Photo by Todd Klassy
By Debbie Gin
How do you make important decisions? I’m grateful that I’m not wired to regret, so for most of my life, I’ve never looked back on a decision, overly concerned about what “could have been.” I just trust that all the info gathering I did on the front end served its purpose, and I made the best decision I could.
Yet, now that I’m older and have experienced more heartache (sometimes caused by my or others’ poor decisions), I sense within a longing for some kind of “formula” that will ensure the “right” decision: something that will tell me for sure this is God’s will for my life!
Writing this post, I’m currently at a large crossroad. In the next month or so, I must make a pretty big decision that will commit me to a trajectory, possibly, for the rest of my life. So, as you can imagine, I am treading cautiously. As a good Korean Christian, my first thought was to visit a kidowon (mountain prayer house) and pray through the decision, and I fully intend to! My second thought, however, was whether going to pray by myself might be 1) too lonely or 2) too presumptuous (that God would bother to speak to me about my small “big” decision.
I’ve blocked my schedule to go pray in solitude (a wonderful spiritual discipline, mind you), but I wonder if there are other less-known spiritual disciplines that I can tap as I am discerning. This made me consider what our church is going through right now. Called a Congregational Discernment Process (CDP), this season of 6 months includes a sermon series, weekly corporate listening with lectio divina and open mic times, and now an extended church board conversation over three months, to address an important question: “How does God want us to love our Christian neighbors, including those who are gay?” For most conservative Christian churches, even talking about the issue places that church into the “liberal” category, something I resist strongly. If we mean to maintain our relevance as a Church, we must talk about it, no matter where we land on the issues.
The CDP came to mind as I thought about my personal decision because, in our deliberations, the phrase “let the Holy Spirit speak to you” keeps recurring. A question that has gnawed at me for many decades, though, follows: what if the Holy Spirit appears to be saying different things to different people? When God’s leading doesn’t easily converge within a group, several outcomes of that group dynamic are possible: 1) non-convergence leads to fierce arguing, 2) non-convergence leads to judgment (i.e., who’s more holy or who really seems to be hearing God’s voice more, which nearly always leads to, though never named, which is the voice of the dominant group?), or 3) the group tries to find the right formula to understand God’s leading. The first two point to the Church’s need to learn civil discourse (i.e., iron sharpening iron, but with respect) and understanding how power and voice work in group dynamics. The third is particularly scary to me, as it seems that reducing God to trite sayings or promoting to divine levels any individual human interpretation of the Holy Spirit’s voice would be inevitable outcomes.
So I have no easy answers; perhaps I should have set that disclaimer early in this post. But I leave you with several questions to consider critically. Many come from a discussion among a few of us (e.g., Pansy Yee, Marsha Lee) that lingered after our adult Sunday School session today: why does it make us uncomfortable to consider the Holy Spirit saying both things? Does this discomfort have anything to do with our (U.S. Western, Christian, Asian American) culture’s push toward having answers/quick fixes/problem-solving? And toward having the right answers? Does this push keep us from considering that we might be wrong? Could the Holy Spirit be speaking through all believers gathered at our church, with not one person’s interpretation holding the monopoly on all things God?
Dr. Debbie Gin is Director of AAWOL (Asian American Women On Leadership). She is a Senior Faculty Fellow in Faculty Development at Azusa Pacific University and an Associate Professor in Biblical Studies and Ministry at Haggard Graduate School of Theology. Debbie and her husband live in southern California.
aawolsisters.com 
Thanks for this. What church are you with? Our church is on the edgo of a similar process and could use some guidance. On a personal note, I just posted a blog on God’s will that might be encouraging to you. Be well. http://cissybradyrogers.com/2175
Thanks for thinking outloud and reflectively. When it rains, it pours. You are in the middle of every major decision process, it seems. What has helped me in similar situations was simply to be loving and letting go of the typical “right or wrong” questions especially when issues at hand are much bigger than what I can imagine or control. I am reading Paul Tillich’s Love, Power, and Justice which seem to sum up all the dynamics of human dramas. It is the process of daring a civil discourse on the tough issues that matter to the silence pain of no small numbers of people. Be well, my sister.
Thanks, Cissy, for your own blog post. I visited and left a comment. Thanks too for your interest in our church’s process. The church is Evergreen Baptist Church of Los Angeles: http://www.ebcla.org/. Not sure how much of the CDP is on our website right now though. Feel free to get in contact with the church, and they can funnel you through to me if you’d like. Appreciate your thoughts!
Yes, thanks Young. Forcing the conversation toward “right or wrong”–and associating that with being more or less spiritual–has been the demise of modern Christianity, in my opinion. It keeps us from having deeper, fruitful, and godly conversations…conversations that are pleasing to God! I’m very hopeful that this season at our church, and lessons that we can learn along the way, will be a launch point for many believers to move beyond an elementary faith to something very profound!
Becoming an adult means embracing all the challenges in life. I agree with you that ANA Christianity will move forward by accepting differences in civil manner. The fact that your church is breaking through the barriers of silencing the pain of the marginalized is already redemptive. Praying with you in this demanding but rewarding season of your life….