Ask The God Questions
October 1, 2001
Too often the missing element in God's business is God. "At church meetings, we often expect the pastor to pray book-end prayers—one at the beginning and one at the end—but then it's business as usual," said Sister Ellen Morseth, BVM. "Spiritual discernment is essential to the church, but it has been buried for years." Morseth and Presbyterian minister Charles Olsen began Worshipful Work, a Kansas City-based ministry that teaches church leaders to bring the practices of worship into the board room and business meeting. The ministry grew from a study Olsen led, funded by the Lilly Endowment, on the ways congregations make decisions. Noticeably absent in the control group was a concentration on spirituality and discernment. Most church leadership teams assume God is guiding what they do. But—with the influence of business models on church planning and administration—the plans God has for a congregation are sometimes bypassed for the sake of efficiency. Spiritual discernment—seeking the mind of God on a matter—is an often overlooked spiritual discipline. Olsen and Morseth have sought to reestablish discernment as a spiritual practice within congregations. In Transforming Church Boards (Alban, 1995), the book that resulted from the Lilly study, Olsen defines the practice first by what it is not: Discernment is not to be equated with consensus decision making. Discernment is not a political process. Discernment is not a logical, rational, ordered discipline that leads deductively to inescapable conclusions. It is a sometimes lengthy, sometimes meandering activity of determining what God wants, or from an eternal perspective, what already is. He points to Romans 12:2 as foundational to the practice: ...
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