Do You Lead with Intuitive Knowing?

#discernment #intuitive #limbicsystem #prefrontalcortex #transcendent #churchleadership #seekinggodswill #godscalling

For over 30 years I’ve taught pastors and churches how to put prayer and discernment at the center of church leadership. Discernment’s been my calling, but teaching it has been my passion. When I started emphasizing church discernment in the 1990s, very few church pastors or churches even whispered the term. Now, many embrace the idea, but is what we’re doing really discernment?

Denominations today regularly talk about discernment, yet they still make decisions largely the same way they did before adopting the language of discernment. Discernment involves more than just adopting the language. It requires something I call intuitive knowing.

Intuitive Knowing is the convergence of transcendence, cognition, and emotion. It's the sense that a decision is right because our thoughts and emotions align with something beyond us in a way that leads to a sense that what we’re doing is “right” for us and everyone around us. Most pastors knew intuitively that their decision to go to seminary or ministry was right. There were many reasons to say no, but they said yes because intuitively they knew that it was the right thing to do. So we’re familiar with Intuitive Knowing, but we often don’t spread it into comprehensive church leadership and life.

Intuitive knowing is foundational to discernment. Recognizing how requires understanding how our brains work. The brain is incredibly complex, yet its complexity can be simplified into three levels of consciousness:

1.     Animal Consciousness: This is our limbic system, our emotional center, which responds impulsively to our surroundings. It continually scans for what might be dangerous, boring, energy draining, tasty, satisfying, pleasing, and more. It’s the part of us that social media, video games, television shows, advertisements, and addictive substances and activities target. It’s both the center of pleasure and the source of many of our struggles. If we only follow our limbic system’s impulses, we become plagued with all sorts of life problems that come with living a mostly reactive life.

2.     Human Consciousness: This is our prefrontal cortex, our rational center, where cognitive thinking occurs. We prize this part of our brains, always wanting to be rational thinkers who reason everything out, but it’s also the part of the brain that requires the most energy to maintain. It’s impossible to live only in our rationality because our brains aren’t built to. The rational can guide the animal, but the animal is more pervasive. It often tricks the rational brain by fooling it into mistaking an impulse for a conscious, rational thought. That’s why we never win a Facebook argument. We’re fighting with rational words arguments rooted in reactivity limbic.

3.     Transcendent Consciousness: This is an awareness and receptivity to guidance from something beyond us. It speaks through our thinking and our emotions, which is why we sometimes struggle to distinguish, “Is this God or just me speaking?” The answer can be yes to both, since the transcendent guides through thoughts and emotions when we’re awake, aware, and available to it.

So, what is Intuitive Knowing? It’s the foundation of discernment. True discernment happens when all three levels of consciousness become aligned—the transcendent guides the rational, and the rational guides the emotional, yet all three align harmoniously because they seek what’s most deeply right. Spiritual practices can nurture this integration, but only when that’s their focus. It’s easy to functionalize practices so that they themselves become the goal, not the transcendence they nurture. For example, journaling is only helpful if it opens us to God’s guidance. If we’re journaling because we’re told that’s what spiritual people do, then it becomes functional.

Unfortunately, functionality and emotionality stalk discernment. Functionality is following rules, order, obligations, traditional structures, and anything that emphasizes putting decision making under human control. Most church decision-making structures are built on functionality, which sometimes can be hijacked by emotionality. Emotionality influences functional processes as leaders who are change-afraid and risk-anxious use these processes to make protective decisions and avoid real discernment. A great example is voting with “All in favor say yes” and calling it discernment. In my leadership I’ve always invited people to pray and seek God’s will first, and then ask, “All who sense this may be God’s will say yes.” That’s the difference between a functional practice and one that leads to collective intuitive knowing.

I’ve written about how to discern individually and in churches in my book, Becoming a Blessed Church. To summarize it, churches that truly discern cultivate intuitive knowing within and among church leaders. They create structures that push people toward intuitive knowing, not just by designing meetings to encourage discernment, but by nurturing intuitive knowing throughout the church.  

Ultimately, we’re talking about how we create churches that thrive because they’re awake, aware, and attentive to how God speaks to us and leads us through our emotions, thoughts, and transcendence.

I encourage you to reflect on all this and consider how you might guide yourself and your church leaders to a greater sense of knowing intuitively what God’s call is.

Blessings to you,

The Rev. Dr. Graham Standish, PhD, MDiv, MA, MSW