Lynn McChlery (MLitt, 2013) has recently published How Do You Know It’s God: Discerning a Vocation to Ministry in Churches (London: SCM, 2021).
Lynn’s book has its genesis in her dissertation that was part of her MLitt Bible and the Contemporary World. Lynn subsequently developed this into her PhD dissertation at Durham University in England. She has since returned to parish ministry in the Church of Scotland.
Her publisher, SCM describe this as ‘a vital new contribution to the scholarship for all practical theologians researching ecclesiology, vocation, group dynamics in churches, and communal decision-making processes of any kind’.
In the words of her publisher:
Much of the conversation and concern of churches and of Christian individuals is centred around Christian discernment or knowing God’s leading in decision-making. The language we use around these moments is fluid, and often feels inadequate – ask someone how they ‘know’ what God might be saying in a given situation and they may well reach for the phrase ‘I just know’. In “How do you know it’s God?”, Lynn McChlery draws on ethnographic research amongst those in different kinds of ‘discernment’ processes, along with theological, spiritual and psychological insights to try and understand this phenomenon of ‘insight’ – or ‘just knowing’.
We congratulate Lynn on this major achievement.