Personal Disciplines and Communal Practice (Video)
Recently, I had the chance to speak to some of the leadership of the church I serve about moving from a deciding body to a discerning body. In an effort to guide the group toward discernment, there are both personal disciplines and communal practices. This video was an effort to teach different disciplines and practices.
You may not care to watch this entire video, I do not blame you - I don’t like to listen to me, too. However, if you are interested in some of the disciplines and practices, I have put minute marks below for your reference.
I hope this teaching is helpful for you to either participate in these disciplines and practices or at the very least give you something to push against and discover your own Lenten disciplines and practices. (These minute marks and links are also in the comments of the video on Youtube.)
The Dawn of Vision and The Role of Pastor
Photo by Karl Magnuson on Unsplash
There is a story about the nature of spiritual disciplines that goes something like this:
A student asked the teacher, “What effect do the spiritual disciplines have on gaining salvation?” The teacher said, “As much effect as you have on causing the sun to rise.” To which the student asked, “Then why practice the disciplines at all?” Looking to the east the teacher said, “So that we are awake to witness the sunrise.”
Too often we church leaders think that it is our job to “come up with the vision” of the church. And some might say this is true. I offer that it is not the leader that comes up with the vision but it is God’s vision that leaders are trying to articulate. This means the leader must be engaged in spiritual disciplines so as to not miss the sunrise.
The vision for a church is like the sunrise. It is a gift an it comes slowly. It is not the leaders job to cast the vision but to help and show people how to stay awake to the breaking of God’s vision. The pastoral leader is not the one who decides what the vision is, but the one who calls people to look eastward for the coming vision of dawn. The faithful church is less interested in deciding what to do and more interested in where to face.
Deciding and Discerning Distinction
Photo by Matt Seymour on Unsplash
In church world, we often do not make the distinction between deciding and discerning. For the most part we favor the word deciding over discernment - if we use that word at all.
To “decide” means to cut away. When we make a decision we cut away the options we do not want or like or deem less appealing. When we decide we tend to assign a judgement or an evaluation of that which we decided against. Once we decide, we consider our choice good and the thing we cut away as less than good or perhaps bad.
To “discern” means to to separate. Separating is value neutral. That is when we separate our laundry we are not saying that “darks” are good and “lights” are bad. We are just separating things into piles. Discerning is a value neutral process where we separate out that which is discovered.
Discernment is like panning in a river. We pull many things from the living waters and look and sort. We may think we are only looking for gold, but when we sort things out we may discover other beautiful things. These beautiful things may not be what was originally sought, however these beautiful things are retained. We do not call the other rocks “bad” or “unworthy.” We only sort in order to see clearly. If we assign some value to things as we sort, then we are not discerning we are deciding.
Discerning is non-threatening and requires patience. We tend to place a premium on having a decisive mind that we fail to appreciate the value, joy and faithfulness the discerning heart.
Be the change by Jason Valendy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.