Discerning the Lord's guidance

Danika Mitcham, Vice President of Supporter Operations for Compassion International, shares practical examples of keeping in step with the Spirit.

As believers, we are given the Holy Spirit to lead and guide us in all areas of life – including the decisions we make in the day-to-day. Ephesians 1:13 reminds us that, in Christ, we “were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit.” Paul wrote in Galatians 5:25, “Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit.” 

At Compassion, one of our Core Values is Discernment, so that we can strive to make Spirit-led decisions as we pursue God’s will to accomplish our mission together. In our Leadership Expectations, leaders are expected to, “in alignment with Compassion’s vision, prayerfully discern the future God is calling your team to.” We can’t do that unless we are regularly seeking to hear from the Lord and adopting specific practices that help us do that in the workplace. 

In my 18 years with Compassion, my favorite teaching moment was a talk on discernment from Jimmy Mellado, our President & CEO. Discernment requires being attuned to the voice of God, and it is important to our work that we take the time and make space to hear the voice of God, through his Holy Spirit, before we act.

One of the ways the my team and I were able to grow this past year was through the spiritual practice of an intentional discernment exercise called Attunement. Throughout the year, our team started each planning meeting with this exercise. This practice helped us to quiet the noise of the day and release hard situations we were dealing with to the Lord, so we could focus on where He was leading us. This has been an amazing experience to walk through in community as a team, and each of us has been impacted in different ways.  

One of my team members, Sang Lee, noted, “The exercise helped me focus on God first with a prayer … and I think the Attunement exercise is going to help us slow down and put God at the center of every part of our decisions.” I have felt this same thing. During my daily work, I now think to myself, “I am not going to respond until I have a chance to walk through the discernment exercise.” It helps me pause and calm my mind before reacting. I am able to become aware of where I am, remove distractions and bring an open mind and heart to the Lord.

In this posture before the Lord, I have been able to deepen my listening. Not just ordinary listening, but listening for what is good and holy, what is broken, what is my contribution, and what is impacting others. This has resulted in a change in how I approach relationships. I engage in this exercise with God before approaching my neighbour. Even though some things I hear in this moment of quiet before the Lord are hard to hear, it ultimately is healthy and helps give me boldness to resolve unspoken conflict within relationships. It truly has been an amazing, empowering experience for me and my team, and it has increased our reliance on and connection to God in the day-to-day.

How can you intentionally bring discernment into everyday life? What practices do you currently have in place individually or on your team that lead to discernment and reflection before action? 

We all have room for growth in seeking God’s will and aligning our response. There are resources available, like the Attunement exercise our team has implemented, to help foster this growth. May we all take steps together as a community to be intentional in discernment, so we can grow to be more in tune with the Spirit and ultimately more like Christ. And, as we live out a commitment to discernment, we can be even more effective in our calling to be a part of God’s Kingdom coming, His will being done, on earth as it is in heaven. 

Author: Danika Mitcham, Vice President of Supporter Operations, U.S. for Compassion International  

The beauty of collaboration

“The non-profit that I run feels strongly called towards collaborations across organizations. We lean into this with our eyes wide open, as we know through experience that with any partnership, there will be natural tensions, obstacles and challenges. Over the past year, we have been exploring a new partnership that seems to be blossoming in some particularly significant ways for both of the organizations involved. Because of this significance, we decided to spend some time together to intentionally seek the Holy Spirit’s guidance for our collaboration.

Each of our organizations brought three executives and board members together for a discernment session with Attune. Coming into the session, each person had prepared themselves to really seek God with an open heart and mind. Together, we named the strengths and possibilities that attracted us to this collaboration, and also named the potential areas of brokenness and risk that could get in the way of our joint work. Though many of us were meeting each other for the first time, it was amazing to hear the transparency, vulnerability and alignment that surfaced as we listened for God’s voice together. By the end of the session, there was a unanimous sense of what the Holy Spirit was showing us. We walked away with three guiding pillars, which have become not only the sub-themes for the initial project that we’re working on, but also for our partnership more broadly. 

