In praise of being unprepared

Sermon preparation and to a lesser extent Sunday school preparation are hallmarks of a faithful ministry in evangelicalism. Not many people are going to fault brothers for spending too much time preparing a sermon or a lesson. There is also no doubt that things tend to run more smoothly and be more pleasing to the ear when they are prepared. Who is not pleased when a sermon is neatly laid out with an intro, three main points, a conclusion to wrap it all together (on time of course!) with a sprinkling of clever anecdotes and “Amen!” lines?

May I suggest that being “unprepared” in the sense of not coming with a preconceived sermon/talk/lesson can be valuable as well?

I have found that an unscripted, unprepared meeting where brothers open the Word, comment on Scripture, request songs that are not picked out and practiced ahead of time and pray spontaneously brings out the best in others and in me. It takes some getting used to. The silence can be deafening at times to ears that are you used to the constant hum of something always going on “in church”. Sometimes you are going to get a clumsy talk or someone may get up and then lose their train of thought. It may end early or it may go longer (almost always longer in my experience).

Where is the room for the Spirit in a highly planned out meeting? When everything is planned out based on a minute by minute schedule, the presence of the Spirit is relegated to a feeling instead of a leading. In far too many cases we are either full of what we perceive as the Spirit and utterly lacking in the Word, or we are steeped in the Word and the Spirit is locked away. It doesn’t have to be this way, it should not be this way.

I don’t think that many ministers outside of a few kooks on the fringe of the “Truly Reformed” extreme would disagree that there needs to be some sort of participatory component in the gathering of the church. The reality of it is somewhat different because typically there is little opportunity for the average Christian man to be involved with the gathering of the church because those gatherings are tightly compressed time-wise and subsequently rigidly scheduled.

One of the greatest preachers in the church was the English Baptist Charles Spurgeon. Spurgeon is known for his lack of “sermon preparation”, famously not even starting to prepare until Saturday night for a Sunday morning sermon and not preparing his Sunday evening sermon until Sunday afternoon. That seems incomprehensible in the church when it is not uncommon for men to spend 10, 20 or more hours a week in deep study and preparation of their sermons. So how could Spurgeon pull off sermon after sermon with such minimal preparation? Well he was of course a rare intellect and had an amazing gift with words. It may be that he was more concerned about who he was preaching about than how he sounded to the audience. More importantly though he was deeply immersed in the Word. The Word seems to have come naturally to him because he spent a lot of time in it. Well, you may say, not everyone is Charles Spurgeon. I would agree that he was an extremely gifted man. That doesn’t mean that other men in the church can replicate what Spurgeon did by spending half of their week in their studies. It does mean that we need to spend more of our time in prayer and in the Word.

I think there is a place for a planned, prepared talk in the church. I appreciate systematic Bible studies and expository sermons. But if that is all we have, if the church gathers and 99% of the Body has no voice, how can they truly be a part of “worship”? The Holy Spirit isn’t obligated to abide by our schedule. God is a God of order but God is also a God of Spirit. An orderly service without the Spirit, if I may be so bold, is not a Christian worship service at all. A worship service where we watch is not a worship service because it gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling. Worship cannot be something I watch someone else doing, can it?

There is so much that the Body of Christ has to offer but it rarely gets a chance. So much power, so much service, so much love and so often wasted. Little wonder that a small segment of the Body is wounded and weary and the rest of the Body is atrophied and lazy. Participatory meetings are neither an anachronism that “doesn’t work” today nor a sign of new fangled emergent practices. It is an ancient path that has command and example in the Scripture and that is more than we can say about an awful lot of what passes as “Christian worship” in even the most conservative evangelical churches.

Preacher, take a chance. Let the Body worship as the Body. You might be pleasantly surprised.