{"id":41020,"date":"2025-03-06T17:26:12","date_gmt":"2025-03-07T01:26:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=41020"},"modified":"2025-03-06T17:26:12","modified_gmt":"2025-03-07T01:26:12","slug":"discerning-fast-and-slow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/discerning-fast-and-slow\/","title":{"rendered":"Discerning, Fast and Slow?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s leadership for whatever it is we\u2019re 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\u2019s voice and help us respond in community<\/em>. It\u2019s a vulnerable, encouraging, and joyful space.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cThy will\u201d versus \u201cmy will\u201d is essential.[1]<\/a> Though the team doesn\u2019t 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)\u2014the discussions and engagement in this team has real-life ripple for our body and broader community. In many ways, discerning seems \u201cintuitive\u201d and holds space for awareness of whether you\u2019re walking in consolation\u2014peace and God\u2019s presence, or desolation\u2014anxiety and dissonance.[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

Thus, as I was interacting with Kahneman\u2019s Thinking, Fast and Slow<\/em>, I found myself assessing and re-assessing our environments and invitations in discernment.[3]<\/a> 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\u2019ve never thought or gone this way before, so it can\u2019t be right). Throughout the reading, I wrestled with if and how my learning from Kahneman should intersect with our discernment practices.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cthe best we can do\u201d is to \u201clearn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high,\u201d gives me a sense of urgency to protect that space of discernment from, well, me<\/em><\/strong>.[4]<\/a> Yet, part of the work of discernment is being fully present as whole people before God to the space of emotion, God\u2019s activity in the world, and the tools he gives us like data and information.[5]<\/a><\/p>\n

Kahneman agrees that data can be helpful if<\/em> we slowly work through the information and don\u2019t simply look for those data that affirm what we already think or want.[6]<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

The more I sit with all of this, the more I believe these two practices of thinking<\/em> (fast and slow) and discernment<\/em> 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]<\/strong><\/a> <\/em>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\u2019s desires<\/em>?[8]<\/a> \u00a0<\/em>Good discernment, good thinking, and good leadership require self-control and attentiveness: Will I rush to the easiest or \u201cmost obvious\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>. That is not to say we don\u2019t have any cares or think the outcome doesn\u2019t matter, but indifference in the sense that we ask for grace to want nothing but God\u2019s 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\u2014fast and slow.<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Barton, Ruth H. Pursuing God\u2019s Will Together: A Discernment Practice for Leadership Groups<\/em>. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2012.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Barton, 59.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow<\/em>. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Kahneman, 28.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Barton, 68.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> Kahneman, 81.<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> Kahneman. This question is implicit throughout the work and is highlighted early; cf. page 44.<\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> Barton, 54.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s leadership for whatever it is we\u2019re navigating or being invited into as a church. It has become invaluable to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":227,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3397,2052],"class_list":["post-41020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dlgp04","tag-kahneman","cohort-dlgp04"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/227"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41020"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41020\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41021,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41020\/revisions\/41021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}