In 2004, my husband, David, and I found ourselves in a place we hadn’t anticipated: jobless. Because of some soul-crushing experiences related to our pastoral roles within a local church, we both resigned. It wasn’t premeditated. It was simply a choice of soul survival. For several years after, I pined for a vocational role that fit me the way that role had. So I did what many do when they have lost something important and meaningful. I kept looking for its replacement. And I kept looking where I’d found it before—on the staff of a local church. I tried that twice, but both times I never could “root” in the soil. It wasn’t my place.

Simultaneously, I felt a gnawing inside me that seemed to grow and intensify with time. It felt vague and yet persistent, and as best I could describe it, it was a longing or urging to give birth; to start something new. During that time, my good friend Ann quoted Robert Frost to me. She said, “Remember that ‘way leads to way.’” That seemed like wisdom and resonated with me; that each way, though it wasn’t where I would ultimately land, led to the next way and then the next. So, I continued to turn down roads that looked promising and walked through open doors that seemed to have potential. One of the doors was a training course to become a spiritual director.

I met Dave Nixon, the founding pastor of Vineyard Central and a ministry called Sustainable Faith in Cincinnati, when he spoke at our church. In a conversation with him afterward, I learned that he led a School of Spiritual Direction cohort each year and there was one beginning in just a couple of months. So, with a small amount of investigation and a dose of prayer, I jumped on the chance to participate, quite unaware at the time of the significance of the decision.

We met for our first gathering in September at Sustainable Faith, an urban retreat center housed in a former convent. The ambiance of the space was so alluring to me. Built in the late 1800s, it had tall ceilings, hardwood floors, exposed brick, and generous-sized rooms. It was drenched in a quiet spirit that felt sacred—a spirit of peace and welcome. I wondered whether all those decades of nuns praying, not to mention Dave and Jody and their community praying, had permeated the atmosphere to the point that shalom was palpable.

As I drove away that first time, I found myself thinking about the experience and even saying to myself, “I’d love to do that.” Well, over time and after many returns to the convent, I began to write in my journal about a desire that was stirring within me to start a similar ministry where I live, in Indianapolis. One weekend, more than a year later, I shared my desires with our house church/small group community. We had gone away for the weekend together, and I hadn’t really shared with anyone what I was thinking. It felt big and vulnerable to openly declare it. Would they wonder secretly, Who do you think you are? Or would they not believe I was serious about it, or think that the idea was dumb?

To be honest, I don’t even remember their reactions. But knowing them as I do, I would guess that they were lovingly attentive and took me seriously. Most important, David and I began to talk more earnestly about this dream, imagining what it might be like. One thing you need to know about my husband is that he is, without a doubt, my strongest supporter. And he never once questioned my dream—for me. He made it clear that he was behind me and would support me all the way . . . but it wasn’t his thing.

Several months later something unexpected happened. I was invited by Cindy Bunch, my editor at InterVarsity Press, to a writing retreat at a beautiful retreat center called The Belfry in the mountains of Virginia. David and I had planned a vacation right after, so he came along with me to the retreat. Together, we watched Anne Grizzle, the owner and host of the retreat center, as she offered us her gracious gift of hospitality, leadership, and presence. The experience made quite an impression.

We left there and continued our vacation, but our conversation kept returning to our experience at The Belfry. I knew something had shifted within David when I found him on his computer, an hour after we got home, looking for properties! Since that time, there have been many twists, turns, about-faces, and alternate routes taken. But what you’d probably like to know and what I’d love to share is that on June 1, 2012, we moved into a hundred-year-old home in the heart of our beloved city and have established an urban retreat center called Sustainable Faith Indy (SFI). We are living our dream!

We established SFI as a contemplative outpost for Christ-followers and the local church, a place where individuals, small groups, and teams can gather in a quiet, protected space to pray, listen to God and one another, and do important work. We support leaders in their pursuit of a contemplative life and authentic calling through offering spiritual direction, vocational counseling, and contemplative retreats. With less than three years under our belt, we’ve welcomed and extended hospitality to nearly two thousand individuals, including family, friends, and guests. The community that is forming has become liquid, pooling together in this sacred place and space and then streaming out and trickling into the dry, cracked, and thirsty places of our community and world.

Now hardly a day passes when we don’t experience a rush of awe and gratitude to God for the holy work he has called us to and the community he is building around us. Way has led to way.

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01.  Reflection: a Communal Approach to Discernment

Excerpt from chapter 4 in Beth Booram, Starting Something New: Spiritual Direction for Your God-Given Dream (Downers Grove: IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015). Used by permission. All rights reserved.

The God I’ve come to know over my adult life is a God who is more interested in the formation of my personhood than my personal comfort. He’s more interested in who I am than the outcome or achievements of my life. His concern is whether, through the circumstances of my life, I’m becoming more like Jesus as I become my true self.”

I found this entry in my journal as I was reflecting on the last several years of birthing Sustainable Faith Indy. I wrote it at a time when I wasn’t especially happy about God’s commitment to my wholeness. We’d come a long way from the beginning of this story where I had this vague, unnamable dream in my heart. We’d come a long way from David being for me but not with me. But at the point when I wrote this, we were stalled. Our house had been on the market several months, properties that we’d fallen in love with had sold, and we sat, waiting and wondering whether what I’d conjured up as a dream was really a pipe dream.

The demanding journey of bringing a dream to life requires persistent courage and conviction because the path forward can be convoluted and the process confusing. In the midst of the milieu an important question often emerges: Is this dream really from God and for me?

This is a big question and requires thoughtful discernment.

