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The concept of represents a confluence of ideas on spirituality, discernment and leadership. The very idea of participating in the implies a spiritual journey and underlying spirituality, and discernment is widely described as the “first step in mission.” The missional church recognises the importance of leadership to envision, shape, and facilitate missional transformation. This chapter acknowledges the urgency and importance of discourses on spirituality and discernment, because of the context of the church finding itself in a complex world. The church a complex system and finds itself in a dynamic reality where the dynamism also entails complexity—to the extent that Friedman (Thank you for being late: An optimist’s guide to thriving in the age of accelerations. Allen Lane, London, 2016) typifies our age as the “age of accelerations.” The research will introduce the idea of missional leadership and its relevance in the light of the renewed attention to concepts of missional church in South Africa, in many other contexts, and in ecumenical organisations. Defining missional leadership as , the chapter will attend to an appropriate understanding of spirituality. This will be against the background of a shift of spiritual formation from knowing and believing, to hungering and thirsting. In the final section, discernment will be described as entering into a trialogue: the discerning interaction between church, culture, and biblical narrative—to seek, discover, understand, and share in what the Holy Spirit is involved in the close-to-the-ground particulars of the church’s engagement in, with, against, and for the world.

While recognizing the increased attention to spirituality in the workplace as being a good development overall, this chapter focuses on some problematic aspects of this new emphasis. In particular, three problems are identified: (1) the danger of instrumentalization and narcissistic misdirection; (2) the adoption of pragmatism in solving conflicts between conflicting spiritualities in the workplace, and (3) the dominance of radical social constructivist approaches, which don’t take into consideration the metaphysical claims inherent in many (especially religious) forms of spirituality. Together, these problems amount to a new “one-dimensionality,” referring to the famous description of modern society by Herbert Marcuse. In order to address these problems, I make recourse to the Protestant concept of the different orders of life, particularly as developed by the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In this chapter, I focus on three characteristics of his concept and argue that they can help in addressing the problems with the new emphasis on workplace spirituality that I have identified.

In its desire to build a bridge between self-awareness and morally responsible leadership, this chapter seeks to contribute to the theory of authentic leadership. The central thesis of this chapter is that Ignatian spiritual discernment is a valuable resource for making this connection. Ignatian Spirituality is directed at the world, the world beyond the self and the world beyond our primary experiences. It is inherently aimed at the common good and is therefore an interesting source when contemplating moral leadership. We will discuss the Spiritual Exercises of humility, silence, and detachment, the prevalence of emotions and imagination, ethical evaluation, and journaling and mentoring as means for increasing self-awareness. We will do this in dialogue with the new Theory-U. This, too, is an approach where societal meaning is fundamental and seeks to increase awareness and genuine openness to the future by letting go of the self. This makes for an interesting dialogue, leading to a deeper understanding of spiritual discernment.