How to Lead When You Don't Know Where You're Going: Leading in a Liminal Season

by Susan Beaumont

The extra time and attention required to prepare a proper tea is rewarded with noticeably fuller flavor. Discernment is similar. The process at first seems cumbersome and painstakingly slow, but when honored, it fosters rich dialogue. With time and practice, discerners settle into natural discernment rhythms, eventually developing a practice that is seamless and elegant.

adapted from Danny Morris and Charles Olsen in their book Discerning God’s Will Together.

eight distinct steps that we will explore later: framing, grounding, shedding, listening, exploring, c...

the process benefits from good facilitation. Someone must monitor the flow of work and the dynamics of the group.

A discernmentarian is a group spiritual guide who is well acquainted with the movements of discernment and the spiritual disciplines that help participants progress through the movements.

The first phase of the discernment process is framing. The framing of the decision, problem, or issue invites the group to carefully consider the boundaries of their work. What is this about, and what is this not about?

Every month the topic is listed on the governing board’s meeting agenda as “worship attendance.” Every month, leaders spend fifteen to twenty minutes brainstorming/worrying about the decline in attendance, without ever deciding whether there is a problem with worship, and if there is, what the nature of the problem might be, and what action might be called for. After months of this fruitless activity, board leaders decide to engage in a more intentional discernment process.

What are we being invited to attend to in the decline of worship attendance?

How will discipleship in our congregation change if people worship with less frequency?

the framing of the issue is often a discernment unto itself and will often take as much time as the entire rest of the discernment process. Whatever the subject, the discernment question needs to be clearly stated and agreed upon by the group.

Shedding involves naming and laying aside anything that might prevent the group from focusing on God’s will as the ultimate outcome.

invites participants to name and release unhelpful biases and ego investments in the outcomes.

“What needs to die in me/us for God’s gifts and direction to find room in our lives?”

a listening process that spanned several months. They began by listening more deeply to one another. Then the discerners invited members of the staff team to join them in a dialogue about the joys, concerns, strengths, and weaknesses surrounding worship life at Stonecrest. Finally, the discerners created a congregation-wide listening process.

Listening also involves summarizing and interpreting what has been heard.

When a discerning group is presented with data, particularly when the data is quantitative, the group may be lured into a decision-making stance.

The exploring stage of discernment is a comfortable stage for many groups, because it mirrors the brainstorming stage people are accustomed to in decision-making. In this stage, participants identify all possible directions or alternatives, evaluating each option, eliminating those that don’t satisfy the guiding principles, until only two or three possible options remain.

The challenge in discernment is to narrow the options and yet avoid being captured by a single outcome while the exploration is still underway.

Continuing with the best two or three options, the group weighs each possibility. The group is asked to suspend its analysis of each option and to receive Spirit guidance. Having completed a vigorous analysis of possible alternatives, the group yields to intuition, insight, and wisdom.

A consensus choice is not the same thing as a unanimous decision (in which all group members’ personal preferences are satisfied). Consensus is also not a majority vote (in which some larger segment of the group gets to make the decision).

Consensus implies commitment to the decision, which means that all participants oblige themselves to do their part in putting the decision into action.

During a consensus check, as concerns are raised, it is the group’s job to understand concerns before resolving them. The group listens carefully to each reservation raised, asking thoughtful questions to better understand the nature of the reservation.

Any member of the group that continues to have reservations can ask to make his or her concern a point of record.

There is one final step in the discernment process, a step rarely encountered in traditional decision-making. We test by resting. Before the decision is shared beyond the discerning group, the group is asked to sit with the decision in stillness and prayer.

Ask, “Is our decision God’s will, nothing more, nothing less, nothing else?”

A discernment process does not need to be long and laborious. A group can complete this entire process in a half-hour conversation during a regularly scheduled meeting.

Leaders let the decision rest for a month after the retreat before the chosen option was brought before the board for approval. Board leaders tested their consensus at the next regularly scheduled board meeting and then called for a congregational vote to affirm their chosen path.

