In the Company of Travellers – Season 2, Episode 5 Transcript

Hannes Wiesmann: Welcome again to In the Company of Travelers, a podcast from the Wycliffe Global Alliance. I am Hannes Wiesmann and with me as always is Jo Johnson.

Jo Johnson: Hi Hannes. Hi everyone.

Hannes Wiesmann: In this podcast we talk with ministry leaders from around the world on the theme of organizational Christlikeness. As we continue on this season’s topic of discernment, Jo, who is our guest today?

Jo Johnson: For this episode, we enjoyed a conversation with Susanna Muntz. Susanna lives in Toronto, Canada, and is the board chair for the Wycliffe Global Alliance. She’s a leadership coach and formerly served with Wycliffe Canada as their director for church engagement.

Hannes Wiesmann: Yes. And Susanna had much wisdom to share about discernment. In some ways, we don’t normally think about that topic. So, here is our conversation with Susanna Muntz. Welcome, Susanna.

Susanna Muntz: Thank you for having me. It’s lovely to be here.

Jo Johnson: Susanna, can you kick us off with a story about a time that you were involved in discerning something and what you learned from it?

Susanna Muntz: Late in my 20s, I was working for a church and I was responsible for the young adults ministry and the global mission ministry of the church. And right in that season, a friend of mine had approached me about potentially moving to a new city and planting a high school movement. And so in this case, it wasn’t actually the, you know, a discernment between what’s good and what’s bad. It was a discernment between what’s good and what’s good. I was doing good work at the church. God was being very faithful. Things were—the ministry was fruitful. And I was also pretty compelled by what people were sharing about what was happening for high schoolers in Toronto. So Toronto is known to be a very multiethnic context. Toronto high schools were sort of notorious for the fact that they would not allow any religious groups within the high schools. And yet we know that teenage years can be really formative around discipleship and knowledge of God. And so I was really faced with quite a profound need for discernment. How would I and how would we read the moment?

So, a couple of things happened. I want to say first of all that I think of discernment like a habit. Ruth Haley Barton calls it a way of seeing, a daily habit that allows you to then make wider and bigger decisions as you need it. And so, I had been in a habit of meeting with a group of people where we were constantly asking ourselves, “What is God up to? What is he inviting us to? How would we respond faithfully?” And this was both in the daily things—how do we treat our kids, you know, how do we address something that’s happening at work—but also big things like where might I move my life?

And so the first piece of insight that I gained was that even though the decision was personal, the process was communal. I was the person that needed to move my life, but there was a whole group of people around me that I just said, I’m not going to be able to see everything. I won’t be able to know and see and discern all the ins and outs. I need help. And so, we decided that we would take six weeks to start praying and listening together. I was speaking with leaders at the church, being transparent with them—hey, I’ve had this invitation, you know, what do you see and hear? And I was also learning more about what was happening in Toronto.

So, the process was communal and then secondly the process—Jay Matenga speaks a lot about this—it paid attention to the context, what was happening in both of these places and reading it through the lens of God’s activity and opportunity to be faithful. So we met I think every two weeks during that six week period. So it was communal, we were paying attention to the context, and then we were asking just really important questions of each other and of me which is: What do you want? Where do you feel your heart moved? What would a move require? I am still a single person and so moving my life away from a community would incur a significant cost. And actually one of the things we talked about was if I move, would this group of people still commit to navigating the transition with me? Would they be a part of it?

And so we just were in a lot of discussion. We would often end our time in prayer and creating silence in our conversation so we could listen to God and then people would share. I have friends who at the time they hear from God through dreams. Other friends it would be a scripture that would come to mind. Other friends would just come up with a really powerful, important question. So there wasn’t one way that we heard from God together but multiple ways. And as we were in that journey of those six weeks I was sort of compiling and listening and building a sense of attunement to God, listening to God. But I remember clearly it was pretty close to the end of that six weeks and I was just in my home by myself thinking about this decision in front of me and all of a sudden I was really quite overwhelmed with grief, sadness, and I started to ask God, what am I supposed to know about this sadness? Is sadness a bad thing? How am I supposed to understand this? And my profound sense in the moment was that God was using a sense of sadness and grief to indicate that I was about to leave. I was sensing, oh, I think I’m meant to leave. I’m meant to leave this sense of home, this sense of family, and go to a new place and build a new sense of family, you know, help other people hear this good news of Jesus.

