{"id":1445,"date":"2009-10-01T20:12:08","date_gmt":"2009-10-02T00:12:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/practicalmattersjournal.ecdsdev.org\/?p=1445"},"modified":"2016-06-23T21:00:04","modified_gmt":"2016-06-24T01:00:04","slug":"communal-discernment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pmcleanup.ecdsdev.org\/2009\/10\/01\/communal-discernment\/","title":{"rendered":"Communal Discernment: Knowing God Together"},"content":{"rendered":"
Download PDF: Eklund, Communal Discernment<\/a><\/h5>\n
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ABSTRACT<\/h3>\n

A key part of Christian ministry to youth is nurturing discernment, that is, learning how to discern God’s will. I assume in this essay that discernment is less about making good decisions per se and more about continual transformation and the overall shaping of character within a community. I thus reconceived the practice of discernment in two primary ways: first, from knowing God’s will, to knowing God and God’s story and then seeking to enact that story; and second, from the individual to the community. I frame discernment not in terms of one person making a good choice but as a community together seeking to shape lives around the character of God as revealed in the overall arc of Scripture and particularly in Jesus Christ. The role of the community in discernment is explored in terms of knowing God through others, knowing God with others, and investigating the role of the Holy Spirit in the community’s decision-making process.<\/em><\/p>\n

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When I became a pastor several years ago, I entered the world of ministry to youth with high aspirations: I would teach my students the full richness of the Christian Scriptures and tradition; what’s more, I would help them to love <\/em>the church and the Bible. Along the way, I would shepherd their spiritual lives in a way that would bring them closer to God. These innocent aims quickly came into contact with the actual world of 12- to 18-year-olds. In that world, I spent quite a bit of time listening to their struggles about what sports to play, whom to date, whether or not to go to summer camp, where to go to college, how to prioritize their busy schedules, and how to please God in the midst of it all. In other words, I came to realize that a key part of my youth ministry was going to involve helping students to sort through these decisions: in other words, to practice discernment.<\/p>\n

I take it for granted that discernment, whether defined as “the art of making decisions” or more widely as “hearing and following God,”1<\/u> is an integral part of a Christian’s life at any age. Thus discernment, as a spiritual practice of the church, ought to be a central component of ministry with students who wrestle with decisions they often see as shaping the trajectory of the rest of their lives. Yet framing discernment primarily as “making good choices” fundamentally limits discernment as a practice. Consider the question, “What does God want me to do?” Two words in particular can be held up to critical scrutiny in this query: me<\/em>, and do<\/em>. Already discernment is narrowed to an individual making a decision about whether or not “God wants” her to join the soccer team or the cheerleading squad.<\/p>\n

This is not to say that existing youth ministry materials are devoid of guidance for students making decisions, or that they are all so narrowly focused. Resources exist that aid in vocational discernment (akin, in some ways, to any secular personality test or career-finder quiz) or that help students identify their spiritual gifts.2<\/u> Frederick Buechner’s definition of vocation is sometimes referenced in these materials: “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.3<\/u> While a reasonable beginning point, it proves to be inadequate for more thorough exploration of vocation. For one, a teenager’s deep gladness (or an adult’s, for that matter) may or may not overlap in any tangible way with the world’s need. For another, a significant strand of the Christian tradition suggests that finding deep joy in our jobs is not necessarily God’s primary concern. After all, since the way of Christ is cruciform, it might well involve suffering.<\/p>\n

David White is a scholar and youth ministry practitioner whose 2005 book Practicing Discernment with Youth <\/em>is an excellent example of reconfiguring the practice of youth ministry as a whole away from its dominant paradigm (loosely, one that seeks to mimic the prevailing secular youth culture) and toward a model aimed at healing youth fragmented by adolescent consumer culture. White calls this model of youth ministry discernment, in a broad sense construed as recovering youth’s whole selves to bring “their lives more fully into partnership with God’s work.”4<\/u><\/p>\n

White examines discernment in four general movements: listening (loving God with your heart); understanding (loving God with your mind); remembering\/dreaming (loving God with your soul); and acting (loving God with your strength).5<\/u> Of these movements, the first three (listening, understanding, and remembering) focus on developing skills in oneself and could broadly be characterized as formation or character development. Listening is primarily about developing intuition and prayer practices, understanding is a mode of critical and integrative reflection, and remembering is “attending through prayer and contemplation to the yearnings of our hearts and those of a broken world.”6<\/u> For White, “dreaming” is bringing to bear the full resources of the Christian tradition (Scripture, traditions, liturgy, and so on), which is where I will initially focus my attention. Finally, acting is loving God with all our strength, or “putting feet to faith.”<\/p>\n

While not wishing to dismiss any of these movements, I place most emphasis on the final two (dreaming and acting). The Christian life is – as a whole – a lived enactment of a story (God’s story), and thus is already oriented toward certain kinds of action – actions shaped by Scripture and tradition, creatively improvised as we learn how to perform God’s story in our own contexts.7<\/u> Faith, if it is faithfulness,8<\/u>already has feet.<\/p>\n

In this essay, I use discernment to mean something more narrow than White’s overarching scope: I mean assisting students in discerning God’s will for their lives, everything from “What should I do with my life?” to “With whom should I eat lunch in the school cafeteria today?” My exploration of discernment in this article is essentially grounded in the virtue ethics tradition commended by Christian ethicist Stanley Hauerwas by way of Aristotle and moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre.9<\/u> That is, it attempts to resist the dichotomy between doing and being, and adopts the position that ethics is primarily about the long-term formation of character rather than the moment of decision. In other words, to paraphrase a line from Anglican theologian Samuel Wells, discernment is about learning to take the right things for granted.10<\/u><\/p>\n

The question, of course, is what are the “right things”? That question occupies the bulk of this essay. I argue that the “right things” are what one might call the Christian virtues: the characteristics of a holy life commended by the Old and New Testaments, revealed first as the characteristics of the God of Israel and Jesus of Nazareth, and commended to the people of God through the imitatio Dei <\/em>(the imitation of God) and the imitatio Christi<\/em> (the imitation of Christ). It is these key characteristics that drive the four questions in the later part of this essay.<\/p>\n

In order to broaden the scope of discernment as a spiritual practice for youth, I propose redirecting the question of what it means to discern God’s will in two primary ways:<\/p>\n