Who can ever fully know the mind of God? It is rare for a discerning group to receive an unambiguous message from the Holy Spirit, although that does occasionally happen. More often, a discerning group grapples with an interpretation of what is being called forth. With patience and attention, the discernment process ultimately elicits clarity, energy, and commitment among participants.

Learning to discern the movement of the Holy Spirit is life-changing for all who yield to the process. On a personal level, faith journeys are impacted in profound ways. People begin to value and trust their own ability to discern the mind of God in their personal lives. Collectively, the team is strengthened by their shared experience of having been led by the Holy Spirit. Humility, awe, and wonder permeate the life of a congregation that practices discernment.

Danny E. Morris and Charles M. Olsen, Discerning God’s Will Together: A

Victoria G. Curtiss, Guidelines for Communal Discernment

Robert J. Sternberg, ed., Wisdom: Its Nature, Origins, and Development

Thomas H. Green, Weeds Among the Wheat: Discernment—Where Prayer and Action Meet (Notre

Larry Dressler, Consensus through Conversation: How to Achieve High-Commitment Decisions

Over the years, gazing at the cracked glass beneath Jesus’ crucified body became a physical reminder to me of God’s abundant grace. This egregious act committed by my siblings and I was never fully repaired, but also never punished. The crucifix was broken. We were broken. It was all okay. Each day of my childhood that I passed by that broken cross reminded me of the wholeness that resides within brokenness.

Miroslav Volf reminds us that when we sever ourselves from memory, we lose our identity, particularly the part of our identity that is rooted in God.

Volf reminds us, “Take the community away and sacred memory disappears; take the sacred memory away and the community disintegrates.”

The resurrection of Christ didn’t happen just to that first-century community; in remembering we know that it is happening now and that it will happen—again and again.

Where have we come from? How did we get here? What then should we do next?

Volf writes about the challenge of remembering rightly. When we remember, we imagine that we are reciting facts, but we aren’t. Our imagination has secretly come to the aid of our faltering memory, so we unwittingly pass fiction off as truth.

According to Volf, “The truth about the past is merely the story we find most compelling, either because it is attractive and useful to us or because it has been imposed upon us by some social constraint or subtle persuasion.”

“How do you do it?” he asked. The man explained, “Anyone can. After I shoot the arrow, I take some paint and draw a target around the arrow.”

The congregation is stuck, but members still love to tell the story of Anna B. Quick, a story in which the heroine does nothing but the faithful few things that have always worked. Out of curiosity and frustration, the pastor digs into the archives of the congregation to research the Anna B. Quick story. Remarkably, he learns fresh parts of the old story that the congregation never tells. It seems that revitalization of the old church happened when Anna and a few others gave sacrificially from their own personal income in order to hire a new pastor. Anna led the church in a decision to tear down the old building, and she helped raise the funds to build a new sanctuary. The church began to thrive once these bold initiatives were underway.

Richard Hester and Kelli Walker-Jones write in their book Know Your Story and Lead with It about the use of narrative therapy techniques in leadership

most of the information about the event remains on the cutting room floor.”

Ask someone to tell a story, mirroring the way it is told in the organization. Once the story is told, ask people how the story makes them feel, and what the story makes them believe about the organization. What values, behaviors, and practices are reinforced when the story is told in this way? In what ways does the story empower or limit the choices before leaders today? What important facts may have been omitted over time? Whose side of the story is not represented in this telling?

When the founding story is problem saturated, it is the task of the leader to shape a redeeming story.

“When were your glory days?” When I pose this question to congregational leaders, I almost always get a united response. Leaders may cite multiple eras in the organization’s history, but in general the minds and hearts of leaders align around “who we were when we were at our best.”

glory-era stories are almost always thin stories that don’t reflect a careful analysis of what accounted for success. They rarely recognize that in the midst of their success, bad seeds were sown that led to later downfall.

When the Trenton Church tells its glory day story, they emphasize the strength of the preaching and the energy and vibrancy of the senior minister. What the story doesn’t reflect is the decline that began during that admired senior minister’s tenure.