Decisions, Decisions...

I've been thinking about discernment and decision making lately, as an individual and as a group process. Sometimes such reflection is local and sometimes it is global. Right now, I'm still at the global stage. In my reading today, I came across this comment from Luke Timothy Johnson in his book, Scripture & Discernment: Decision Making in the Church,

Groups have a fragile hold on their existence. They depend on the commitment of their members to the way things are done, and the reasons for so doing them (14)

Here, "group" means church.

I am struck by this assessment of group integrity. It suggests that we spin on 2 poles, both necessary for group cohesion. I would have to think that the latter of Johnson's poles is the start of group existence but the former is the more tenacious of the two. I wonder what happens when we forget how things are done? What happens when we change how things are done? Do we know the reasons we do the things we do? What does it mean to keep doing these things if we have forgotten why we do them?

A number of assessments of today's church suggest that we (the church universal, or at least the western version) have forgotten the reasons for doing what we do. But we keep doing them the way they always have been done. If they are right, then we hang on to doing things the way we have always done them because we have lost one of the poles that balances group integrity. That leaves us teetering on a dangerous precipice.

So how do we step away from the precipice? Or better yet, how do we discover again the poles upon which we can balance our life together?