Discerning, Fast and Slow?
One of my favorite regular meetings is when my Discernment Team gets together. We meet for five to six hours every month (2.5 or more hours every other week) to pray together and seek Holy Spirit’s leadership for whatever it is we’re navigating or being invited into as a church. It has become invaluable to me as a lead pastor to have a group of trusted friends who seek God’s voice and help us respond in community. It’s a vulnerable, encouraging, and joyful space.
One of the reasons we seek discernment in community is the reality that we can be self-deceptive and infer a path forward that is self- more than Spirit-driven; a community of those striving to know the difference between seeking “Thy will” versus “my will” is essential.[1] Though the team doesn’t have formal operational or governance roles, they do serve in a significant advisory capacity to me (and is made up of representatives from both our staff and Council teams)—the discussions and engagement in this team has real-life ripple for our body and broader community. In many ways, discerning seems “intuitive” and holds space for awareness of whether you’re walking in consolation—peace and God’s presence, or desolation—anxiety and dissonance.[2]
Thus, as I was interacting with Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, I found myself assessing and re-assessing our environments and invitations in discernment.[3] It would be very easy to leverage biases and mental shortcuts to cultivate a false consolation or even a desolation that is not spiritual but contextual (we’ve never thought or gone this way before, so it can’t be right). Throughout the reading, I wrestled with if and how my learning from Kahneman should intersect with our discernment practices.
Kahneman does an excellent job of revealing some of the hidden mental shortcuts that can lead us to false conclusions and have far-reaching implications as we allow them to set trajectories for our families, careers, and organizations. That it is impossible to fully recognize where we are blind or acting on flawed intuition, and knowing “the best we can do” is to “learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high,” gives me a sense of urgency to protect that space of discernment from, well, me.[4] Yet, part of the work of discernment is being fully present as whole people before God to the space of emotion, God’s activity in the world, and the tools he gives us like data and information.[5]
Kahneman agrees that data can be helpful if we slowly work through the information and don’t simply look for those data that affirm what we already think or want.[6] He also highlights the impact that emotion and mood have on intuition and decision-making and the ways that our physical posture impacts our mental processes. In both an operational and discerning leadership space, this requires me to cultivate environments where we are functioning from a place of holy optimism and hopeful engagement rather than frustration or anxiety.
The more I sit with all of this, the more I believe these two practices of thinking (fast and slow) and discernment are not in conflict with each other, though they may live in some tension. Both require going deeper in our focus and choosing curiosity: Kahneman pushes us to cultivate active minds and ask the question, is my intuition actually correct?[7] Discernment requires cultivating sensitive body-mind-spirit interactions where we ask the question, am I asserting my own wishes (and presuppositions) or surrendering to God’s desires?[8] Good discernment, good thinking, and good leadership require self-control and attentiveness: Will I rush to the easiest or “most obvious” response when a great deal is on the line? How will I check what I sense is right? They each require a payment of sorts: self-control and attentiveness tax our systems more than we may realize. Both require transformation: to have our view expanded and our mind renewed. Both require grace: despite our best efforts, and even with utmost diligence, we will get it wrong sometimes.
While at first I was concerned the practice of discernment might appear flawed from a thinking fast and slow perspective, I believe discernment has a gift to offer thinking. Each time my team gathers, we seek indifference. That is not to say we don’t have any cares or think the outcome doesn’t matter, but indifference in the sense that we ask for grace to want nothing but God’s will, to see where our will and his might be incongruent, and to be led in the way of love. It requires a way of fresh imagination, something I think helps us think better—fast and slow.
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[1] Barton, Ruth H. Pursuing God’s Will Together: A Discernment Practice for Leadership Groups. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2012.
[2] Barton, 59.
[3] Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
[4] Kahneman, 28.
[5] Barton, 68.
[6] Kahneman, 81.
[7] Kahneman. This question is implicit throughout the work and is highlighted early; cf. page 44.
[8] Barton, 54.
About the Author
Jeremiah Gómez
I get to be Sarah's husband and Jubilee's and Zechariah's dad. I also get to serve as lead pastor at Trinity Church, a dynamic church in the Midwest where we're diligently seeking to Love God, love others, live sent, and be transformed together in community. I love the privilege of working across differences, championing healing and reconciliation in many forms.6 responses to “Discerning, Fast and Slow?”
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Jeremiah, as you practice thinking and discernment what is the role of the Holy Spirit in helping us to think and discern?
Thanks for your response, Robert!
My framework is that Holy Spirit is the primary agent in the practice of discernment. We are invited to be willing participants with Holy Spirit without losing agency. In the same way, I believe he is the agent of transformation, yet we are expected to be coworkers in what it looks like to experience mind (and thought process) renewal (cf. Romans 12:2). Part of my struggle early on in this post is knowing there is reliance on Spirit for help and leadership in discernment, and that discernment doesn’t happen AT us but WITH us, so how we think and process matters in the space of discernment.
Amen! Your response reminds me of Wilimon, in his book Pastor, who wrote something like, “As Christian leaders, we believe the Spirit brings transformation. The best we can do is to be the type of leader that God uses to transform people.”
That’s a great perspective! I think both of our NPOs require a different way of thinking and of engaging those around us with hope toward something more, but knowing we cannot force the transformation we know could (and should!) be experienced. The Wilimon “quote” is helpful calbration as we press in. Thanks!
What a great application of the text, Jeremiah. Barton is on Michaela’s bookshelf rather than mine, which means I get some of the benefit for very little work. ‘Indifference’ has been really helpful in orienting me to wait on the Lord rather than rush to an action. Maybe we can rebrand spiritual discernment as System 3 in the hierarchy. Regardless, the call to slow down, to check my desires, and to seek wise counsel fits the fast and slow model.
Thank you, Rich!
I really appreciate discernment as a “system 3” concept, and it’s certainly something I want to take time to process. Perhaps a warning that we may be relying on biased shortcuts (to our detriment) is when we are so invested in a particular outcome that indifference is not a factor at all…