It’s now been several weeks since that session, and as we’ve gotten into the nuts and bolts of this joint project, several challenges have already presented themselves. While it’s no surprise that we’ve run into challenges, it has been surprising to see how – at least so far - we’ve been able to navigate through each tension point with relative ease. Some of this is because we have these core pillars to return to. There hasn’t been a meeting where we haven’t pulled out some element of these guideposts to shed light on the issues at hand.

Probably the bigger factor, however, is the deep sense of unity and calling to this collaboration that both of our organizations now hold. It just feels like a true partnership – in a way that I don’t know I’ve ever experienced before. It almost doesn’t feel like we’re working for two different organizations. 

It feels like one family. It feels like the Body of Christ.”

"…the attunement process helped to catalyze a rich season of clarifying who we are and where we are."

"My husband and I are the co-pastors of a church, and Covid has ushered in a new chapter for our ministry. It had been five years from the moment we started as a church to the last Sunday we were allowed to worship in person. As we went online, we watched people slowly leave our church as we kept trying different things to make it work. It became clear that our ministry could not proceed as it once had. We could sense in our spirit that a new vision was emerging, but we couldn’t see where we were going. We weren’t even sure where we were, or where our people were.

Based on the recommendation of an advisor, we decided to bring Attune in to help our core leadership team gain more clarity on the path ahead. The biggest theme that came forward was this idea of “withness.” It came up during the very first meeting, stuck with us throughout the discernment process and we continue to step into it more fully even now – several months later.

We’ve now defined withness in two dimensions: 1) People coming alongside you, where people are in your stuff with you; and 2) We’re leading together – with a flattened sense of leadership. Along the first dimension, we’ve realized just how central this theme of withness is to our church culture, and our desire is to help all of our people understand and intentionally lean into this. Along the second dimension, my husband and I have realized that, while we had intentionally equipped and empowered our first set of leaders – we had stopped there. As a result, we had found ourselves doing more of the work, and then feeling a little grumbly about it. It was working against this sense of withness.With these themes of withness now surfaced, we’ve been able to pursue both dimensions more intentionally. For example, in a couple of months, we’ll be kicking off a series of dinners to create space for all of us to better understand this idea of withness – by reflecting on what we are doing well in coming alongside each other, and where we have missed the mark. To add to this, the effort will be led by one of a couple of new powerhouse leaders we are intentionally pouring into, who were involved only at the margins before.

And even beyond this theme of withness, the attunement process helped to catalyze a rich season of clarifying who we are and where we are. We can now much more clearly communicate this to people and empower others to join in with the work of our church. Because of this, we are now planning to officially relaunch the church in just a couple of months. We’re also redefining, clarifying and igniting our discipleship process. And we’re building a new website. And we’ve developed some intentional ways to grow a more missional outpost identity. There are still so many challenges we’re facing, and so much work to do, but we know God has already gone before us. We know he is calling us and others further into this work. We know he is showing us what withness looks like first hand, as he is with us in our stuff, and in our leadership."

"And in the tension of it, there has been such beauty and transformation"

"A couple of good friends and I decided to go into business together about a year ago. Although things have gone very well, there have definitely been growing pains for each of us. In the awkward tensions of expanding from friends to colleagues, we’ve felt a growing need to process through some of the more difficult personal and interpersonal issues that have come up. Earlier this year, despite some resistance to setting aside the time during a very busy season, we decided to go through an Attune Module, to help us do this deeper processing.

At first, it felt a little uncomfortable to bring God and spirituality into our workflow. The module also stretched us to share in more open ways - to kind of pull back the curtain and let others see what’s going on inside of your head and heart. It sometimes felt pretty raw and vulnerable. And as someone who tries to be composed and thoughtful in my approach to others, the idea of opening up about my emotions was downright scary.

But it also felt safe. Having Erin and Tracy there as a gracious and guiding presence was deeply, deeply important. And the way the lens itself is set up helps to create a safe and intentional space for sharing. When someone is truly listening to you, caring for you and asking really thoughtful questions – it’s hard to keep on avoiding the hard places. The lens also gave us a way to approach each other and the hard conversations we need to have in a way that doesn’t feel like interrogation, that doesn’t feel inappropriate. We now have a framework to process the hard emotions.

