DISCERNING THE SPIRIT, Part II: Community Decision-Making

9/17/00, Crestwood United Church of Christ

Rev. Marcia Moret Sietstra

I've come to the conclusion that God must have a sense of humor.  I first suspected this when I had children God gave me kids who did things I said my kids would never do.  Lately, I suspect God is chuckling again as I find myself doing things I vowed I would never do!  I seminary we learned about how difficult it is for churches to agree on major change, especially building projects, and I vowed never to take a job in a church where there was a hint of a building project on the horizon.  Then I did an internship at a Methodist church and fell in love with the place, just in time to help put up a brand new building.  Then I took this job a year ago, thinking the biggest decision facing us anytime soon would be whether or not to replace the old furnace, or maybe go to 2 services in a few years.  But once again, it appears a decision about a building project has landed in my lap like a hot potato!  Perhaps it's God's way of removing any illusion that I actually have control of my life!

For those of you who don't know it, we have a major decision to make around here, sometime in the next year or so - whether or not we will relocate to SW Sioux Falls and build a new church.  The Big Question for us these days is: Do we want this Big Change?  A Visioning Task Force has been formed; they'll be studying all the possibilities for our future.  It's a big undertaking, and a lot of work for everyone on it.  You might be asking yourself, "Why would we do this?  Wouldn't it be a lot simpler to leave well enough alone?"

I imagine the disciples in the early church wondered the same thing!  Shortly after Jesus died, his followers were gathering into communities, later called churches.  In Acts we find a record of their problems.  You think we have a big decision to make?  You should see the ones they had to decide!  The had all these non-Jews wanting to join their church, but these newcomers not only weren't Jewish, there weren't circumcised and they didn't even eat Kosher!  Letting them in meant breaking 2000-year-old church law!  It's been said that if the disciples had not overcome their own discomfort and let Gentiles into the church, the church never would have never spread out throughout the Roman world.  It would likely have died out.  That decision had tremendous implications.  Seems to me, it would be good to know what process they used to make such a crucial decision.

Acts 15 tells us.  It describes how they gathered information and debated the issue.  They asked people with experience to talk to them.  And then they kept silence for a while, it says.  Later more people got up and shared personal thoughts; and they talked about their history as well as what was happening among the new non-Jewish converts.  Finally it says, one way emerged that seemed to be in keeping with the Spirit--to invite the new, non-Jewish converts into the church.  This is the way they chose, in the end.

Well, that's the disciples, you might say!  We aren't pure like them; we are just ordinary people.  How would we know what "the Spirit" wants?  Besides, you can't expect us all to agree like they did.  You know what?  The disciples weren't pure either; they were, as Don Fountain so aptly reminded us at our coffee on Monday night, a bunch of rumduddies!  I think Jesus chose ordinary guys for a reason, knowing that if the Spirit could work through them, we could dare hope that the Spirit can work through us too!

You may remember that last week we looked at a business expert's advise on making personal decisions and saw how closely it matched a Christian method practiced down through the centuries called discernment.  A way to your heart & head, and hopefully, to the Spirit.

Spiritual discernment begins with gathering all the available information, weighing it rationally by listing the pros and cons, and then taking the choice you are leaning toward and letting it rest on your heart for a while before acting on it.  While you rest with that choice for several days or longer, you listen to your feelings and your body as you imagine yourself making that decision.  You watch attentively for feelings of consolation--which are positive feelings of calmness, lightness, expansiveness, freedom.  You also watch for feelings of desolation, negative feelings of anxiety, frustration, or lack of peace.

I was reading an article this week in the new Oprah magazine, a magazine that includes a fair amount of Christian wisdom, though I doubt the writers realize it.  The article is by a psychotherapist named Anna Christensen (Oprah, Oct.2000) who describes a discernment process used in psychotherapy that resembles what I talked about.  Only she called it a mind-body awareness technique.  

Using the mind body awareness technique, she recommends allowing oneself to not only recognize the feeling of consolation or desolation but to stay with it until an insight arises.  Say for example, the question "Should I retire?" is the Big Question you have to decide.  Does the image of being retired give you butterflies in your stomach or tightness in your chest?  Stay with that feeling instead of trying to get rid of the butterflies or the tightness and allow yourself to really experience the sensation and what it might mean.  Maybe it's your innate wisdom telling you, "I'm excited about retiring, but I'm afraid I won't like feeling less productive," or "I really don't want to make a change right now."  You may need to talk to more people about what retirement is like or figure out ways to still be productive before you can make the decision to retire.  A good discernment process requires a lot of time and patience for those insights to come to the surface.

It takes quiet, thoughtful, meditative downtime; many Christians find that in prayer--listening prayer--not saying things to God but being quiet and open.  In prayer we tend to focus on God's will for us, which moves us to higher ground.  Our best ideas often emerge from somewhere deep within us--I think at the level where we connect with a Spirit force in life, an archetypal pool of wisdom, what some of us call the Holy Spirit.  Could it be that we have a greater capacity for contact with our own Higher Power than most of us are in the habit of using?  Mythologist Joseph Campbell, who studied ancient religion, wrote, "I have found that you have only to take that one step toward the gods, and they will then take ten steps toward you.  That step, the heroic first step of the journey, is out of, or over the edge of your boundaries, and it often must be taken before you know that you will be supported."

