Since completing my curacy in the Church of England, I’ve worked as a priest in three different contexts: ministerial formation, national ecumenical and theological work, and now a large urban multi-church parish. In each of them, discernment has featured as a key term, and one that has sometimes bothered me.
“Have we taken time to discern God’s will in this situation?” is a question that readily provokes a certain awkwardness, in that it seems self-evident this is something we really and obviously ought to do. Yet we may not feel too sure either what it would actually mean to do it, or how we could feel confident that we had given it due attention.
The tradition of Ignatian spirituality can perhaps be counted as the crucial historical influence on appeals to the value of discernment in the contemporary church. This is clearest in the first of the three contexts I mentioned above, that of ministerial formation. It has long been taken for granted in many churches, including the Church of England, that a person in an ordination process should have a story to tell about interior calling: how you came to feel drawn to being a deacon or priest.
The strength of that story—the extent to which it carries conviction—is taken to be a critical factor in “discerning” a person’s vocation. You might assume that’s obvious, but it wasn’t obvious at all to people before the early modern period, who were more likely to think that if the way was open for you to be a monk or a nun or a priest, then you should take it, just because these were ways of living that carried distinctive value for the church and the society it served.
For Ignatius Loyola, matters weren’t quite so straightforward. Such choices were about deciding which good gift of God to embrace, since marriage and “secular” work were also goods of creation, and the church and society in fact depended on different people choosing different goods in this context, with only a minority becoming priests, monks, and nuns.
So how could I know that I am one of the few who are called to this? His answer required attention to the interplay between objective theological reasoning about the ends of human existence and subjective exploration of one’s inner landscape, the interior pushes and pulls one experienced in seeking the guidance of the Holy Spirit. How can we tell which of them are the promptings of the Spirit rather than distraction or worse? That becomes the burden of discernment, when theological reasoning remains vital, because we can sure that what the Spirit prompts us to do will always be conducive to the fulfilment of our purposes as God’s creatures.
One of the difficulties of using Ignatian traditions for the discernment of ministerial vocations today is that we are disoriented about the relevant processes of theological reasoning regarding human goods Against this the felt strength of our inward perceptions should be tested, rather than merely some kind of externally pragmatic assessment about the likelihood of our effectiveness in ministerial roles. From listening in prayerfully to our jumbled desires, what can we glean about life-shaping roles and responsibilities that will be for our good and the good of the church, and the good of the world that the church serves?
Parallel questions are in play in the context of what might be called missional discernment, which is where the term is most likely to feature in my current role. Within the Church of England, Mission Action Planning has been widely used since the start of the century as an approach that enables local churches, of whatever tradition and in whatever context, to align their culture, resources, and activities with the priority of mission for ecclesiology, as a doctrinal and practical principle. It’s gone in and out of fashion during that time, but remains very much part of diocesan policy in many places.
The standard introduction to Mission Action Planning outlines four key phases: review, discern, plan and act. It is anticipated that the first two will take considerable time and attention: reviewing what is happening both in the life of the church and in the local community that it seeks to serve, through use of relevant data as well as focused conversations with a wide range of people; and then discernment, which needs to be corporate, not simply the responsibility of a sole leader or leadership team gathered around them, and spiritual, rooted in prayerful seeking of God’s will. Indeed, discernment here functions as the essential hinge, taking a church community from review toward planning and action, a step that in our haste we may be tempted to skip or short-circuit because the imperative for action that will bring change can seem so obvious, but always at our peril, since we may miss the one thing that is actually needful for our church in its current situation.
As with vocational discernment following Ignatian tradition, a key premise here is that there are many good things we could do, but we cannot do them all, so that we need to find some basis for making a choice which isn’t simply a question of working out whether one thing is objectively better than another, but rather of what this specific church community is being called to do here and now to serve the mission of God. Expansive notions of the missio Dei since the mid-20th century have played a crucial role in shaping practices of missional discernment, with their presentation of God’s activity in mission as dynamic and diverse while also inviting our participation—a participation that is therefore bound to be partial, and dependent on a spiritual perception both of where God is at work and of where God is inviting us to engage our agency.
Such perception depends, however, on what we believe about God’s action in the movement of mission and how the church is caught up within that. The global reception of missio Dei theology in the last 70 years has left churches to various degrees conflicted and confused on that question, I would argue. Moreover, it’s not at all clear what the analogue is in an ecclesial process of discernment to the interior exploration of desires and thoughts in Ignatian tradition, though questions of motivation are arguably pivotal here too. If many of us are drawn to the idea of setting up a food bank, or an introductory course in Christian discipleship, or a toddler group, what is the interplay between our theological understanding of the church in the mission of God and the feelings of energy and attraction that these activities may elicit in us?
When I was supporting national ecumenical and theological work for the Church of England, discernment featured less prominently in my work—with one exception. I was part of the staff team supporting the Living in Love and Faith project, and since 2019, discernment has occupied a significant place in that project’s presentation. As the Living in Love and Faith book expressed it in 2020, the purpose of all the “learning resources” produced by the project was “to help us to learn and discern together so that right judgements and godly decisions can be made about our common life” (p. 422). The influence of Ignatian tradition—appealed to explicitly by the Archbishops in the book’s Foreword—shows through here: discernment is a spiritual practice that helps us move from description of the choices open to us in a given situation to coming to a judgment about the path we are called by God to follow.
The obvious departure from the setting envisaged by Ignatius is that the choice here is not between acknowledged goods as described within a shared account of theological reasoning, but a choice about what is in fact good and right when there are conflicting and potentially incommensurable accounts of such reasoning. The drift that follows from the consequent unmooring of discernment might be traced in the repeated deferrals since 2019 of when the pivotal task of discerning will actually be done (not yet, according to the latest report from the bishops to the General Synod).
For what can an appeal to the practice of discernment signify in this situation, beyond a vote of no confidence in the capacity of theological reasoning to address the apparent impasse, and an implicit assertion that what is at stake is not, at root, a matter of good and evil, sin and salvation, but rather the pragmatic management of contradictory flows of conviction and power within an irredeemably refractory institution?
My instinct is that there may be an important answer to that question other than “nothing,” but it would have to outline a form of experiential listening that interweaves with the careful labour of moral theology, without displacing or diminishing it.
The Rev. Dr. Jeremy Worthen is the Team Rector of Ashford in the Diocese of Canterbury. He previously worked in ministerial formation and in supporting national ecumenical and theological work.