And in the tension of it, there has been such beauty and transformation. It’s given us genuine tools to know how to ask good questions, and to position ourselves in a place of listening and not offering advice or guidance. It reminds us that we’re held by something larger than ourselves. We have our team supporting us, and we have Attune supporting us, and then we have God there encompassing the whole thing.

This experience has given us more insight into what’s happening internally and below the surface within ourselves and each other, allowing us to naturally address issues at a deeper level. It’s helping us develop a more trusting and honest team dynamic. Even the starting point of certain conversations are so much deeper than before. We certainly haven’t “arrived” yet, and I don’t know if we ever will – but it feels healthy – I keep coming back to that word. It just feels healthy."

“My church is in the process of starting up its third social enterprise."

We see these ventures as the work of stewardship, formation and discipleship. As a former banker and serial entrepreneur, I felt both excited - and overwhelmed– as the church looked to me to take the reins on this new business.

My previous companies were started with no more than a couple of others. Here, we had a whole team of people involved – all of whom have different areas of buy-in and knowledge, and I had no clue about any of it. Could I really lead these people? Would they listen to me? To add to it, this is a brand new industry for me. I’m in uncharted waters and there’s so much to figure out.  What are the processes involved? How do we make money at this? Where do we even start?

We brought in Attune to take a core group of five of us through a few workshops, to discern more of God’s guidance as we got started with this new adventure. They led us through a few exercises that revealed more of everybody’s thoughts and ideas, allowing us to really get to know each other’s hearts and minds. It became clear that this is a group who wants to glorify God – and who believes you can do this while also making a profit, while treating people well and doing good for creation.  Back in my corporate – “It’s all about the bottom line” days - I used to say to myself: “This is a machine, and I can’t be mad at a machine for doing what it’s designed to do.” 

What became clear to me through these workshops is that this new enterprise is not a machine. This is really “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

The workshops helped us to root our new venture firmly within this overall revelation. We were also able to discern and align around who we want to be, who we want to serve, and what our mission is. It’s clarified these things and helped us to keep them front of mind. Just the other day, I was reading something and I was able to quickly say “This won’t work because it doesn’t fit inside of our mission, our mantra and our value proposition. How do we tweak this?” 

I still feel a little overwhelmed sometimes, but I now feel more prepared and confident with what God has equipped me with. We have a stronger sense of unity among our team. And we’ve affirmed that this is not a space where we need to turn off our connection to the Holy Spirit. He will give us the wisdom we need when we don’t know the answers.”

"This new, exciting season for our business continues to feel like we’ve gotten on a roller coaster that we can’t get off of."

Heading into the end of the year, we were running at a pretty fast pace. To help us stay on the tracks, we set aside some much needed time to pause, reorient and fix everything that was not working. There was so much to do - so much to figure out. It was time to reset and rebuild.

We brought in Attune to facilitate some times of reflection and discernment to help us with this. These sessions helped us tease out so many different ideas around the various aspects of the business and the ways we work. A lot of what surfaced related to “getting off the roller coaster,” with a central theme taking shape from our time together: 

"Let it be easy, let it be fuzzy."

As a team, we’ve agreed to lean into this beautiful invitation from God. But truth be told, we’re actually more comfortable and familiar with the roller coaster – where we attempt to take the reins in every aspect of our work, striving towards a greater sense of clarity and control. Getting off this roller coaster is a real struggle that is hitting a nerve within each of us – permeating throughout all of our lives.

For me, it’s a constant push and pull. In all the various moments which confront me with something I don’t know how to do, it typically first feels like panic and a sense of “I have to figure this out. I have to create a grand masterplan so I know what I’m doing.” But then I take a moment, and there’s this gentle reorientation. It’s a call to trust more in what God has for me versus my own ability to figure this out. 

"Ok, hang on – let it be easy - maybe it’s ok not to know.”

The panic subsides.  What takes its place is not quite full relief, but it is peace of mind. I take on a new perspective that says “This doesn’t make a ton of sense to me, but I know that doing less and trusting more is the right way forward.” I don’t gain clarity, per se, but I do gain a sense of internal alignment. The other way can feel fragmented. This way brings wholeness. It feels healthier – like a breath of fresh air. 

“It feels like freedom. It feels like shalom."