It’s Agapé’s planning season – time to look at some Frequently Asked Questions.

1. What’s the use of planning? Something might come up.

Let me refer you to the Book of Proverbs, a good part of which was written to answer that question. In summary – yes, you can plan to do good things. Take for example, ‘those who plan what is good find love and faithfulness. All hard work brings a profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty’ (14:23)

Planning is a godly thing to do, and it makes it more likely that you will succeed. It will prevent things from ‘coming up’ that shouldn’t.

Back in the days when Covid was threatening, Chloe Hanan led the campus team in writing two plans for the year – one if there was going to be a lockdown and one if there wasn’t. My short-sightedness couldn’t see a lockdown coming and I wondered if the team had a case of planning overkill. But how right Chloe was! They just switched to plan B!  

2. Can I change my plan mid-year?

Of course you can – if you have good reason – not just ‘something’ coming up! Paul’s detractors criticised him on this very point (he changed his plans mid-year). Paul’s reply was that he wasn’t deviating in his purpose, but the timing sometimes got changed due to circumstances beyond his control.

3. What kind of things should I always include in my plan?

Paul allowed certain things to change his timing – and it’s not a bad idea to keep these factors in mind. They included:

(a) Open doors. Since the whole point of the plan is to preach the gospel, then we need to be ready to enter a gospel-preaching door we hadn’t known about. This isn’t opportunism because something makes the work easier. In Paul’s case he delayed some plans because a big door had opened and it was harder – so hard he daren’t abandon it.

(b) Team function. In Troas, Paul even found an open door that he didn’t go through because Titus wasn’t at hand to help. Team life is a basic that we can’t really do without.

(c) Leadership character. Because the Corinthian church had a somewhat, shall we say, ‘chequered’ history, and Paul knew they hadn’t quite got themselves fixed up yet, he delayed arriving in case he’d scare the living daylights out of them. This wasn’t convenient for him but he was putting their interests first.

(d) Unreached peoples. Paul blatantly prioritised those who hadn’t yet heard the gospel. As he made his way across the first-century Mediterranean basin he had a little weakness for unreached peoples. He tells the Romans (who had heard the gospel) that yes, he would love to come and see them, for a break, after he had dealt with the current unreached people and on his way to the next ones. I sometimes wonder if the Romans didn’t feel a bit deflated by this somewhat back-handed complement!

4. What if Christ returns in the middle of it all?

Jesus taught, ‘It will be good for that servant whom the Master finds doing so when he returns’. He did not say that he would commend that servant who had worked out the time of his coming so well he had arranged for his car insurance to be cancelled from that date. In the end, I hope he will find us in the middle of a good plan. And we won’t finally have the timing exactly right – because we don’t know when he’s coming.

That’s why James taught us not to say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business…’. He thinks that would be an ‘arrogant scheme’. He writes that we ‘ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that”’. It almost sounds like he wants us to say that out loud.

5. Where is the Holy Spirit in all of this planning?

At the beginning, the middle and the end. The beginning – because without listening to him through his Book and through prayer, we won’t have even the right motivations in planning. The middle – because without his dominance in our lives we won’t have the spiritual stamina to carry out even the best plans. And the end – because, once we have trimmed our sails toward a godly, long-term objective, and set out on the water, he will steer the moving ship. Acts 16 famously records how the Holy Spirit deflected Paul’s travelling evangelistic team so they ended up in Europe. What he didn’t do (he didn’t need to) was persuade them to preach the gospel there. That had already been decided.