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DiggBefore Saving the World, Listen Up
Michael Gecan , who trains community organizers, on the importance of listening before acting.
For more than 30 years, I’ve worked directly with more than 500 congregations — predominantly Christian, but some Jewish, and, recently, several Islamic institutions. While I have often been the trainer or teacher in these settings, I have also been learning as I’ve gone along — about how different denominations and faiths deal with similar challenges; about the tenacity and creativity of ministry at the level that matters most, about the distractions faced by those seeking to be both present and effective in the world. These leaders have taught me what happens when women and men of faith try to relate their faith to people and places and complexities in the world as it is.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer said: "The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists in listening to them...those who cannot listen long and patiently will always be talking past others, and finally no longer even notice it...The death of the spiritual life starts here...Brotherly pastoral care is essentially distinguished from preaching by the fact that...there’s the obligation of listening."
Real discipleship cannot occur unless one listens to others. Listening cannot occur unless one forgoes all the substitutes for the individual meeting — group meetings, lectures, phone calls, IM-ing, surveys, focus groups, and email. Sitting down face-to-face, one-to-one, for thirty uninterrupted minutes with others is the center of relational work of all kinds.
Almost every form of service starts with the best of intentions. And many forms of service are desperately needed. I’m not criticizing the entire approach and not questioning the need for services in many forms. I am pointing out that the programmatic nature of many social services has divorced the institution and the individual providing the service from the recipient of the service.
Many modern congregations can provide a wide array of social services — food, clothing, counseling, homeownership classes, parenting classes, tutoring — but can still have little or no relationship with the people being served. The workers, the providers, are not trained to listen to those who eat in the cafeteria every day, or who sit in the health center waiting for attention, or who stand on line for clothes. They are trained to respond to the specific need and then move on to the next client. In many cases, a congregation may see thousands of people through its social service programs, but not see one ofthose people at religious service, and not be concerned about that. In some cases, the AA and NA gatherings in congregations are larger — often much larger — than the Sunday or Saturday congregation.
As in the hierarchical institution, those in need, those at risk, those in the “world outside” are not asked to reciprocate, to participate, much less to own and help shape the programmatic culture. They are merely asked to sit and wait until the service is dispensed. Listening does not occur.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with or even bureaucratic about social service. But many congregations have allowed the programmatic culture of social services to overwhelm or even replace the more relational culture of a dynamic religious institution that seeks to encourage discipleship. What’s dangerous about this alternative to a relational approach is that it looks relational. Often the people providing the service believe that they are relating. But the relating is generally unilateral — provider to client. The result is that there is little or no reciprocity, little or no engagement, little or no discipleship. While we may meet the peoples’ needs, we rarely meet the people.
Faith identity, in my view, has less to do with what you say you are, or what you believe, or whether you consider yourself liberal or conservative, hierarchical or congregational. It quite literally depends on who you know and, even more importantly, on who you are getting to know. And that depends on whether or not you are listening. And that means that the center of ministry is out there on the frontiers of existing institutions.
Discipleship is positive faith. It is a rich reality full of opportunities for listening and relationship. But these opportunities all come fraught with challenges and dangers. None of them is what Bonhoeffer called an invitation to "cheap grace" — the "reduction of Christianity to abstract doctrine, neatly formulated principles, and non-threatening systems."
But neither are they, as some would claim, radical breaks with our best religious traditions. "Tradition," the biblical scholar Jaroslav Pelikan wrote, "is the living faith of the dead...Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition is the way that we who are its heirs must follow if we are to go beyond it — through it, but beyond it — to a universal truth..."
That "way" that Pelikan points to is, I believe, through
a culture of engaging and listening and acting with others.
It means living literally on the edge of the institutions and
traditions that must evolve and progress if they are to avoid
the fate of other dead faiths and other dead cities, if they
and we are to be fully alive.
