Discernment as a Spiritual Practice, Part 3: A Worked Example

I wrote this story for a seminar on Discernment I was leading. First I shared the material that is included in Parts 1 & 2 of this series, so you need to have learned about the Ten Steps described there to properly understand my interpretation of Dorothy's journey. 

Most information in this account is factual, told to me by Dorothy herself, but there are one or two places where I had to guess. 

Miss Dorothy Parkes 1906 - 2007

As a teenager at Whangarei Baptist Church - now Central Baptist - Dorothy came to a personal faith in Jesus Christ and became very enthused about loving and serving God. After matriculation, she worked in a haberdashery and saved the fees for attending the Bible Training Institute based at the Tabernacle in Queen Street, Auckland. The women who attended Reverend Joseph Kemp’s college were conscious of limitations on their serving in ministry in New Zealand, and most saw the future in the mission field, which was a main emphasis of Kemp’s evangelical theology. 100 young people became missionaries under his leadership. 

At the end of two years of study, where Dorothy had done well, she applied to the Baptist Missionary Society to go to India. Although she had the requisite personality and qualifications, she failed the medical test because of asthma she had suffered since childhood. Dorothy was devastated and returned to her home in Whangarei. She served as a Sunday School teacher at Central Baptist; although she never married, she loved children and had an effective ministry teaching them to be followers of Jesus. But her missionary heart told her there were other children in the city who did not know the gospel and whom Jesus had also died to save. This yearning led to her taking up teaching Bible in Schools, which she was able to fit into her working life because she had become the manager of the store where she worked.

In 1928 she read an article in the NZ Baptist; a Girls Life Brigade had been started in Dunedin by former missionaries in Caversham. Miss Parkes was intrigued by this female version of the Boys Brigade, with its holistic emphasis on physical, mental, social and spiritual development of young women. She wrote to Captain Grocott in Dunedin to ask more about the organisation, and explore the possibilities for a company in Whangarei. She also spoke to her pastor and to some church mothers she thought might be willing to enrol their girls. Feedback was cautious but positive, since they all knew of the good work of the Boys Brigade.

A  company was started with Miss Parkes as Captain, and quickly grew to over 50 girls, not just from the church.  Dorothy was to serve for over forty years in the GLB / GB and rose to positions of responsibility regionally and nationally. In 1993, aged 87 she cut the cake to mark 100 years since Girls Brigade was started in Ireland, and the girls in my 1st Dargaville company presented a musical drama of her life. Sadly the script and songs have disappeared years ago, but I have never forgotten this sterling woman. When I interviewed her for the script, she told me that, looking back, she realised God had used her just as effectively with the  girls and women  in Whangarei as he could have in India, and she was right. Dorothy died at the age of 100.

Let’s go through the lily pads of Dorothy’s discernment:

• Framing – frame the issue in a questions – like every young Christian, Dorothy wanted to know “how will I serve God?”
• Grounding – find a guiding principle – Dorothy was convinced that “God speaks, and can guide us into his will”
• Shedding means considering what you might have to give up or lay aside in following God’s will – ego, assumptions, and biases. I’m sure Dorothy thought she was doing this but in retrospect, we see that there would have been many personal and social constraints on her vision for herself. For example, serving as an ordained minister was ruled out for her. 
• Rooting in the tradition means looking for religious and biblical stories and images that relate to the situation. Many Biblical paradigms would have influenced Dorothy. Stories from the Hebrew Bible, parables, miracles, letters and visions from the New Testament would have shaped her dreams, eg I can imagine her resonating with the man from Macedonia, asking Paul to “come over the sea and help”. 
• Listening is about promptings of the Spirit heard in the voices of the church  and the cries of the wider community. Many influences would have been at play, from her own faith journey and that of her family, through sermons and visiting missionaries at church, to her lecturers at BTI and students she met there. Her own city became a mission field.
• Exploring and Improving: BTI had links with many mission organisations, not so much the Baptist one, as their link was with Baptist College, but with independent groups like OMF, SIM, BMMF and Poona Village Mission.  But because she had been a leader of Ropeholders, the Baptist denomination’s missionary movement for children, she stayed in touch with what was happening on the Baptist scene. At some point, she sensed that this was where she should start.
• Weighing sorts and tests the options. Once Dorothy had decided to offer for the BMS in India (Tripura), she was dependent on their assessment of her suitability. Getting that heart-breaking and unexpected rejection  was a major turning point in her faith journey.
• Dorothy then had to go back to Exploring and Improving and this took some years.
• Once she had zoomed in on the Girls Brigade possibility, she again was reliant on the advice and permission of others. This was forthcoming, perhaps because of her sterling track record, and because being a spinster meant she had the time. 
• Closing and Resting – the inspiration and joy this ministry brought to Dorothy and Central Baptist were experiences of Consolation; a sense of peace that assured her she was serving in a place that delighted God’s heart. If she had applied for India today, she may well have been sent, since most asthma is under good medical control. Chesterton says “Gods will is more like a fenced playground than a straight road.”

To Ponder: What does Dorothy's journey point to in your own life?