Mennonite Church USA

Do not conform to the pattern of this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.—Romans 12:2 TNIV

And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.—Philippians 1:9-11 TNIV
Deep in my heart, there’s nothing that I want more than to know God’s will for my life—God’s good, pleasing and perfect will, as the Apostle Paul described it to the Romans.

As executive director of Mennonite Church USA, I have the same longing for our whole church. With Paul, I’m praying that our love as a church may grow in knowledge and depth of insight, so that we, too, may be able to discern and pursue God’s best in our world today.

Discernment is an essential calling for the church. Paul Lederach wrote: “Christians are to discern because they are living under God, who is also discerning. God’s discernment and Christian discernment are to coincide. Christians are to live so that they are approved now and also in the judgment.”

J. Lawrence Burkholder, former president of Goshen (Ind.) College, said that the hardest question a church can ask itself is how it can know the will of God in relationship to the world of today. In his mind, “discernment is the clue to New Testament ethics.”

They would look at an event in history and they would ask themselves as a community under the Holy Spirit, “What is the meaning of this? Is it good or bad? Is it for Christ or against Christ?” In contemporary language, one might call this an “exegesis of the situation.”

How did the church go about this kind of discernment?

Calvin Redekop described discernment as three primary activities: (1) It engages in deep and intense study of what the Scriptures and the Spirit of Christ command and demand its followers to do. (2) It analyzes the sources and meaning of God’s Word in terms of its original meanings and what they are saying today. (3) It is concerned about defining the nature of Christian life and obedience in contemporary terms.

The three scholar-leaders I’ve cited spent much of their lifetime helping their generation become a more discerning community. That endeavor is just as relevant today.

In that vein, I will cite two current theological educators. Michael King, dean at Eastern Mennonite Seminary, Harrisonburg, Va., recently defined discernment as “involving the community of believers gathered in Jesus’ name around Scripture in the presence of the Holy Spirit to find its way through the pressing, complex and sometimes divisive issues of a given context.”

And Sara Wenger Shenk, president of Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, Elkhart, Ind., recently wrote about communal discernment: “Despite many failures, we continue to hold up this glowing vision because we believe that we’re really onto something. We believe that to seek a common mind within a shared conversation (for the purpose of a more unified witness) is not only a worthy goal but the very heartbeat of God’s reconciling mission in the world.”

That’s the heart of our vision for Mennonite Church USA—a longing for God’s healing and hope to flow through us to the world.

And that’s the hope with which I published a book by the same name as this column, at the invitation of Michael King as publisher for Cascadia Publishing House.

May God enable us all to better understand God’s will as we engage in communal discernment, a core commitment of a faithful church.

Ervin Stutzman is executive director of Mennonite Church USA.