Importance of Intentional Worship Planning (10-08-15)

Here is a typical scenario. You are sitting in your church sanctuary between Sabbath school and church. Announcements have droned on for about 20 minutes. The well-meaning elder has virtually read the entire bulletin. He then exits the platform. Mrs. Tinkerboom then begins to play the organ quietly. You recall the music from the last funeral you attended. Mrs. Tinkerboom plays the same piece every Sabbath. Mrs. Tinkerboom has been the organist at your church ever since you could walk.

After three false starts, four men walk onto the church platform, kneel for a moment, sit down and the service begins. You’ve memorized their every move. By the time the Scripture reading, the offering call, the pastoral prayer, and the special music all plod past you, like they do every Sabbath, in the same order, with almost the same participants ...you start taking a trip, in your mind’s eye. You are somewhere else. Your church services may not be like this. But many are.

What’s tragic about this kind of scenario is that it is so much in contrast to the very nature of the God who is being worshipped. Consider the story of Creation told in Genesis 1 and the very first message it communicates about God. Before God rests from His work of creation, before He presides over the first Sabbath worship service with Adam and Eve, notice how he plans and prepares.

Genesis 1 describes six days of detailed, strategic and intentional planning. God has a plan. It begins with bringing order out of chaos (verses 1-2). He then fills and infuses the order with more and more life. Each day builds upon and fills up the previous day’s creation to maximize what He’s done so far. Each day develops more complex life that requires the previous days’ completed activity. All six days possess the total building blocks necessary for a maximum experience on the pinnacle of the week, the Sabbath rest.

Imagine the worship experience Adam and Eve enjoy because of God’s approach. The story of Creation is evidence that at the heart of God’s nature is a creativity that flourishes with advance planning, intentionality, strategic thinking and action. There’s nothing during that week that happens haphazardly or without thought and foresight. God doesn’t just throw stuff together, hoping for the best results. He doesn’t come to that first Friday evening and suddenly say, “Well let’s see, tomorrow’s my first Sabbath worship experience with my creation! I wonder what can I put together for the service?”

No, God brings order out of chaos at the very beginning of the week and then intentionally infuses that order with every kind of life imaginable as each day goes by, an ever increasing energy as the week progresses, a Spirit-breathed infusion into the entire well-orchestrated process, so that when the Sabbath comes, it results in an amazing, life-enhancing, God-glorifying experience between Creator and creation.

There’s another text that alludes to this important attribute of God’s nature. The verse is about the Lamb “who was slain before the foundation of the world.” (Revelation 13:8) What does that mean? Even before our world was created, God had made plans for the salvation of a fallen world. The Lamb would be sacrificed “in the fullness of time.” Humanity would be redeemed. The plan was put in place. An intentional strategy for dealing with sin was developed long before the need arose.

The book of Revelation refers again and again to that Christ-event as the motivation for worship among God’s people. “You are worthy, O Lord our God, to receive glory and honor and power. For you created everything, and it is for your pleasure that they exist and were created … Blessing and honor and glory and power belong to the one sitting on the throne and to the Lamb forever and ever.” (Revelation 4:11, 5:13) Once again, God’s advance planning, the divine intentionality, for both creation and redemption provides the context and content for the experience of meaningful worship.

If intentionality, foresight, and advance planning are core attributes of the divine nature, and worship is about focusing on God and giving value to what God values, why is so much of worship activity so haphazard? Why are worship services so often thrown together without much creative thought, planning and preparation? Why do so many people choose to stay away from church because they consider it boring, irrelevant, and not meaningful? Is it possible that the very lack of strategic and effective planning for worship might be a factor in worship that often does not help to bring the sense of completion and resolution people are so desperately looking for? What could it look like for a congregation to place an emphasis on effective, intentional, creative worship planning?