"I needed community to be able to heal my spiritual wounds" for Monday, 12 July 2017 - Alban Weekly - Duke Divinty School in durham, North Carolina, United States
"I needed community to be able to heal my spiritual wounds" for Monday, 12 July 2017 - Alban Weekly - Duke Divinty School in durham, North Carolina, United States
Carol Howard Merritt grew up in a conservative Christian family. It was also an abusive family, and she has struggled much of her life to heal from the wounds sustained in childhood.
Yet the writer, teacher and speaker has remained committed to the church -- and has even become ordained in the PCUSA.
In the book, Howard Merritt shares her personal experience and offers help to others who love the church but have been wounded by it.
She studied at Austin Presbyterian Seminary and is the author of "Tribal Church: Ministering to the Missing Generation" and "Reframing Hope: Vital Ministry in a New Generation." She co-hosts the podcast God Complex Radio in addition to blogging at The Christian Century. She also has contributed to Faith & Leadership.
Howard Merritt spoke recently to our colleagues at Faith & Leadership about the book and the lessons it holds for church leaders.
Carol Howard Merritt: I needed community to be able to heal my spiritual wounds
The author of “Healing Spiritual Wounds” talks about how the church was a source of both wounding and healing.
Carol Howard Merritt grew up in a conservative Christian family. It was also an abusive family, and she has struggled much of her life to heal from the wounds sustained in childhood.
Yet the writer, teacher and speaker has remained committed to the church -- and has even become ordained in the PCUSA. “Christianity was and is part of the problem, the cause of much suffering, anxiety, and pain in life; but Christianity has also been my cure, my solace, my center,” she writes in her new book, “Healing Spiritual Wounds: Reconnecting with a Loving God After Experiencing a Hurtful Church.” (link is external) In the book, Howard Merritt (link is external) shares her personal experience and offers help to others who love the church but have been wounded by it. She studied at Austin Presbyterian Seminary and is the author of “Tribal Church: Ministering to the Missing Generation” and “Reframing Hope: Vital Ministry in a New Generation.” She co-hosts the podcast God Complex Radio in addition to blogging at The Christian Century. She also has contributed to Faith & Leadership.
Carol Howard Merritt Howard Merritt spoke to Faith & Leadership about the book and the lessons it holds for institutional Christian leaders and others in the church. The following is an edited transcript. Q: Why did you write this book? I began writing this book when I began to see this intersection between how religion wounds us and also how it heals us. And I became very interested in this question because it was so real in my pastorate -- it was so real in my life, so real in the people I was coming in contact with. So I began to think about how does it really -- this wounding -- happen, and what does a healthy organization, or religious health, look like? I began to try to think about steps that people could go through in order to gain some religious health. The book goes through those steps.
It describes religious wounding by thinking about a simple machine. If you think of love of God and love of self and love of neighbor working together, most healthy religions have those three things happening. We learn to love God, we learn to love ourselves, and we learn to love our neighbors. Religious wounding happens when one of those things breaks down. So if we’re not able to love God, if we are thinking about a vengeful God, or a God who’s extremely punitive, then the machine breaks down. Or if we have been taught not to love ourselves because of our gender or because of our sexuality or because of our ethnicity, then the machine breaks down. Or if we’re taught to not love our neighbors, then there’s a problem with the spiritual health, our spiritual health. And we see this happening in different forms, and in different ways, particularly in American religion. I was raised in a very conservative Christian home, and there was abuse in our home. My father was violent. And in our church, we were taught that we needed to submit to that abuse. So clearly, there was a breakdown in that machinery. We were not taught to love ourselves. And so I worked through those steps of learning to love God, love our neighbor and love ourselves. Q: How can your book and its insights help Christian leaders as well as individuals? The way that pastors and church leaders can use this, I think first of all, is if we can begin to understand what’s happening in people’s lives. For me, it was a switch from conservative, a very conservative, fundamentalism to Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), a more life-giving denomination. But many people are going through different sorts of wounding, and so it gives us the ability to understand people in a different way. So what I do in the book is I try to bring people through a process that we learn in seminary, and that is to take apart your faith, to look at all the aspects of your faith, and to put it together in a more life-giving way and a more loving way. I use a lot of feminist theology, womanist theology, liberationist theology to bring people through to a more life-giving faith. I’ve heard from different pastors who have used this in their congregations, and it’s been helpful for them to be able to lead people through this process of healing. I’ve heard it used by Christian counselors who are using it in spiritual direction, who are using it to lead people through a process of healing. But I think it’s also important for us to look at the landscape of America, and religion in America, and realize that this incredible shift is taking place, where even conservative evangelicalism has been such a huge part of our national narrative, and now those things are crumbling. We need to be aware of it and understand how to address it. Q: Your personal experience in what you’ve described has to do with fundamentalist evangelicalism. But do you think it’s limited to that, or do people from other traditions also experience the kind of wounding that you’re talking about? Oh, absolutely! Unfortunately, humans do terrible things to each other, and we often do things to each other in the name of God. We’re wounded in church all the time, and pastors are wounded. And so yes, I think that is my particular story, but it’s a much, much larger story. Q: Do you have recommendations for church leaders in helping prevent that from happening, from a sort of systemic or institutional perspective? Right, that would be the best thing, wouldn’t