Embedded deeply into the practices and training of Mission Alive is the spiritual practice of discernment. Simply, discernment is determining what God is saying to you – about any subject. Of course, the challenge is to distinguish between God’s voice and the plethora of other voices that demand our attention moment by moment. Perhaps the hardest voice to distinguish from God’s voice is our own. Most of us have become quite adept at hearing our own voice but concluding that God is doing the talking. That is, we hear God saying exactly what we want Him to say. The practice of spiritual discernment is learning to hear God’s voice with increasing clarity.
Discernment and Mission
We at Mission Alive are deeply convinced that God has been about his purposes from the moment the Spirit hovered over the primordial deep (Gen. 1:2). He has been up to something on this earth and what God is up to we call God’s Mission. What God is doing in any place or at any time becomes clearer through the practice of spiritual discernment. If we are to participate in what God is doing, we must be able to recognize it. Furthermore, if we are to figure out how we are to participate in God’s Mission, we must have a way to see and listen. This is discernment.
Spirituality and Mission
Our participation in God’s Mission requires that we both pay attention to what God is saying and doing through practices of prayer and reflection and that we follow our prayer and reflection with action – that is engaging in God’s Mission. The only way we know how we are to uniquely engage in God’s Mission is to practice spiritual discernment.
To spend time in prayer and reflection (discernment) about God’s Mission without following up that discernment with some missional action is pointless. We call this Escapism. We escape into the spiritual realm to spend time with God but it has no missional expression when we re-engage the world. It is like when Peter suggested that they put up tents on what we call the Mount of Transfiguration (Matt. 17:4) as if they were just going to stay on the mountain. On the contrary, God told Peter to listen to Jesus who immediately led them back down the mountain into a moment of ministry (Matt. 17:14-18).
More commonly we take action without bothering to listen to God about the action we think we should take. We call this Frenzy. This is when we are so busy doing ministry that we do not take the time to both pray about it and listen for God’s leading (discernment). Frenzy reveals our trust in our own conclusions, experiences, and expertise. To trust God means that we start with the practice of spiritual discernment before we engage in missional action.