Pastor Eric Trozzo
How do you show somebody that you are listening to them? This is often known as “active listening.” It is an important skill to build relationships. We often do a great deal of speaking and saying what we want to say, but less attention to hearing others. Active listening helps us to pay attention to others and soak in what they are saying. Beyond that, it helps the other person feel heard. In a world where we are often isolated from one another, feeling heard is essential to feeling connection and having a sense of belonging. Active listening includes verbal acknowledgement, such as asking questions to clarify, making sure to stay on-topic, summarizing what you hear, and not trying to jump in with your thoughts until after fully listening to the other person. Even more important, though, is the non-verbal communication through which we convey our concern. Keeping helpful eye contact, facing the person, nodding appropriately, and moderating facial expressions all help to convey true interest in the other person.
In April, our congregational council had a retreat to look at an overview of St. Matthew’s ministry. One of the key themes that emerged from the conversation included deepening our sense of faith and what it means to live faithfully each and every day. One of the major ways for doing this, meanwhile, is through connecting with the communities around the congregation: what are people’s needs, hopes, and concerns? To do this requires more than too quickly saying “You should come to church.” It first of all requires listening. This is a point that came up repeatedly. To speak before listening is to fail to care for others as fully as we might, and doing so too often cuts off relationships and valuable connections rather than building them up.
The list of ways to be engaged in active listening is for one-on-one conversations. How might we as a congregation translate those practices into actively listening to the community we live in? If we do not do it, it will inevitably lead to a bigger and bigger gap between the world inside the congregation and the world outside it. We will have less and less sense of what we are called to do as we become more and more irrelevant to the world around us. Perhaps you have already noticed signs of this process. Central to our task of proclaiming the gospel to a world longing for good news, then, is to listen actively so that we can hear where the longing for God might be. Can we do this not just with our words, but with non-verbal signs that we are truly interested in what others may have to say? Can we communicate this in the way we carry ourselves, in the way we organize our building space, and in the ways that we view people who are different from us? These are essential elements of listening well, which in turn is essential to taking part in the mission that God has called us to be part of. May we all be entering anew this process of learning to listen actively and compassionately.