wonvoice creative

I’m deliberately going to take 1 thing that Marky boy said, waaaaay out of context. I think that the notion of planning & the role of the Holy Spirit is one that can be highly emotive, & often in the midst of the emotion we can maybe miss what is really happening. I would like to explore a few thoughts on this in the ensuing paragraphs.
I’m all for planning, & I’m all for spontaneity. Does that sound like a contradiction? I think that the two of them can & do mutually co-exist when practised with wisdom & insight. In fact, I would argue that the more planned something is, the greater potential for spontaneity. In my mind, it goes something like this.
Planning exists at a multiplicity of levels in any service; from the loosely put together event to the full on carols by candlelight type thingy that we do once per year. Planning exists at some level within everything that we attempt, & the question for me is more to do with “do we approach it as a help, or a hinder”? Some of my insights are based on the following observations…..

- as a young man, my first ever jam session went something like this; bring your instruments to my place & we’ll jam. We spent about an hour setting up, stood at our instruments & went, “what songs do you know?” A few bars would be played before it was discovered that no-one else knew that one, so someone else would have a go; after about an hour of this pattern being repeated, we gave up. No planning, no productive outcome, & we didn’t achieve the aim of our coming together.
That’s one end of the spectrum; here’s an opposite pole. During what was probably the most profound experience of worship I’ve had the privilege of taking part in, we were in the middle of one particular song when something changed in the way we were all playing. We found a spot in the song that in hindsight I believe that God had chosen to pour out His spirit in a real & profound way. We found ourselves working a musical pattern in the song that we had not planned to do. I believe that we were able to do it with the skill & intensity that we achieved because we had planned to know the song as well as we could, & part of our planning meant a thorough rehearsal where we became familiar with each others sounds & gestures throughout the song. This alone meant that when it came to a spontaneous moment, we had the capacity to go with it.
To say that we should plan minimally so that we leave room for the Holy Spirit to move, is to incorrectly demonise planning. It makes its claim based on the assumption that the Holy Spirit only engages in the realm of the Sunday service & not in the realm of the planning. Based on my own experiences as well as some Biblical expressions of creativity & worship, I don’t think that this is true. I think that the real problem that planning can create when it cames to the domain of the Holy Spirit, is when we hold too tightly onto our plans in spite of what the internal clock of our spirit may be telling us. i.e. we have planned it this way, so this is the way it’s going to happen regardless. I think that many churches are guilty of this one on a regular basis. I think that I have been guilty of this.
In my experience, when you understand the way that these two dynamics work, and you subsequently embrace these dynamics, you have a most powerful tool. As a personal example, let me share from my 15+ years of running retreats, as I think that this is a template that can help understand this dynamic better.
Almost all of the retreats that I ran were planned in fine detail. We would research the client that had asked us to give the retreat. We would find out as much about their world as we could. We would then meditate on this, pray about it, share with each, & then come back together & start putting a program down. When the retreat finally started we would commence our planned program, knowing that what we had planned was only a guide & that if we discerned other potential directions, we would make sure that our posture in running the program was one that would allow us to change course as required. We became so adept at this as a process, that one of our catch-phrases was “hey, if you liked this retreat, you should have seen the one that we planned”. It is my firm belief that 2 things were paramount here; 1- it was because we were so well planned & prepared that we could do this & 2- it was because we held loosely onto to what we had planned that we were able to move around as we discerned appropriate. I can remember one session when the people were gathering for morning prayer & reflection & so much had happened prior to this moment that the plan we had was nowhere near appropriate. I turned to my colleague just before I opened my mouth & said under my breath “I have no idea what I am about to do”. What transpired was one of the most amazing moments that had nothing to do with our planning, but our preparedness meant that we could respond appropriately.
Churches that embrace planning & form at the expense of the Holy Spirit, (such as those who are slaves to Liturgical form) are in grave danger of squeezing the Spiritual life out of their congregations. Those that embrace planning, listening for the spirit in the same manner that they do as the service unfolds on a Sunday, have the potential to set their Sundays on fire, regularly. However, if you put a strangle hold on that plan as “this is what we are going to do no matter what” then the potential to grieve the Holy Spirit is greatly increased. Put simply, great planning can produce great spontaneity. Try throwing a song to a band in the middle of a service that maybe only two of them know you will begin to see the genesis of this.
Finally, what does the Bible say. Well there are many references but the standout has to be the building of the temple in 2nd Chronicles. The whole temple was built as an act of worship (ch 2:5) and once this was declared, much of the rest of the text is consumed with intricately detailed planning. AT the end of all that planning ch 5 vs 11 - 14 tells of a mighty moment of worship where the priest & the musicians sounded trumpets, played cymbals & other instruments & raised their voices in worship at which point the Bible tells us in vs 14 “and the priests could not perform their service because of the cloud, for the glory of the LORD filled the temple of God.”
Guess what, it happened as a climax to their planning; it can happen today.
MM