I can recommend this as one of the most valuable books that Christian ministers and lay leaders can read and teach in their congregations to help their churches move in a fresh experience of truly following God’s call. Ruth Haley Barton has given us a readable text based on sound understanding of theology, history and church practice within a Baptist as well as ecumenical perspective.
I will share in the following paragraphs some of her most seminal statements in order to whet your appetite. Keep in mind that she is not speaking so much about individual spiritual discernment as about corporate/congregational, though that in and of itself requires personal commitment by each leader and member to an honest search for the leading of the Holy Spirit in all things.
Beginning with the Introduction, I resonate with so much that she shares, especially that many Christian leaders have “a vague sense that our approach to decision making should be different from secular models . . . The problem is that we’re not quite sure what that difference is.” So, we tend to go on with business as usual in our meetings, with “an obligatory devotional (often viewed as irrelevant to the business portion of the meeting) or the perfunctory prayers that bookend the meeting.”[1]
She recommends that church decision-making should be intentionally re-oriented to draw the leadership groups into more deliberate seeking of God’s will in all things. In her words, “Discernment, in a most general sense, is the capacity to recognize and respond to the presence and the activity of God—both in the ordinary moments and in the larger decisions of our lives.” I resonate with her view that it is our “commitment to discerning and doing the will of God through the help of the Holy Spirit that distinguishes spiritual leadership from other kinds of leadership.”[2]
She states that the process of spiritual discernment involves “(1) preparing individual leaders for discernment, (2) becoming a community for discernment at the leadership level and (3) engaging an actual process for discerning God’s will together as leaders.”[3]