it? As a Presbyterian, I chose that denomination because it has a good system of checks and balances. But even within that system of checks and balances, we see how breakdowns occur. Our institutions, they sort of cave in on themselves in order to protect themselves. We see it happening all the time. You can see how the whole church or the whole organization begins to protect the organization, and often the way that they protect it is they begin to blame the victim or gaslight the victim, like say that the victim is lying or the victim misunderstood. And many times, we feel like we’re doing the right thing, because we’re protecting this organization that we love, and this organization that stands for God. But believing that person is an extremely important part of this process, especially for church leaders -- being able to make a safe space, and to have processes for people to be able to record or to tell their stories. Then it’s important for us to be able to take God and what happened to that person and then disentangle those two things from each other. Because for many people who have these wounding experiences, those things become enmeshed. People think that it was God who wounded them, God who hurt them. Q: How did you retain your faith, both in God and in the institutional church? One of the very disconcerting things happening right now is that so many of our institutions in our country are being dismantled. I see this, and it makes me worried, because it feels like we’re tearing apart something that’s extremely important. I’ve always been someone who really believes in the institution, and the institutional church. I’m part of the denomination because I believe that we have that history that we can lean upon. I believe that we have those checks and balances in place. I believe that we’re hooked into something larger and so it’s harder for us to throw away things, and I think that’s really important. It helps us to be able to put a check on some of the sexism or some of the racism that can occur. All of that said, oftentimes we make mistakes, and when those mistakes happen institutionally, they can become extremely large. We’re seeing this with the pedophile cases in the Roman Catholic Church. We’re watching how the institution covered up and worked to protect itself. So just like any human, just like any religion, just like any organization, we can be very good or we can be very destructive. I believe that the institutions are our best form of checks and balances. It’s our best form of making sure that a whole and healthy faith can go forth. One of the best ways to do it is to be vigilant, and allow that room and that process for truth telling. Q: Did the spiritual-but-not-religious path appeal to you? I needed community to be able to heal. I needed the ancient liturgy, and the tradition that had long historic roots. I needed to rely on those things to show me a loving God, to show me that there has been a God throughout the ages who has been merciful and who has been just. I wasn’t able to conjure that up by myself. I needed to do that within the community. I needed to do it within seminary. I needed to connect with God within the beauty and the art and the singing of a historic tradition. I tell a story in the book that there was a point in my life where I couldn’t really disentangle God from the abuse that I had gone through. The thing that helped me was going to services and singing and having that chant go through my mind over and over and over again: “Bless the Lord, my soul, and bless God’s holy name, who leads me into life.” And just being able to say those words again and again helped me to connect to a life-giving God. Then I began to read the science that’s behind it. Neurologists tell us how this sort of singing or meditation or liturgy -- it actually rewires our brain. You can see this when we look at political rallies. And so there’s great power in these spaces, these shared spaces. So for me, even though church was a place where I had been wounded, I knew it was the place where I could be healed, because I could connect with these liturgies. I could connect with the prayer; I could connect with the song, with the tradition. The other thing that was really important for me was being surrounded by people who could hold my faith when I wasn’t able to have it. And so knowing that I could walk into church, and maybe I couldn’t believe that Sunday, but I was standing in a tradition, and I was standing with a group of people who could believe, who would buoy me, who would uphold me until I was able to get to that faith. I have worked with people who aren’t able to go back to church. I tell a story about a man who became physically nauseous each time he would go to church, because he had been a victim of a pedophile pastor. And absolutely, if a person is in that situation, I completely understand if they’re not able to go to church. But for the most part, I found it to be a place that can be extremely life-giving, and extremely empowering for people. Q: Do you recommend any particular way of approaching healing for folks who also are in the position of representing the church? It’s hard to work in the church without getting wounded by it, and I’m constantly talking to people who have been wounded by the church. Oftentimes we are dependent upon the community of faith that we’re leading to get our spiritual nourishment, and oftentimes when we’re working through these sorts of wounding experiences, we have to find another community. And that’s difficult, because we’re working on Sunday morning, and there are not a lot of places where we can find that community. But we can be very intentional about it, either through finding a cohort group or finding a place where we can do Christian education with a group of people that we can really lean on and learn to love. But I think those spaces of community, those spaces of caring, are extremely important for pastors and for many church professionals. Having colleagues that you can trust, having people that you can rely upon, having those spaces for yourself to be able to walk through the steps of healing and reconciling with God -- it can be more important for church leaders, I think, than for laypeople. I wouldn’t counsel pastors to talk about a lot of the stuff with their congregations until they’ve dealt with it. I know we really love authenticity. It’s sort of a buzzword these days, and so pastors often feel like they’re being more authentic if they’re able to share what they’re going through. But sometimes that ends up just bleeding all over the congregation, using the pulpit as a therapy couch, and that’s just not fair to the people. We can’t always get all of our act together, but we need to try before we emote all over people.
