Martin Luther called the church a “mouth house”: an assembly filled with the Word of God read, preached, and sung. The church also needs to be (Luther would agree) an “ear house”—a gathering of Jesus-followers who value listening at least as highly as speaking.
I’ve often encouraged Jesus-followers to heed Paul’s advice to “speak the truth in love, so that you may grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ” (Ephesians 4:15). There’s an implied and crucial corollary: “Listen to the truth in love. Theologian Paul Tillich said: “The first duty of love is to listen.” I would change duty to privilege “The first privilege of love is to listen.” In day-to-day practice, love calls for time and attention, including unhurried and undistracted listening.
The Shema, central to Jewish and Christian devotion, enjoins this liberating commandment: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:5). The Shema begins, though, with the responsibility of listening: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone” (6:4). Loving God begins with listening to God. So it is with all our relationships: the practice of deep listening is central to love.
Listening is costly; it exacts the price of humility and vulnerability. Receptive listening demands a kind of confession: “I don’t already know everything I need to know about myself, about the person sitting across from me, about the world, and about God.” Listening requires acknowledgment of limits to our experience and wisdom. Hearing the truth in love depends on our letting down our defenses, laying aside our preconceptions, suspending, at least temporarily, our prior conclusions, giving up our prejudices, and opening ourselves to the possibility of our being changed by what we hear.
Two Ways for Congregations to Nurture the Practice of Listening
Provide for silence in worship and in meetings
Silence is countercultural. We’re inundated with pings, rings, alerts, notifications, and 24/7 breaking news. Noise and nausea share a common root (Greek, nautes, “seasickness”). The dizzying distractions of our blaring world threaten our emotional and spiritual well-being.
Moments of sheer silence in worship bear witness to the importance of tuning-in to the inner witness of the Spirit who speaks to us not only through the words of others but from depths within and heights beyond our own and others’ voices. The Spirit’s ways of communicating with us are most often like a whisper. Silence enhances our ability to hear.
In the course of a meeting (not just at its beginning and ending), to pause occasionally for a minute or two of silence gives participants an opportunity to recenter their attention on the purpose of the meeting and, more significantly, on the purposes of God which the meeting serves. These pauses allow people to settle their feelings and to increase the likelihood that what they offer to the meeting will be thoughtful responses more than triggered reactions to what others say and do. These times of stillness provide everyone the reminder to ask: “What is the Spirit saying to the church?”
Have challenging conversations without the pressure of an immediate decision
We’re most likely to listen respectfully to experiences and ideas different from our own when we hear them as perspectives to ponder and possibilities to consider, rather than as proposals to approve or policies to adopt. Classes or small groups, roundtable or town hall discussions, and informal exchanges over a meal are almost always better contexts than board or business meetings for early consideration of potentially conflictual topics.
Moving quickly to votes or official decisions on contested issues is sometimes necessary, but, whenever possible, we should move more deliberately and slowly. Giving people time to think and feel their way through what they’re hearing, to read and study on their own, to ask questions, and to hear from others makes real and lasting change, both personal and congregational, more likely.
Swiss psychiatrist Paul Tournier said, “No one can develop freely in this world and find a full life without feeling understood by at least one person. It is impossible to overemphasize the immense need humans have to be really listened to, to be taken seriously, to be understood.” For both individuals and congregations, the development of freedom and effectiveness, of joy and faithfulness, depends on loving listening and gracious understanding.
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