Things I Never Understood About Church, Part 1: Planning Ahead

Lately I have been thinking about some of the things I never understood about church. Many of them stem from how we did things at the church I grew up in; some are just things that didn’t make sense to me. Some of them still don’t make a lot of sense to me; there are others that I’m starting to understand.

I’ll start with one of the biggest things I remember hearing when I was growing up. In my church, it was considered pretty ridiculous to plan sermons or services ahead of time. Things like having a church bulletin with an outline of the service, planning which songs we would sing, or doing a message series were looked down upon. This sort of planning supposedly left no room for God to work. Most of the time, the choir director decided on the songs at the last minute or as they came to him; this wasn’t a problem because the songs were easily accessible in the hymnal, and the choir was small and informal anyway. During the middle of the service, different families or other groups would sing a few songs if they wanted to, and the pastor sat on the front pew thumbing through his Bible and figuring out what God was telling him to preach.

When I started going to different churches in my mid-to-late teen years, I took some of these attitudes with me. “How can they plan their service ahead of time like that? What if God wants to do something different? What if God wants the pastor to preach about something different one Sunday morning; will the pastor just go ahead with part three of his five-part series and ignore God?”

But over the last few years, as I have experienced services at different churches, and especially over the past year of being a part of a church that is just getting started, the concept of planning ahead has started to make sense to me. I still believe it’s possible to go too far by ignoring God in order to stick with the plan. So if you’ve planned to sing these three songs but you get up in front of the church on Sunday morning and feel like God wants you to sing a song you hadn’t planned for—I think you should do it anyway. Likewise, if you’re in the middle of a message series and you feel that God wants to take you in another direction—follow him. Let God’s plans take precedence over your plans.

Done correctly, I think planning ahead is beneficial. If you know what you are going to sing ahead of time, the musicians and singers can prepare. The person running the media can get the words on the screen so everyone can see them. The pastor can spend the week praying and preparing, rather than throwing something together during the twenty minutes before he stands up to speak. Preparation allows the message to be clear and focused. And from the point of view of a visitor, a church that is obviously not prepared often comes off looking as though they have no idea what they’re doing. Being unprepared shows, and can make it more difficult to get the point across or to make a positive impact.

As with anything, preparation can be taken to the extreme—both by strictly sticking to the plan no matter what, and by not preparing at all. But prayerful planning that is open to God changing things at the last minute is often a positive thing. In fact, isn’t that how we should strive to live in all areas of our lives—prayerfully planning while acknowledging that God may change those plans and we will follow him?