As clergy open ourselves prayerfully to God's inspiring and comforting companionship, our wounds become the media of God's healing touch to other vulnerable people, write two pastors and Alban authors.
Church communities do a better job of talking about the beginning of people's spiritual lives than about moments of spiritual desolation, says a Duke Divinity professor.
Lauren F. Winner: Most of our spiritual life is not spent in ecstasy
Church communities do a better job of talking about the beginning of people’s spiritual lives than about moments of spiritual desolation, says the Duke Divinity professor and author of a new memoir.
People often ask Duke Divinity Professor Lauren F. Winner how she can be so self-revealing in her books, which have chronicled the ups and downs of her faith life.
But talking about our lives with God -- good and bad -- shouldn’t seem so daring, she said. “Not everyone wants to write a memoir or write a book about their anxiety. But should it seem shockingly self-disclosing to talk about how lonely you sometimes feel?” she said. “Not that the church needs to become an ongoing therapy session, but I do yearn for the church to be a place where people are able and encouraged and taught to talk about their relationship with God.” In her first book, “Girl Meets God,” Winner shares her journey from Judaism to Christianity. Follow-up books include “Mudhouse Sabbath” and “Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity.” In her latest work, “Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis,” (link is external) she writes about the period following the breakup of her marriage and her mother’s death, during which she experienced doubt and despair. Now an ordained Episcopal priest, Winner is pondering not just personal issues but institutional ones, as well. She asks how church leaders can effectively reach out to individuals facing spiritual crises and what congregations could be doing to help Christians talk about their relationship with God in all its facets. Winner completed doctoral work at Columbia and now serves as assistant professor of Christian spirituality at Duke Divinity School, where she earned a master of divinity degree. Ordained as an Episcopal priest in December 2011, Winner spoke with Faith & Leadership about her new book and her new role in the church. The following is an edited transcript. Q: In some ways your book “Still” is a book about failure -- of your marriage and then your sense of God’s presence. What do you hope people will take from your story? C.S. Lewis said, “We read to know we’re not alone.” Those of us who are readers find a lot of our companionship, sense of solidarity and not-aloneness through books and through the communion of saints that we can meet in books. For people who are hitting a wall in their spiritual life or who may feel very isolated, I hope that this book will provide a little companionship at the wall. If, in addition, there’s an insight here or there that someone underlines and thinks is really helpful, that’s great. But if it offers some company to people when they hit their spiritual wall, that would please me. Q: Do you feel that the act of writing the book was part of what moved you along spiritually? There were some episodes or characteristics of what was for me a very spiritually difficult time that I understood more deeply through writing about them. We don’t talk especially well in the church about people’s moments of spiritual desolation, and maybe there are Christians who don’t have those moments, but I think most of us have them. It’s actually part of the architecture of the Christian life, not the odd exception. The communities of which I have been a part are wonderful, nurturing, nourishing Christian communities, yet they do a better job talking about the beginnings of people’s spiritual lives. We have a long history in North American Christianity of narrating people’s conversions as though that’s the end of the matter, when really that’s the prelude to the matter. And sometimes in our communities we say in response to someone’s spiritual desolation, “It’s fine; it’s understandable; we’ve all been there,” but we expect it to get resolved in about six weeks. And if it doesn’t get resolved in about six weeks, the person must not be trying hard enough or something, or not doing the right kind of praying or something. In some mainline communities, we may not talk very well about people’s encounters with God’s hiddenness because we don’t talk very well about people’s encounters with God, period. Pastors are not the only people who have responsibilities in that area, but I think that it might be part of a pastoral office to think about, “Is your community able to talk about people’s lives with God?” If the pastor is not attending to that, it’s probably not going to happen by accident. Q: What do you mean by that? I’m an Episcopalian. It is very characteristic of many Episcopal churches that, for whatever reason, people are not all that comfortable talking about Jesus out in the world. We might say, “I need to grow in comfort in publicly naming Jesus as part of my life.” But how much of that are we doing even in our own church community? It’s not only at my job at the bank I’m not talking about Jesus. That’s something that we can keep deepening. Q: In some ways, your life is integrated to allow you to do that -- maybe in a way that a bank teller doesn’t feel comfortable. Right. But if the bank teller’s at a Bible study or has a friend over from church, can he or she talk even then about what is actually going on in that person’s spiritual life? If not, might we want to cultivate that practice