Several years ago a small incident occurred that has been much in my mind since I received the Final Report of the Task Force on Peace, Unity and Purity of the Church. The incident took place as a pastor and I drove home from a meeting. We had joined ten others in what was called a “discernment exercise,” exploring future directions for the presbytery where we both served. Rather than just brainstorm and then debate ideas, the group had attended on Scripture, entered silence, listened deeply to one another’s yearnings, even where those yearnings lay far apart. The group prayed. On the way home, for better than an hour, my friend talked about the “fresh bond in Christ” (his exact words) he was discovering with a person whose views differed dramatically from his own.
Had my traveling partner scuttled his long-held convictions? Not at all. Had the differences between him and this other person momentarily disappeared beneath some gooey haze of feel-good emotionalism? No. Their discussion had been too honest for that. With respect to future directions for the presbytery, did much remain to be resolved? Absolutely. Yet something fresh and green was growing, and the presbytery was richer because of it.
Communal discernment had come as a gift.
Discernment both frames and permeates the Task Force Report of Peace, Unity and Purity. At the outset, the word appears in the title: “A Season of Discernment.” It sounds in the report’s final, ambitious recommendations: “This entire report has as its premise that a season of discernment is due in the church …” (VI. A Final Word). Communal discernment lay at the heart of the Task Force’s better than four-year process. How the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) responds to the work and recommendations of the Task Force will depend, in no small part, on how well the church understands what discernment really entails, how clearly the church sees the living relationship between discernment and the Reformed Tradition, and how fully the church can perceive where, ultimately, discernment draws us.
The report and the example of the Task Force make plain that communal discernment is demanding and presents no shortcuts. People occasionally speak of discernment as if it were a quick fix, a rapid path around troubling issues and divisions. It is not. Discernment in community asks a high degree of integrity of all who take part. It grows only where people are willing to be true to their deepest convictions and open about them, even those convictions that seem prophetic and stretch others.
Discernment in community requires deep, prayerful listening to what others say, to why they are saying it and to what stirs within them when they speak, when they are silent, when they are in pain.
Discernment in community requires deep, shared attentiveness to Scripture. It requires this even where understandings differ and much needs to be talked through, listened through, worked through together.
Discernment in community requires shared prayer, in speaking, in quietness; and it requires an underlying understanding that our polarities in Christ are exactly that, polarities. They are not differences that must exclude one another, but poles that need one another for balance and wholeness.
Ultimately communal discernment requires a radical openness to how the Sovereign God may lead in fresh and unexpected ways. We must speak our best. We offer the truth as we understand it, but we also know that in the listening, through the Word, by the breath of the Holy Spirit among us, God may declare something utterly new.
And it is precisely at this scary point that the deeply rooted bond between the practice of communal discernment and the Reformed Tradition comes clear. John Calvin firmly held that “Piety is requisite for the knowledge of God.” (Institutes, Book I, Chapter II). This never meant denying the intellect. It did, however, mean that if we would know God we must open ourselves in reverence and loving devotion to the One whose mind, love, and wisdom shall forever be greater than our own. This insight profoundly shapes our understanding of the Church, how it lives and where it draws its life. At the very start of the Book of Order (G-1.000) we declare that Christ is head of the Church, calls it into being, is present in both Spirit and Word, and alone is to teach, call and use the Church as he wills.
In the Reformed understanding, our very ecclesiology invites us to be a people who pray, wait, seek together after the leading of our truly Living Lord. Our operational image has little to do with, say, the U.S. Congress in parliamentary ordered session and everything to do with a band of disciples hunkered down, prayerful, expectant, opening on Pentecost.
All this points to where discernment, by the gift of God, can ultimately lead: graced, ongoing growth in understanding, in bonds with one another and with the All-Caring God.
Here it is necessary to be specific. In this spring of 2006, it is easy to forget how wrenchingly diverse a group of people was appointed to the Task Force five years ago. Despite their honest words on the matter, it is easy for us to forget how diverse they remain on many vital issues. Yet this body has spoken with a single voice. What they have said now stretches us. Fresh words will do that. And as part of the stretching, they have united in inviting us as a faith community to enter more fully into the ways of communal discernment.
That is a faithful invitation, and it is daring.
Steve Doughty, Honorably Retired, of Otsego, Mich., is a former pastor and presbytery executive.
