Congregational Discernment:
Seeking God’s Path Together

Congregations face hard decisions. They must discern the mission and vision of the church, pastoral staffing needs, ways to care for their building, and whether to continue historic ministries or to begin new ones—just to name a few of the decisions they commonly make. In some cases, a congregation will reach a place where they must decide whether they will become a legacy church and close with dignity or take steps to revitalize their ministry for their future.

The challenge is to ask what God is inviting your congregation to be or do at any given time—and to listen to what God is saying. The good news is that you probably are already doing this, at least in part:

• If your congregation has ever prayed for guidance while making an important choice, you’ve done discernment.
• If your community has ever listened to a collective gut feeling and gone with that, you’ve done discernment.
• Or if you’ve waited patiently for the right time to take a next step, that’s discernment.
• If your congregation has ever made a list of the pros and cons of various options and then used that list to help decide which path to pursue, you’ve done discernment.
• All those times you’ve imagined the kind of church God was calling you to become, you were participating in the spiritual practice of discernment.

What Discernment Is Not

Although you may already know quite a bit about discernment, some of what you think you know may be wrong. Here’s what it is not:

• A synonym for an authoritarian decision-making process
• A stalling tactic
• A process used only by clergy or those feeling called to professional ministry

Why Engage in Congregational Discernment?

In addition to helping congregations listen for God’s call for their life together, congregational discernment can bring renewed life and energy to our communities.

Discernment Enhances Congregational Vitality

Congregations that focus on what God is calling them to do not only draw closer to God, but also demonstrate a clarity in their missional ideals and have greater potential for a healthy and vital life.

Discernment Builds Community

When you keep an open mind about where God may be leading and begin to discern as a congregation, you cease to be simply a collection of individuals speaking from your experience. You become one body listening for direction from the Holy Spirit.

Discernment Helps Us Grow in Faith

The more we use principles of discernment, the more we learn about ourselves and our congregation. Discernment can become how congregations live day to day and not something taken up only when it’s time to convene a search committee for a pastor. It’s not just for deciding if it’s time for a capital campaign or whether we add a band to our music program. It becomes way of life.

No One Can Contain All the Wisdom of God

“No one can contain all the wisdom of God, for that would be to be God. However, the Spirit desires to share as much of the wisdom as the group can handle at any given time. To do this, different pieces of that wisdom will be given to different folks (Mary Benet McKinney).” As McKinney sees it, group discernment requires the wisdom of all of us, from the sage to the dreamer, the young, the old, and even the one who always plays devil’s advocate.

Learning from Jesuit Spirituality

The practice of Christian spiritual discernment today comes primarily from two Christian traditions for which discernment is a special charism or gift: the Jesuits and the Quakers. Many of the spiritual practices around discernment can be traced directly to the contributions of Ignatius of Loyola, who came to understand how the Holy Spirit worked in his life through a series of experiences that he wrote about in his Spiritual Exercises. He reflected on his life and noticed important “movements of the heart” and how acting on those movements could draw him closer to God or block him from the closeness that he so desired. Ignatius taught that we can learn a lot about our spiritual path from our own moments of consolation and desolation. That’s why he told his fellow Jesuits they were required to do the Daily Examen, even if they were too busy to do any other prayer each day. It was that important.

Spending time in prayer, noticing those moments that draw us closer to God and those when we feel somehow blocked, gives us information about how God is speaking to us and where God may be inviting us to change. For discernment, the benefit of the examen comes as we do it over a significant stretch of time and notice patterns and themes.

To learn more, watch The Ignition Way: What is Discernment? from Loyola Press:

Learning from the Quakers

About 141 years after Ignatius founded the Jesuit order, George Fox, a bright but unschooled British shoemaker, got fed up with institutional church, set out to find the plain truth of the gospel, and ended up founding the Religious Society of Friends, better known as Quakers. Fox roamed the countryside of England, preaching and teaching a simple faith based on paying attention to direct experiences of God in silence.

He writes of one mystical experience: “I heard a voice which said, ‘There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition;’ and when I heard it my heart did leap for joy.” And with that, Fox traveled the countryside teaching and preaching that the light of Christ is in each of us, speaking to our condition and offering us joy. Fox reminds us to pay attention to our Inner Teacher.

Silence & Waiting

The Quaker way of discernment is simple. For most Quaker individuals, discernment involves silent prayer and waiting for an answer, a sense of peace and clarity, or—to use their seventeenth-century words—watching for a “way to open.” Patience and silence can be difficult for many of us, so the Quaker way of discernment, especially in community, takes practice. The clearness committee is the most structured practice of Quaker discernment.

Watch “Clearness Committee” featuring Parker Palmer:

Watch “How to Have a Quaker Clearness Committee” from QuakerSpeak:

Quakers have written much about communities waiting for a leading from God. When discerning as a community, the group watches for a sense of unity around a way forward. Unity is not the same as complete agreement on the next step. When a group achieves unity, everyone agrees that the Spirit seems to be moving in a particular direction, and even if the next step is not every person’s preferred action, no one feels compelled to stand in the way. In the same way, if someone feels such conviction that an action is not a true leading from God, he or she is obligated to speak against it. In that situation, Quakers continue discerning until unity is reached.

Training for Congregational Discernment Teams

The Episcopal Church in Colorado has trained facilitators who provide training for congregational discernment teams. To request a training for your discernment team, reach out to Dianne Draper. Trainings are typically held via Zoom and last 90 minutes.

Material on this page drawn and adapted from Incline Your Ear: Cultivating Spiritual Awakening in Congregations (Fortress Press, 2021) and used with permission from author Teresa Blythe