How to Walk into a Room

Summary: A books about discernment. 

Anyone who is a regular reader of my book reviews probably knows that I have been on a long-term reading project about discernment. I listened to an interview with Emily Freeman on the Gravity Commons podcast, and then a couple of days later, Audible had a sale on How to Walk Into a Room, and I picked it up.

One of my convictions about discernment (you can read my most recent summary of what I think about discernment here), is that while discernment includes decision-making, I am more interested in formational discernment, how we are formed toward Christ so that we both intuitively follow Christ's lead as well as how we consciously make decisions. I think both parts are important, but How to Walk Into a Room is mostly about the consciously deciding aspect of discernment.

Over the past decade there has been a near constant discussion about the rise of the ‘Nones”, those who no longer identify as part of a specific religious community. Those nones are not necessarily leaving Christian faith, but they are leaving a religious community for one reason or another. One of the findings of the research study that was detailed in The Great Dechurching, is that most people stop going to church when they move. It is less an intentional withdrawal from church than a lack of motivation to find a new church. Another large group of people stopped going to church during Covid and never found their way back. But Freeman is talking about a third group of people, those who are intentionally trying to discern whether to continue in a church or leave because of specific reasons. Those reasons can be different, spiritual harm or abuse, differences in theology or practices, personality conflicts, etc., but there is conscious intention to ask God if they should continue or leave. In many cases, these people are not leaving faith, they are leaving a specific community and intend to go to a new faith community.

Freeman walks through a four-part process of discernment that would apply to a number of different decision making steps. She includes other examples like work/vocation or continuing education, but her main example is her own process of deciding to leave her congregation.

The four parts are the acronym PRAY: Point & call; Remember your path; Acknowledge presence; and Yield to arrows. Point and call is easily remembered because it is probably the most tangible. Started by Japanese rail workers, point and call is a safety practices of naming out loud the simple steps of a process so that both the person naming and those around them know and can see the steps of the process. This is one of the main benefits of spiritual direction, specifically naming areas where you see God at work or where you have questions so that you can have a second person walk with you in seeking God.

Remember your path is somewhat like a calling/vocation/rule of life. I have been in a group with Jonathan Walton who has completed a book on building a rule of life (it will be published 2025) and he is leading us through the content of the book in a shortened form. While Freeman doesn't exactly mean a rule of life in her “remember your path” there is a significant overlap because the remember your path is partially about calling/vocation and partially about the guardrails we have.

Acknowledge presence is about acknowledging the presence of God in the process. This is part of the Prayer of Examen and is what is meant when there is a call to worship or invocation in a worship service. God is always with us, but there is reason to specifically remember God's presence.

The fourth part is what we most commonly think of as discernment, identifying the arrows (red, green, yellow) that we see around us with the help of the Holy Spirit. Where does God seem to be leading? Is that an open door? The value of a book like this is in the illustrations and the illumination of wisdom about how we can get the process of discernment wrong. Not every seemingly closed door is closed. Not every seemingly open door is open. Our history, emotional and relational make up, our personality and intellect all matter to this process. Having a community around us can help us to discern whether we are seeing rightly. But especially when the question is about whether we should be leaving the community of faith we are in can be difficult because we do not always trust the advice and wisdom of people who might be making a different decision.

I read this alongside Jenai Auman's Othered: Finding Belonging with the God Who Pursues the Hurt, Harmed, and Marginalized. Othered is particularly about ways that the church can traumatize or further injure those who are traumatized. How to Walk Into a Room has good discussion about the role of trauma on discernment and that is helpful, but there are many ways that discernment is impacted beyond trauma. Our culture, and theology, our experience, and personality all impact our discernment in various ways.

As I skimmed through reviews on Goodreads before writing this, I found two main complaints that were common among the negative reviews. The first was complaining that this was “not biblical' or that it was simply a self-help book. I think much of this type of complaint is from a stream of Christianity that distrusts that individuals are led by God. At the end of the book Freeman talks about how she and her husband have found a place in a local Friends (Quaker) congregation. The original heresy that Quakers were charge with was believing that the Holy Spirit directly guided them. But it wasn't only Quakers that have had this charge. Ignatius, the founder of the Catholic Jesuit order, also in his Rules of Discernment, assumes specific individual direction by the Holy Spirit in his Spiritual Exercises. How To Walk Into a Room was not specifically making the case for individual and corporate direction by the Holy Spirit, it mostly assumes that the reader already believes this. But much of the negative reviews specifically name this as why they rated the book poorly.

Most of the rest of the review that are negative are about the specific reason why Freeman and her family eventually decide to leave their church. The reason is somewhat obscured because Freeman is careful not to directly share the story of her child. But something about that child's sexuality causes Freeman and her husband to reevaluate their understanding of the theology of sexuality. It isn't only her child, but also other relationships. But the most proximate cause for leaving the church is her changing ideas that come about because of her child.

There are obviously many Christians who believe strongly one way or another about LGBTQ+ issues. But several reviews I read about How to Walk Into a Room specifically condemned Freeman for changing her mind because of experience or proximity. And I do think this is an area where there is a lot of misunderstanding. Experience and proximity is one way that God can use us to change our mind. The apostle Thomas changes his mind about the possibility of Christ's resurrection because he sees and touches Jesus. Peter changes his mind about whether Gentiles should be part of the church because of his experience of a vision of God. Paul changes his mind about whether Jesus was the messiah because of his experience of being blinded and healed. Post-biblical era, there are many other similar examples. Many abolitionists became abolitionists after experience with slavery. John Wesley and Richard Allen both resisted the ordination or licensing of women to preach until they directly experienced women who they identified as called by God. And many changed their mind about the sin of usury because of their experience with the rise of capitalism. That doesn't mean we always accept something as a result of experience. How to Walk Into a Room explores the role of experience on discernment. But experience and proximity are influences on our understanding of discernment.

The broader “room” metaphor I thought was less helpful than the PRAY acronym. But there is truth to the metaphor that we are called into and out of spaces and that God is with us regardless.

Part of the difficulty of discernment is that we will not come to a single universal conclusion that applies to all people at all times. To think we will is to misunderstand what discernment is. And that is really the problem with the way that many people understand Christianity. It is not that we can do anything and ignore the bible and the creeds, but that everything about Christianity is in part an interpretive process of discernment. All interpretation of scripture is an interpretation. All application of scripture is an exercise in discernment based on that interpretation. All of the discernment and interpretation is fallibly guided by our understanding of the direction of the holy spirit as part of the universal body of Christ. If you have not picked up How to Walk Into a Room and do not believe in the inclusion of LGBTQ+ people into the body of Christ, I want you to know that the subject is here. But I also would encourage you to still be willing to listen to the process that Freeman walks through here because that process is not just her conclusion, it is a process that can have more than one conclusion.

This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/how-to-walk-into-a-room/