And so in that moment, it was a profound learning that our, first of all, our emotions are not liabilities to understanding God’s will, but that asking God, “Where are you in this?” was important because some people could say, “Oh, well, if you’re sad, then don’t go,” you know, or if you’re angry, don’t do it. Or, you know, if there is a sense of loss, then that must mean a no. But in this case, because I was able to say, “God, how should I interpret it?” it was really clear. God was saying, “I’m helping you get ready to leave.” Grief and loss are good indicators. They’re important. You will need to move through them. And they’re an indicator that my presence is with you here in grief and loss. And then you can trust that my presence will be with you when you move. And you’ll move into disorientation and you’ll encounter grief and loss there.

That concept has really stuck with me. Ignatius would call that consolation. God, are you with me? Am I aware of God’s presence? And I then was able to share that with my friends. You know, I had this really powerful moment. It came first as a feeling and overwhelming sense of grief and loss, but God is with me. And that helps me trust that God will be with me as I take this next faithful step. So, the truth is that through the rest of my life, it has not been the exact same. It’s not always been that grief or loss were the way that I knew that God was with me. Sometimes it’s actually a deep sense of peace. Sometimes it’s a deep sense of joy and energy that I sense that God is with me. But in that moment, it was grief and that was a bit surprising.

Jo Johnson: Yeah, for sure. What an amazing story. Thank you so much for sharing that. I’d like to pull out two strands that I noticed in there. The first is the fact that although it was your personal journey, you gathered people around you.

Susanna Muntz: To do that in community.

Jo Johnson: I guess I’m not sure that to many people it would occur to them to do that. So, what led you to do that and how did you pick those people that you asked to walk that journey with you?

Susanna Muntz: You know, maybe one of the gifts of being a single person is that I’m always aware that it’s me and I always need help. I don’t have the sort of hard-coded community around me. That said, I say to married friends, peoples in families and in churches as well, discernment is—though it’s personal—think of it as a team sport. All of the scriptures that you hear when Paul says, “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind so that you can test and approve God’s will.” That’s an all y’all. That’s not a you, Susanna. It’s you all together. So I actually think people get overburdened by discernment when we make it private. I have to come up with the right answer. I, Susanna, have to figure out God’s mind and then do it. There’s a grace. There’s a relief. No, it’s also more complex, but there’s a grace and a gift when other people are listening.

So we had highly valued that already. Communal approaches, communal decision-making. And then the way that I chose who to bring into that group was I was looking essentially for diversity. So I was looking for a diversity of gender and age. So men and women around me, people who were much further in their life and in their journey with God than I was. So people older than myself. Um, but also people who I thought really knew me and would do two things: they would seek my good and they would absolutely tell me the truth. I wasn’t really looking for people that were just looking for an easy answer or a typical answer, but that they would challenge me and that they themselves had a discernment habit. Were they people who in their lives—were they looking for God’s activity and had they demonstrated that they had done faithful things? So, it’s not even that all of them had made a big move in their life. It’s not that they had all been at the same circumstance. For me, that’s less important. The circumstance is not as important as: Do you have a habit of looking for God and following him? So, that’s how I chose. It was like six people. Too many voices can kind of make it too complicated or flood the arena, but that’s what we did.

Jo Johnson: That idea of discernment being a daily habit was the other string that I wanted to pull out. Can you talk about that a bit more—what that looks like practically and how you maybe how you came to practice it as a daily habit as well because I must admit that’s a new idea for me.

Susanna Muntz: It’s Ruth Haley Barton who kind of puts that language around it. She talks about it as a daily habit of a way of seeing and let me just say I think it’s quite normal and I think in my teen and early 20s many years I would look at other people and think like, “Oh, discernment is really about making the right decision, did they do the right thing?” That was the first thing that we think discernment is: decision-making. And I would say they’re not—discernment is not primarily decision-making. It results in decision-making, but it starts with seeing and listening.

And then secondly it’s a bit of a sense that like nobody’s going to wake up one day and decide to climb Mount Everest. Like, it’s just not going to work. You have to have a hiking habit, a walking habit. And so, in this community that we were a part of, we had a sense that there were going to be big decisions for us to make. Where should we buy our home? There’s other big decisions. Who should you marry? What should your vocational calling be? Really substantial decisions. And we tend to kind of come into it, but we’re kind of coming into it cold. We’ve not done it before. And so, our sense as a community was the way that we listen well for God in those big moments is to listen well and deeply for God in the really little moments like the grocery store—like you’re in line with the cashier and you notice that you just had the like “Hi how you doing? I’m fine, I’m fine,” and that it was very rote. And so in that moment at the grocery store I would think, “Huh, this person has probably just gone through 50 people. I wonder if they feel overlooked all the time. I wonder if there’s a way in this moment in the line at the grocery store for God’s presence and joy and grace to come here. So, what could I do to disrupt the cadence of this conversation?” And I would count that as a way of having a discernment habit. What’s happening right here in this moment? What might God be doing? And so, we did that often. We would start to be about our daily life thinking about: What is God doing?

