There will be a staff meeting or a production meeting in many churches where we will go around the table and talked about what worked and didn’t work in a service or an event. We’ll learn from what we missed, the miscues, or things that we forgot. We’ll celebrate what worked, how God moved, the guests that came, and the taken steps.

This is all well and good and important.

But over this past year, I have been reminded of something we often miss: Celebrating the unexpected or the things that didn’t go as we planned.

In most churches, we do a good job of celebrating wins and learning from things that don’t work. But what about celebrating what God did in the things that don’t work or go as we planned. I think in covid, many of us had our plans turned upside down. Ideas we had didn’t play out the way we expected. But instead of just turning the page, what if we celebrated what God did in the unexpected? What if we looked back to see God’s hand? To see what he was up to when our plans were upended? I think it can help grow our faith and help us have some closure in some areas.

Here’s an example from my life and church.

In January of 2020, the church I planted merged with another church. In March of 2020, the world shut down because of covid, and our church went fully online. All the plans we had, all the things we had worked on and hoped to do, went out the window. Fast forward to today, that campus won’t reopen. On the one hand, we can look at that and say that it is a failure. It isn’t what we set out to do. The campuses we hoped to launch out of that campus aren’t happening on the timetable we set.

Yet, as I look back over this past year, I see God’s hand all over the place.

I’ve talked to countless pastors leading small to medium-sized portable churches like Revolution, and they are exhausted. Some of them have even left the ministry to take others jobs, which is heartbreaking. Some of those churches no longer exist. In many ways, that merge saved the staff and me at Revolution and kept us in ministry.

What God did was not only in me or at Revolution. The roles the staff of Revolution played at Pantano were perfect fits for us and needed, even though we didn’t know it at the time. We stepped into things that existed and didn’t exist at the time of the merge, and we went fully online as a church. We were able to experiment, learn and help move a church forward into a new hybrid church world.

If we look at a normal way of celebrating things, we can miss this.

So, pull your team together and pull out a journal and write down how you saw God move in the past year in unexpected ways.