Now I've been describing personal discernment; how does a group do it, like a family or a whole congregation?  Is it possible to discern the Spirit's leading for a group?  Yes it is.  Many, many congregations us the discernment process to make decisions peacefully and carefully.  It's an ancient practice being recovered.  The process I'm about to describe is for you visitors too, because you may end up joining us or another church where this information will come in handy!  You could even use it in your family.  I'm using a description of discernment from this book, which a number of UM conferences are using around the country: Discerning God's Will Together (Danny Morris & Charles Olsen)

Imagine a seed.  The seed is the big question being considered.  You plant the seed by asking the question.  Now it would be easier and less risky to not bother, because planting and cultivating seeds of change is a messy and difficult process.  But doing the easy thing is not what we're here for.

Christians believe we're here to do some good--to do what's right, and by right I mean what a loving God wills for us.  So we plant this seed of an idea.  The dried outer shell of this seed needs to burst open and fall away when the sprout appears.  Something like that has to happen to us too.  If we're really interested in what God would want, we need to shed our personal agendas, let go of our own plans to make space for what might be best for all--God's agenda.  This shedding of what we want is absolutely necessary if we are going to be able to focus on what God wants.  Christ modeled this when he prayed, "not my will, but yours be done."

Morris & Olsen stress that if we are hoping to discern God's will, we can't campaign for pet causes, and we must put aside matters of ego and ownership.  Our ideas and observations are needed, but openness to alternative ideas is equally important.  This shedding of our own agendas is hard, particularly if you are convinced that an idea is wrong, and have no good feelings about it.  How can anyone ask you to shed your feelings about it, to be open to whatever emerges from the group's process?

We do this because no one of us can presume to know God's will for certain.  Just as reason has to inform you as much as what you "feel", the community can often balance the individual…not always but usually.  That's what Paul said in Corinthians.  We need everyone in the church to make the best decisions possible, even a person who may appear to be insignificant.  Maybe that person will turn out to be most connected to the Spirit, maybe a quiet, non-leader will contribute a piece of wisdom that we need!  We need the insights of our visionaries, analyzers, skeptics, and innovators even though they make us uncomfortable sometimes.  The group also serves as a corrective to the individual, since the wisdom of the whole is usually greater that the wisdom of one. 

The next step is to cultivate the idea.  We do this by gathering research and dialoging together.  What do we want to be and do?  What would God want us to do?  Can we do it well here in this building?  Is it possible to add on?  Could it be more economical to build a new church since then there is conference and national money available?  Do we even want to grow?  Is it necessary?  What's the future of the church in our culture?  What would God want us to do?

Out of deep respect for each other and the conviction that the Spirit works through people, we listen and listen.  It is like a plant sending up many shoots, each one now supporting several branches.  In discernment we explore various options or paths that could be followed, while we continue to ask, "What would God want?"

There will be disagreement, just like in your family when you have to make a group decision.  Remember the last time you went out to eat?  How long did it take you to decide where to go?  If you want to see healthy disagreement, visit our adult Sunday school class!  They are gifted at it!  They learn a lot from hearing a variety of opinions, and often disagree.  You should all visit that class, because that's the kind of interaction this whole congregation should be having!  Unfortunately, churches tend to shy away from the disagreement, but how else do we get all the options on the table, so we can test each one?  Luke Timothy Johnson, a well-known theologian writes, "Because we fear disorder and conflict, we often give stability and institutional self-preservation higher priority than trying to discover and obey the will of the living God." (Barbara Wendland, Connections, No. 66).   Disagreement is a good thing as long as people treat each other well.

 I'm delighted to see here a growing willingness to dialog about the current questions, because that shows our high regard for our relationships.  If we had rushed into something, some people would have felt unheard and unvalued.  It's a measure of our own strength and security, that we are taking the time to truly listen to our neighbor, instead of politely avoiding real dialog.

The last step is harvesting.  What are the feelings of consolation?  Does an option give you a feeling of joy, a sense of right?  Or does that option give you a feeling of distress?  Desolation.  Eventually we will sense that people feel ready to make the decision, haven taken the time necessary to discern the Spirit in and through each other.  Often what will happen in a discernment process is a leader will present one option that seems to have widespread support.  The people will choose one of several responses:  A person could support it, or the person might say,  "It is not exactly what I would like, but it's close enough.  I will not block it" or one might say, "I cannot support it." 

 he group might then choose to stop the process and give the subject more consideration.  Are there more questions that need answers?  If efforts to reach consensus, i.e. full agreement, fail and a few persons still oppose it, and cannot in good conscience change their response, the leader may ask the persons if they feel able to stand aside, so as not to block the rest of the group.  If there were widespread lack of support for an option, this would be an indication that this does not appear to be the way the group feels led by the Spirit. 

 This is the process I am recommending we consider using.  It's not Robert's Rules of Order.  It is not secular democracy where we can quickly vote and let the losers go their own way.  This is the church and that dramatically changes how we do things.  This is moving the process to higher ground.  It means there are not winners and losers.  There are only winners if the whole group is committed to discerning the Spirit together.  If we say we are responsible for doing God's will, we should use a process that deliberately tries to discover what it is.

 I've often struggled to know how involved God really is in day-to-day lives.  I don't know; but I do believe there is a Spirit force in the world that we connect with.  It is that still, small voice that is the best in each one of us.  Some would call it the Holy Spirit.  It will guide us!  Amen.