I have been invited to contribute ideas to a WhatsApp group who are interested in planning their own worship services. I’m interested! I can think of a lot of spiritually nurturing experiences I have found stimulating and helpful; and I’d be happy to share them.

But immediately, I’m in two minds.

My first thought is that planning is participative in and of itself. When we meet to create, we fire ideas off each other and they take on lives of their own. Ideas evolve. The overall flow of what we come up with begins to take on its own shape. Leadership functions and preparations that will be needed to be done beforehand emerge and are taken up by those who are energised by them. I have always found this an enlivening process.

But how can I, at a distance, contribute? For me, it’s the dynamic of the group meeting together to plan that is the main game. There’s always Zoom, of course. But my sense is that the group values the face-to-face; that the process is just as, if not more, important than the product.

Maybe I collect the ideas that have helped me in my life and put them into a format like a book – a collection of ideas and insights that may be a stimulus for new ideas ‘owned’ by the participants?

Would that be useful?

Maybe, but there’s a danger.

On the one hand, I don’t want to reinforce the ‘expert’ idea. I don’t want to be part of a process that encourages the inference that you, the reader, are not just as talented, knowledgeable and creative as anyone else. You are just as capable of coming up with great ideas that stimulate spiritual nurture as I am! And better still, only you are the one closest to the context of your situation. Only you can make the kind of judgements that will make your choice and construction of activities powerful and relevant experiences.

My worst fear, having been there, is that, when we are under pressure, we are more than likely to simply grab the ‘recipe’ and apply it, as is. We miss out on the many wonderful experiences of the planning process itself. And we wonder why ‘expert’ rituals often turn out to be flat on the day. They are not ours!

Planning for spiritual nurture experiences is spiritual nurture itself. The spirit of planning – participative, encouraging, challenging and hospitable – ultimately infuses what is eventually offered to the bigger gathering on whose behalf we are acting.

That said, all the planning in the world does not necessarily result in inspiration or spiritual  transformation. In fact, trust in planning alone is misplaced. As one famous preacher once said, ‘I prepare as if there is no Holy Spirit, and I preach as if there is only the Holy Spirit.’ ‘Letting go’ in the moment is an act of confidence that the idea that arose in the planning in the first place still has its own life and fosters its own creativity in others in its own way.

So what about my response to the invitation to contribute – perhaps as a collection of ideas and insights in the form of a book?

All ideas and inspiration come from somewhere. That includes reference to resource books. It’s how an insight grabs us and what we do with it that matters. We have the power to take someone else’s idea and determine whether it creatively lives on, in whatever guise we give it, or not.

That’s why I find a TV series like ‘McCartney – 3, 2, 1’ so engaging. All those anecdotes of Beatle Paul McCartney paying attention to little things – like, ‘pass the salt and pepper’ being misheard as ‘Sergeant Pepper’, and becoming – ‘what a great concept for an album!’ How his attentive mind works!

You can’t get that out of a book! But the anecdote, the history of the process, if you like, is a powerful encouragement toward our own creativity.

So what can I say about a collection of stuff as one way I can respond to the invitation to participate?

It’s a compilation of some of the things that have been important to my own life and to my personal growth. I offer them as stimuli for group planning or for personal enjoyment.

I hope the group will feel free to make them their own; edit, expand, alter, combine, or modify at will, to fit their own particular context. And then add their own insights to the lexicon for their community, and others.

So now I’d better start my collecting! Or recollecting!