Jo Johnson: You know how when you come home, right, and you’re like sitting at the dinner table together and it can just feel like a report like everyone just sort of says like, “Then I did this and then I did this and then I did this and then I did this.”

Susanna Muntz: And we started to help each other say, you know, yeah, in all of that, where did you most notice God’s presence? Sometimes we would ask of all the things that you talked about there, where did you find yourself most energized and alive? That’s another good way of understanding God’s presence. We might ask: Of all of those things, what moved your heart the most? And so, we were trying to—it’s like look below the surface. It’s the difference between looking at water and reading the current. You can be driving a boat and looking at the water and still run aground. We just did this 2 years ago, I was thinking about this. I grew up on the water. My family, we love boats. It’s how we connect. We love being outside, but we were on a new lake. My uncle had the map which tells us where all the rocks are and everything. And we’re all in the boat and we’re all trained. We’re all literally looking at the water and we’re chatting and we’re, you know, we’re commenting and it’s a beautiful day and all of a sudden you hear like “screech” and like metal against rock and our propeller is getting totally torn up. That’s because we were looking at the water, but we weren’t seeing the current. We weren’t seeing the pattern that the rock would have created such that we could say, “Hey, God, like turn the wheel. There’s a giant rock underneath the water coming up.”

So, my experience with that is it can feel a bit mystical to people or a little bit out of reach. And I would say it comes through practice, looking and then seeing deeply. It comes through practice and through conversation with other people trying it out. I think it also means moving away from giant statements like “God told me.” We shifted our vocabulary to say, “I sense that God might be moving me this way.” Or, “It made me think about this scripture. What do you think about that?” Or, “It made me interpret—I was wondering if this woman in the grocery store was feeling overlooked, and so I tried something out.” Adding some humility to the process of discernment prevents us from living in the binary of right or wrong and it also prevents us from getting unnecessarily isolated. When I say God told me and that’s it, then it might just be like then I have to live it out and nobody else really gets to participate. And so there’s a practice of seeing God’s activity, interpreting it with other people and being humble in the process. I might get it wrong. I might hear wrong. Not because I’m bad or because I’m setting out to be disobedient. That’s rarely the case. But I’m a human and I don’t see everything. I don’t see all the rocks even when I’ve grown up on the lake. Y

ou know, if I was going to help somebody start a discernment habit, I think I would start with the question: Where do you give your best attention? Just in your day, like think about where do you give your best attention? Is it to the feelings of people? Is it to data and spreadsheets? Like just first, where does that go? And then I would say, what have you learned about how you sense God’s presence with you? I don’t mean when are you happy or when are you sad. Happy means God’s with you. Sad means he’s not. I just mean: What have you learned about how you notice when God is with you? And then I would say in the next week, what would it look like to dial up your attentiveness to God’s presence in your surroundings? What would it look like to come into that next meeting and right before the meeting just say, “Hey God, help me be aware of what you are doing here,” and then pick a friend to share that story with. It’ll be awkward. It’ll start awkward. It always does. But if you’re willing to negotiate the awkwardness, the tentativeness at the beginning, it will become really rich. Your friendship will deepen and you will have more joy and confidence in your ability to hear God’s voice and respond faithfully.

Hannes Wiesmann: So I think you mentioned two possible ways how a person could answer that question. One is with people, one is with spreadsheets. Maybe you could help my imagination a little bit. What would be the way how a person can see God or—the spreadsheet person? How would that person potentially use this particular perspective or approach to life?

Susanna Muntz: Yeah, I love a lot of people who love spreadsheets. What I would say is looking at the numbers. Of course, you need to understand like how did we get the numbers and are these numbers reliable? So, that’s the first thing a spreadsheet person is going to do. And that’s good. That is faithful to God because God wants us to be truth-telling. So, yes, look at the numbers. And then I think for the person who’s looking at the spreadsheet, the question becomes: What do you sense those numbers then are—they wouldn’t use this language but what do they mean, what are they telling you to do? Like based on these numbers, do we stop something, do we start something? And then right alongside that, that person is then going to say: If we were to do that, how might that participate in what God is doing? So you could, if you’re a numbers person, also say, “Hey, are there particular people who are either going to get really afraid hearing these numbers or anxious hearing these numbers?” Huh. Then we probably need to consider: How do we tell the truth about these numbers, but we need God’s help to address fear because we can’t be caught in fear and be faithful at the same time. We can’t be trapped in fear and faithful at the same time. So that’s what I would say for numbers people is yeah, be great at the numbers. Help the numbers tell the real story, tell the accurate truth and then start to consider: Do they make you fearful? Do they make you feel powerful and like you don’t need anybody’s help? Hm, interesting.

