Accurate and ethical discernment work is oftentimes as difficult as good investigative journalism. In our cut and paste soundbite news culture this fact has been lost. True Discernment is not as easy as copying a juicy out of context quote or a soundbite and then pasting it onto your blog so that you can then editorialize about the quote in order to anathematize a person and then throw them under the Christian bus.
Real discernment work is VERY labor intensive. In order to do it properly, you must get to know and check sources. It requires you to contextualize questionable material, and put out of context quotes back into their proper context. It requires a lot of reading as well as spending many hours on the phone and/or writing email correspondence. Without these basic disciplines, you wouldn’t be able to discern the differences between Brian McLaren and Albert Mohler.
I say this because during a recent phone conversation/argument I had with one "discernment blogger" I was strongly warned by this person that Dr. Albert Mohler couldn't be trusted and that he was theologically compromised because he had recently delivered a lecture at a conference where Rick Warren had also spoken.
Anyone with even basic reasoning skills would know that you cannot accurately assess Dr. Albert Mohler’s theology by who shares the dais with him at a conference. Instead, accurately assessing Mohler’s theology requires a person to actually do some work by reading and examining the actual content of his theological writings and lectures. But simply calling Dr. Mohler's character and theology into question via Guilt by Association is flat out lazy and wrong headed.
Furthermore, anybody who claims to be a "discernment minister" who is so obtuse that they'd write off Dr. Albert Mohler as "theologically compromised" simply because he spoke at the same conference as Rick Warren may want to consider another line of work because it is highly doubtful that their spiritual gifting is discernment.
