The retreat on Moscow

An interesting experiment, and thanks to Steve for kind-of suggesting it. I don't suppose many of our Pilgrims will have used the MoSCoW technique as part of project management. It's a simple enough game to play - you list all the possible things you could make or do, then set a time period within which you've got to achieve them - and then list them as Must, Should, Could or Won't (MoSCoW, you see). Then you set a shorter period, take the Musts and divide them into the Musts, Shoulds Coulds etc for that shorter period. A neat way of sorting out the wheat from the chaff of requirements.

But I'm not aware of anyone ever doing MoSCoW in a liturgical setting. So it had to be worth a try. We said to the Beaker People - over a period of eight weeks (or four "sprints") how would you grade the things we normally do in worship?

Among the Musts were "Holding a pebble", "Praying", "Feeling good about ourselves", "Playing some Coldplay" and many others. I was a little concerned that "Reading the Bible" was listed as a "Should", but I figured we'd get around to it in Sprint 3 or thereabouts. And "Allow women Bishops" being rated as a "Won't" was just teasing, I'm sure.

But then we narrowed it down to today's worship - you've got one hour, I said (for we are not a fundamentalist creed) - what must we fit into the hour? The answers were "Lighting a tea light", "Humming", "Gossiping", "Notices", "Looking out the window" and "Coffee". OK, they're all valid items in an act of worship, and to be honest it wasn't much different to many of our other Occasions. But we've just done the MoSCoW for this afternoon, and we're gonna have exactly the same.

This Agile worship leading's not all it's cracked up to be.