When We Gave Our Church a Veto
Elizabeth and I are in a season of fundraising. As part of that process, we have been sharing the story of how we ended up in Dublin back in 2012.
I’m sharing it here because it illustrates a practice that’s become important to us: community discernment.
Our Story
We were in Ireland in 2010 on sabbatical when the idea of moving to Ireland first arose. Because we had three teenagers, we decided as a family that we would wait. Either everyone needed to be on board or have graduated from high school.
In early 2011, things fell into place, and we began making plans.
However, that’s when I believed God was inviting us to enter a process of discernment with a group of people who would be directly affected. I needed to go to our church council and give them the ability to say “no”.
Why?
I’m guessing that this sounds strange to many of you. Why would we need the permission of another group of people to move to Ireland?
I think because many of us have dealt with authoritarian church leaders, we bristle at the idea of others having any say in what we do. I get that.
That is not what this was. This was us voluntarily submitting ourselves to people we trusted and knew cared about us.
So why did we do this?
The first reason is simple. We believed it was something God was asking of us.
I initially didn’t want to do this; I didn’t want to give other people a veto over something that Elizabeth and I felt strongly we were supposed to do. However, we had seen God directing this process from the time it first came up, and it made no sense to stop trusting him here.
But there were other reasons as well.
I was always discouraged when people you thought were friends were in the process of making major life decisions, and other than maybe an “unspoken prayer request”, said nothing until after the decision was made.
Another reason was that we frequently used the phrase “living life together”. To be fair, that phrase had become a bit cliché, but it was something we were trying to live out.
I also realised that if I talked about living life together but excluded those closest to me from being a part of one of the most significant decisions of my life, I was being hypocritical.
My Request
In February, I met with the three other members of our church council at Wegmans. They knew we had been thinking about Ireland when we got back six months earlier, but we hadn’t spoken about it in a while, partly because it seemed like it was off the table for a time — that’s another story.
As I informed them of our current progress, I asked them to pray. But I said, “Don’t pray that God make it clear to us. We think he has done that. I want you to ask God to make it clear to you.”
I asked them to take a month to pray and fast. And told them if they said no, we wouldn’t go.
That was a long month. I didn’t bring it up. They didn’t bring it up.
Until a month later, when they invited us out to dinner.
Breaking the News
I had no idea what they were going to tell us.
At dinner, they told us that each of them left that meeting a month earlier convinced that the answer was “no”.
Our church had come through an arduous building project, a disastrous staff hire, and two exhausting years.
But as they began praying, each sensed the same response from God: “Send them!”
And so, on St. Patrick’s Day 2011, we received the blessing of our church council to move to Ireland.
Final Thoughts
I shared a story a couple of weeks ago, demonstrating that our move from Ithaca to Dublin was not smooth. One of the things that helped keep us going in the midst of that was knowing that a group of friends had discerned this calling with us.
They were right — it had been a challenging last couple of years in Ithaca, and if I had made the decision independently, it would have been easier to look back and question my motives.
“Did I actually hear God?”
But because we had walked through a process of discernment with our friends, we were able to rest in that.
Looking Ahead
This experience shaped how we make decisions in our church in Ireland today—we’ve built community discernment into the way we lead.
In Friday’s post (for paid subscribers), I will dig a bit further into this process and the biblical basis for its use.