this.” He’s quick to explain that Joy Bomb: Unleash Jesus’s Explosive Joy for an Extraordinary Life wasn’t birthed from a pulpit strategy—it’s a calling that traces all the way back to childhood.
“I can go back to being a little boy and going shopping with my mom and taking my notebook, my spiral notebook and a pen and sitting under the TJ Maxx clothes racks and writing stories and writing things,” Tauren said. “And once I started following Jesus, it turned into writing messages and writing songs. There has been a creative drive to articulate my experiences in God’s Word through the written form for a long time.”
Still, the real green light didn’t come until recently.
“I just felt like it was time,” he said. “I had spent a year reading through [the Bible with] YouVersion… and at some point we went through Matthew 5. I was just saying, ‘blessed, blessed, blessed,’ and I think Nicky Gumbel pointed out in his devo that blessed meant happy.”
That single word—happy—hit different.
“I started thinking about the reality that Jesus in his inaugural sermon, the first time he spoke and someone wrote it down as a message, the first word that he says is ‘happy,’” Tauren explained. “The power of priority. If this is the word heaven prioritized for humanity, how important must happiness be to the heart of God?”
For Tauren, Joy Bomb is more than a spiritual message—it’s a spiritual weapon. “It is definitely a book to put people on offense, not defense, because we all know our joy is under attack,” he said. “If you think that all that there is to see is what you can see, then you have not seen all that there is to see.”
And while it’s a book about joy, make no mistake—it’s really a book about Jesus. “A lot of us don’t find Jesus because we’re on a truth quest. We find Jesus because we’re on a happiness quest,” he said. “So I hope that this message gets people to where true happiness is. And that’s in Jesus.”
If Take It All Back was about reclaiming ground, Joy Bomb is about igniting the ground you’ve taken.
Joy Bomb: Unleash Jesus’s Explosive Joy for an Extraordinary Life releases May 20, 2025, and is available for preorder now wherever books are sold.