Flip Your Planning Meetings Inside Out
Do you have a word for 2025? A single, prayerfully-chosen theme that God might want to use to help shape and deepen the coming year? If so, I’d love to hear it!
Coming into 2024, I remember very clearly committing that I wasn’t going to pick one! If God picked it, fantastic, but I would rather go without than just make something up and ask God to bless it. I’m rereading last year’s journal again in 2025, so the unfolding of my 2024 theme (Restore and More in ‘24) is quite fresh! And wow, did God ever pick that one! I know I’ve never had a year with more focus. If there was a week all year that my Restore and More theme wasn’t consciously articulated, I’d be surprised. More of that, please!
So my word for 2025 is:
“360”
I know… that’s a number, not a word, just like last year was a phrase not a word. I don’t typically do well with rules that aren’t in the Bible, but I digress. 360 hearkens back to my childhood all the way up through engineering at the University of Arizona. It’s the number of degrees in a circle, and it signifies a longing for wholeness, completeness, a both/and on steroids, with nothing left out that ought to be included. I’ve already prayerfully journaled several areas currently on the radar where in the past I would settle for an either/or, but this coming year I want the whole package. I’m happy to share them with you if you’re interested!
Here’s one that started changing everything in the last half of 2024… I’ve been reading the book An Unhurried Life devotionally, meaning a few pages at a time. See how 360 that is - refusing to hurry through a book called Unhurried? And literally yesterday, the author Alan Fadling gave new language to yet another both/and, and to a huge area of transformation that is the primary reason we’re in Season Two of J17 Ministries. Here is Fadling’s game-changing question:
How do prayer and planning relate to one another (for you)?
Are they intimate allies, casual acquaintances, or relative strangers?
If I’m honest, for most of my life I would have claimed that I lived in the first part of that continuum, and I would have been lying - to myself as well as to you. I sought the Lord for the big picture… and then I let Him know that I had it covered from there, and I’d check in if I needed anything. Whether the planning meeting was for the congregation I led, or the citywide work I’ve been engaged in for the last almost-14 years, or my wife and I calendaring and prioritizing, self-reliance was my theme no matter what I claimed. Prayer on the run is helpful only if it’s bookended by prayer as undivided and unhurried attention to the Lord. I had learned this powerfully… once… back in 2001, when a planning meeting in our congregation was finally one that I couldn’t in any way control. I had absolutely no idea what the right answer was, and I knew that if we got it wrong, our congregation was likely to implode. So instead of praying for God’s presence at the start (while knowing that my deeper prayer was that God would bless my efforts to steer things in the right direction), prayer in that meeting was the main event. We talked a bit so we knew how to pray, prayed until we heard God speak, and then talked briefly about what we heard. And suhprize, suhprize, as Gomer Pyle used to say, God knew exactly how to lead us, and exactly what we needed. He was (and is) a far better unifier than I could ever have dreamed of being.
I’m sad to say that I only practiced that kind of “prayer and planning as intimate allies” when I was desperate and clueless. Or I should say, when I realized I was desperate and clueless, since Jesus was actually quite literal and truthful when He said, “Apart from Me you can do nothing.”
Now my heart’s desire is to flip the order inside out. Instead of prayer bookending the main event, which is either me sharing my brilliant strategies or all of us planning and co-creating, prayer is the main event. The smartest One in the room ought to have the floor, right? And I’m finally realizing at a practical level, not just a theological level, that the smartest One in the room is none of us. So conversation amongst us humans-only is for the limited purpose of clarifying what to pray about, and then debriefing what we heard. Some friends of mine in Kansas City refer to their staff meetings as "Business meetings with Jesus" because observers from anywhere would be able to notice that listening prayer is the centerpiece of the meeting. I’m not where I want to be in this yet, and so that’s why 360 is my word for 2025!
Anyone who wants to is welcome to join us! And if God revealed this to you at a functional level decades ago, like I wish I had, feel free to pass along some of your wisdom!
Dave Drum, Founder