This past weekend a group of laypeople from St. Luke’s and I spent two days working with the folks at the Partnership for Missional Church (PMC), a process developed by Church Innovations of Minneapolis.  Simply put, PMC seeks to partner churches together to develop the skills of corporate spiritual discernment.  They facilitate gatherings of congregations, parish leaders and judicatories in a process of community assessment, gifts discernment and capacity building to help Christian communities identify “God’s promised and preferred future” in their common life.

One of the things that I am reflecting on about this weekend was a concept borrowed from physics called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.  The overly simple explanation of the principle is that one can determined either the location of a subabtomic particle or its destination, but not both.  The implication for churches and discernment is that we can either control the process or the outcome of discernment, not both.

What seems most applicable about this principle, as applied to churches, is that we can either be faithful to the process of following and discipleship or we can do what we feel like we want to do, we cannot set out to ‘have it both ways’.  Simply put we can either trust God to take us where we are called to go or we can make our best guess as to where that is, go there and wait for God to show up.

It seems to me there’s an element of fear in either choice.

On the one hand we can hear the words of the author of the letter to the Hebrews as he writes, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” (10:31) and live with the question of whether or not God is inclined to break our fall, or we can deal with the anxiety of whether or not God will catch up to our plans and bless them ex post facto.

As ‘fearful’ as trusting God is in the times of great uncertainty, I believe that we’d do well to heed the words of the prophet Jeremiah, “For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope” (29:11).  I choose to believe that God has great plans in store for ‘The Church’ if we can invest in doing what is ours to do with respect to process and leave the outcome to God.

I close with this most wonderful passage from Ephesians, “Glory to God, who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, for ever and ever. Amen”²¹ (3:20-21).

May all our processes be faithful and God’s preferred and promised future for us all be revealed and sought with passion and courage.