That probably means not that the numbers are wrong, but there’s an opportunity to say, “God, what am I missing here?” Because the reality is we can’t just rely on numbers to make us feel secure or safe. So, I love numbers. I actually think data is really important to bring to big decisions. I actually did budgeting work one of the weeks that I met with that group. We talked about how much it costs to live in Toronto. It’s way more expensive than living in Waterloo. So, and I’m not great with numbers. So, I had a person who was an accountant. I’m like, great, come on in. Let’s all talk about the numbers. Good. But spreadsheets. There’s going to be other people who are really great at understanding consequences. If we do this, then this might happen. Great. Bring that, too. And just say, “Hey, I’m concerned that if we do this, this might happen. Could we discuss it?” There’s going to be other people who are attuned to emotion in particular—loss, grief, joy—and there’s going to be other people who have an ability to understand developmental growth. Suz, if you make this decision, let’s talk through what it challenges you to become. Not just impact, but how do you grow? And so, all of these perspectives are so helpful to consider: how do they help us grow, how will our needs get met? All of it is worth paying attention to.

Hannes Wiesmann: You also mentioned in this process that you looked at the contexts. How did you approach that? What did that look like?

Susanna Muntz: So, with the church where I was currently working, I invited some people to help me think about the ministries I was currently leading and just asking about their health. How were they doing? What stages of growth and development were they in? What would the impact be if I were to leave? One of the other things that I started to look at—and it doesn’t always go this way—but at that time I could actually see two or three people that I thought could replace me. And I had to notice that like it all felt like it was way too early. I’m like, “Huh, they could do it, but it feels too early.” But I had to understand like that might be my own fear. That might be my own resistance. Like what is that about? And that was part of understanding the context.

I also asked the lead pastor: What would the impact be if I left? It wasn’t the same as “you get to decide,” but it was “help me understand, help me see everything that was happening.” In terms of context in Toronto, I certainly started talking to friends who were there and teachers in particular—tell me more about high schools. And this is what I wish I had done. My wisdom now would tell me I wish I had explored more what it was like for single people to make friends in a new place. Turns out, yes, there’s lots of other single people, but it’s very difficult to make friends at a particular age in a city. It doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t have made the decision. I still would have gone, but it could have helped me discern how to live out the decision. In my experience, the more robust the discernment process, the more resources you have to be faithful when you’re living out the decision. When we make discernment just about the decision, it’s so easy to get six months into the decision and be like, “What? What is happening? I don’t think I can do this anymore. Maybe I made it wrong. Maybe I didn’t do it.” It’s usually that we didn’t do a deep enough dive into cost counting and really understanding: What am I saying yes to even when you can’t see everything? But I felt so much more confident. Not that I wouldn’t feel lonely in Toronto—I did. Did I miss my friends? Yes. Did I ever think why did I move here? Absolutely. Absolutely. Like what am I doing here? Of course, because it got hard and planting ministry among high school students in a secular high school system in Canada is incredibly difficult.

So, of course, there were moments where I thought like, “Oh, this is really hard.” But the discernment process let me call those friends and just say, “Hey, here’s what’s happening.” And they could say, “You know, we heard this. This is what we talked about. How is this going? How can we help you?” So, it didn’t just rely on my memory of God saying something. It was our memory and I was better prepared. I was clear about budget. I was clear, “Oh, this is going to be really difficult.” I was clear about the ways that it would challenge me. And so my capacity to be faithful in the ongoing nature of that decision was increased because it was communal, robust.

Jo Johnson: It strikes me that discernment therefore is more like jelly or Jello than a jigsaw puzzle with fixed pieces that go in a fixed place at a fixed time. Does that make sense?