For me, the discernment process didn’t follow a straightforward line. I would like to tell you that it came together in a sincere moment of prayer when light dawned and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that God wanted me to do this thing. And then magically the stars aligned, and everything fell in to place to confirm God’s blessed approval. Hardly.

What the discernment process became for me was a long, circuitous path of yearning, seeking, confusion, and waiting as the longing I experienced and the challenges I faced exposed what was in my heart. My responses to the process became the content of agonizing and honest prayer, where I met God in the depths of my being and sought to know his will for me.

• I wrestled in prayer with my mixture of motives. Some seemed to be pure, from and for God, and others out of self-serving desire.
• I wrestled in prayer with the nature of my energy for this dream. Sometimes I felt free, like I was being drawn toward it, and other times I felt anxiously and compulsively driven.
• I wrestled in prayer with what might be false
• assumptions versus real faith. Was it right to assume that the life I was being drawn toward would be more satisfying and in line with who I am, or was I fooling myself that the grass was going to be greener on the other side of this dream?

 

Seeking to know God’s heart and will for me became a profound and purifying process—an illustration of what it looks like to engage in personal discernment. There is great value, however, in inviting others into the discernment process with you. That’s what Chris Smith shared as his experience when we talked about his dream when he started The Englewood Review of Books.

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02.  Discernment in Community

The positive impression that Mennonite communities had on Chris Smith when he visited them as a young boy never left him. A seed was planted in his young heart that grew into a conscious desire and pursuit in his adult life. So when he and his wife, Jeni, moved to Indianapolis, it made sense that they would find many kindred spirits at Englewood Christian Church. Englewood folks approach being church and doing community very differently from most churches around. And one of the ways they function uniquely is in how they help “discern and refine where the dreams of the individual meet the mission of God through the people of God in their local community.”

Early on, Chris joined the staff of the Englewood Community Development Corporation (ECDC). He explains,

 

I’d been on staff with the Englewood Community Development Corporation that had been started by the church. But most of my income came through selling used books. I’ve always loved books. I started selling and collecting them in college.

My salary was covered by selling used books, but during the recession of 2007 I lost about three-fourths of my income. So, our community asked, What do we do? We came to the idea of doing the Englewood Review of Books. Our community discernment started with the folks who worked closely with ECDC. It started there, but once we refined it and realized that this was possible, we took it to the church’s ministry council. Part of the process was asking questions and pushing back.

We knew we wouldn’t make a lot of money doing book reviews, but it was in line with the publishing and book selling we were already doing, and so we pooled our email address list and had about one hundred people we sent a review to every Friday. People loved it! We launched a website six months later. Today we have about four thousand subscribers. I honestly don’t remember who suggested the idea of publishing book reviews. But once the idea was put out there, it made sense. I don’t think I would have ever come to it if Englewood wasn’t the sort of church community that pointed me in that direction and had the business structure to help.

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03.  Calling a Clearness Committee

About the time that David and I were ready to give up on our dream, we asked our community, a small group that we’d been a part of for four years, to sit with us and help us listen to what God was saying to us. They agreed, and through the simple format of a Quaker practice called a “Clearness Committee,” we received some important questions to consider and greater clarity related to our dilemma and need for discernment.

What follows is an adapted version of the clearness committee process as described by author and educator Parker Palmer. You might consider using this process, when the time is right, to invite others’ help in discerning whether this dream inside you is from God and for you to tend.

Palmer observes,

 

Many of us face a dilemma when trying to deal with a personal problem, question, or decision. On the one hand, we know that the issue is ours alone to resolve and that we have the inner resources to resolve it, but access to our own resources is often blocked by layers of inner “stuff”—confusion, habitual thinking, fear, despair. On the other hand, we know that friends might help us uncover our inner resources and find our way, but by exposing our problem to others, we run the risk of being invaded and overwhelmed by their assumptions, judgments, and advice—a common and alienating experience. As a result, we often privatize these vital questions in our lives: at the very moment when we need all the help we can get, we find ourselves cut off from both our inner resources and the support of a community.

For people who have experienced this dilemma, I want to describe a method invented by the Quakers, a method that protects individual identity and integrity while drawing on the wisdom of other people. It is called a “Clearness Committee.”

I have adapted the following steps that Palmer suggests. For the complete article, see “The Clearness Committee” at www.couragerenewal.org/parker/writings/clearness-committee (accessed 14 February 2023).

1. Select a group of people you trust to assist you in this discernment process. I would recommend a minimum of three and no more than eight.
2. Before meeting, take time to reflect and write a concise statement of the issue you’re trying to resolve, provide relevant background information, and offer any hunches on what you think is happening. Provide this to each of your Clearness Committee participants.
3. The meeting typically lasts two hours; designate (ahead of time) one person to facilitate the meeting and another person to take notes.
4. The time begins when you break the silence and share briefly about your situation, what’s going on, and how you are feeling about it.
5. The participants then respond, but only with open, honest questions. This is imperative! An open, honest question is one where the asker can’t predict the answer. The questions should help you be curious about some aspect of your situation.
6. You are invited to respond to each question that feels of value to you. You get to decide. Take time and give full explanations, without sharing your whole life story or information that isn’t pertinent.
7. As you respond, the participants will think of additional questions and can ask them in order to drill down deeper into the subject matter. They should be asked in a slow, gentle, unforced way.
8. Fifteen minutes before it’s time to end, if you desire, invite the participants to mirror back to you what they’ve heard you say. Again, they mirror but don’t offer advice.
9. Keep in mind that you may not have your answer(s) by the end of the time. What you have will continue to stew in you for some time, eventually providing the clarity and confidence you need to either lay the dream down or pick it up and move forward.