Susanna Muntz: Yeah, I think you’re right. And I think that’s partly—I mean, we’d have to go down the rabbit trail of how do we understand God’s will, right? Like is God primarily mechanistic and just kind of waiting for me to get it wrong? And I just don’t think scripture gives us a picture of God as mechanistic but God longing for partnership. So first of all God’s will for all of us—and actually all the scriptures start with like—I hope that you grow in your love so that you can be able to test and approve God’s will. Be renewed in your mind so that you can test and approve God’s will. So discernment always starts with renewing and reviving our relationship with God and one another. That’s always where it’s going to begin. What’s our attentiveness to one another like? And you can’t discern well if you don’t feel like God is attentive to you. If you feel like God’s just waiting there with his arms crossed—”Get it right. If there’s an A or a B, which one are you going to do?”—you will move to decisions rooted in fear and performance, and it’s not really going to serve anything.

So, you’re right. Maybe the puzzle metaphor works because, you know, different people can add different pieces and a picture does become clear. In my experience, the whole puzzle is not clear at the time of decision-making. We have to decide before the puzzle is clear. But I really prefer to think of it as a way of seeing and a way of responding. And if it feels like jelly, it’s not because God’s trying to frustrate us or irritate us or be elusive. I think that’s what it can feel like, right? Like, “God, why why are you making it so hard? Or why can’t it be more clear?” But if we look below that, jelly invites us, pushes us into more conversation with God and one another. I had to be far more attuned to grief and even just feelings like, “Why am I suddenly crying on a Friday night? What is happening?” And if it was just an intellectual right or wrong, I wouldn’t have been able to grow in my understanding that God can profoundly move and be present to me in grief and that God wasn’t bringing grief as something negative but grief as a path, or you know, joy as a path.

You know, when I was growing up there was a tendency to think like, “Well, if you hate it, it must be God’s will.” Like the way that you know is that you really don’t want to do it—let’s just be careful now. I want to unpack that, right? What would make us think that the way for us to know it was God’s will is if we hated doing it? I find that deeply troubling now. So, will it be hard? Yes. So, one lens to think of discernment is: Does this challenge me to have more dependence on God? That’s a good litmus test. And especially when you’re deciding between goods, choose the one that causes you to depend on God deeply. But the idea that we would hate it, so it must be God’s will really paints a picture of God as quite antagonistic. And I think we need to remember that the third fruit of the spirit is joy.

One great litmus test for “is this God’s open generous invitation” is that I’m able to identify where God’s joy and my joy—Susanna’s joy—will occur if I make that decision or take that step. If you can’t articulate that, you will not be able to navigate the disorientation. But I think we tend to think a little bit less about joy. We think of faithfulness as like “it’ll be hard, I’ll hate it, but I’ll do it.” But it’s love, joy, and peace. Can I imagine my joy after this decision? Can I imagine God’s joy after this decision? Both of those I think we need to have robust imagination around. Because it’s joy that will be our strength when we’re in the middle of the decision being really, really difficult and really painful, really painful, really hard.

Jo Johnson: I think that’s just a fantastic place to end—that there is joy in discerning what God’s saying. I agree that there is a certain brand of Christianity which says anything God wants to ask me to do, I’m going to hate. But it’s not the father God that I know either. So, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate the wisdom that you’ve shared with us.

Susanna Muntz: Thank you. And I’ll just say as the board continues discerning and especially this discernment about the next executive director, we want to do this together. We want to do this communally as a whole movement, seeking a sense of God’s presence and movement, seeking God’s joy, seeking God’s peace and direction. So, I feel really grateful that we are as a board surrounded by brothers and sisters who have a discerning habit, who have been looking for God, learning to watch for God in their lives. So, we just—we invite that contribution and the insight that people are gaining and I feel encouraged because I know that there’s faithful people that have been doing that for a long time.

Hannes Wiesmann: Our thanks again to Susanna for an insightful, thought-provoking conversation. I almost want to go back and listen to the whole thing again.

Jo Johnson: Yes, certainly a lot to think prayerfully about. I was struck by a couple of things as Susanna described her discernment process. In particular, her curiosity and her courage; together with trusted friends, she explored the situation and she wasn’t afraid of whatever would turn up.

Hannes Wiesmann: Yeah. And just the idea that we can trust God, that his direction is for our good, but also for our joy.

Jo Johnson: We would love to hear from you about this topic as well. How can listeners share their thoughts, Jo? (Note: Speaker names recorded as written in source text).

Jo Johnson: The best way is to email us at info@wycliffe.net. We really hope to hear from you about that question and also with any other comments or questions you have in light of this conversation or even just about the podcast in general. That’s all for now. Travel well, Hannes.

Hannes Wiesmann: Thanks, Jo. And travel well everyone, until we meet again in the next episode.