more? I am interested in the question of how churches can become places where people can speak about all of the corners and crevices of their spiritual lives. I also sometimes find it a little alarming when people ask me, “What does it feel like to be so self-revealing? Now everyone who’s read this book knows all about your anxiety attacks and your intense loneliness.” Not everyone wants to write a memoir or write a book about their anxiety. But should it seem shockingly self-disclosing to talk about how lonely you sometimes feel? Not that the church needs to become an ongoing therapy session, but I do yearn for the church to be a place where people are able and encouraged and taught to talk about their relationship with God. To the extent that churches do not encourage, teach and welcome people to do that, we are not fully living into our calling as the church. Q: You were recently ordained. How has that affirmed your sense of vocation? I was in the ordination process for about a decade, so I stretched it out longer than people usually do. I believe that there are some people who are called in a very specific way to ordination. It is what God wants them to do. The sense I kept getting from God was, “If you want to be ordained, that’s great. I’ll roll with that. If you don’t, that’s fine, too. We can do something else together in the world for the kingdom.” Yet I feel very much like the office of the priesthood is the office I am meant to be occupying in the church. I recently read a wonderful formulation from the Orthodox Russian theologian Paul Evdokimov, who wrote that the priesthood of the laity is devoted to consecrating the world for God, making the world holy. And the priesthood of clergy is devoted to explicating that consecration through and in the sacraments, which makes an enormous amount of sense to me. I was ordained into the priesthood last December. I was told by a wise priest in New Haven that she didn’t really know what it meant to be a priest until she’d been one for about a decade. I heard her say that and thought, “That seems right.” So ask me in nine years, and maybe I’ll have more to say. Q : So you have three callings: priest, professor and writer. How do you see those three different roles and their relationship to each other? In my life, they don’t feel like three distinct things. They feel like they are part of the same whole. Now, that might be different if I were teaching in the math department, but everything I do feels like it’s in the same basket. So I don’t actually think I’ve ever experienced it as three distinct callings. Q: What are the spiritual practices that sustain your faith? Writing has long been a spiritual practice in my life. I feel like the way that I understand and apprehend anything, really, is through writing about it. I think this is related to my sense of being called to the pulpit. Many of my most vital experiences come when I have somehow been exploring Scripture on the page, often for a sermon. So that’s an important piece of my spiritual practice. Prayer has always been a backbone of my spiritual life, corporate prayer and often -- though not always -- individual prayer. I had some time when I really fell away from individual prayer. My prayer life is foundationally liturgical. It was when I was practicing Judaism; it is as an Episcopalian. For the last couple of years, a major piece of my prayer life has been a method of prayer developed by Sybil MacBeth in a book called “Praying in Color (link is external),” which is essentially about praying via doodling. This sounds absurd, but doodling prayer has been the only mode of praying I have experienced where an hour will go by and I will think five minutes have elapsed. This particular mode of praying works for me because, A, I have no artistic talent, so there’s no voice in my head -- as sometimes happens when I’m writing -- saying, “Stop being present to the experience and make that tree look better.” I know the tree is never going to look better. And B, every spiritual director I’ve ever had has tried to get me to have some part of my prayer life that doesn’t include words, because I’m so word-oriented. When I am praying in words, there is always a danger I’ll start thinking my way out of the prayer. Q: What’s the value for you, aside from getting away from words? For me, this practice underscores that one essential thing that we are doing in prayer, which is simply noticing that we are in God’s presence. When my mother was ill -- she was ill for 15 months before she died -- at some point, it seemed that praying for her healing was not what I needed and wanted to be doing. But then I didn’t know what to pray. So I said to my spiritual director, “What’s the right thing to be praying for?” and he said, “Maybe you should just picture your mother and picture Jesus showing up, and that is your prayer.” That really changed dramatically what I thought about petitionary prayer. The heart of all petitionary prayer is drawing people into God’s presence. This mode of praying really holds that knowledge for me. Q: You mentioned writing as a spiritual practice. What are your writing practices? I’m a very undisciplined writer, unfortunately. I love revision. To me, the heart of revision is about seeing again what story I’m trying to tell. So I have a set of revision exercises that are not designed to necessarily get me closer to the final draft but are designed to help me see the story differently. It may be something like rewriting a piece in a different tense and just seeing what you stumble over, what you notice and what you’re invited to see. Beyond those kinds of things, I’m not really sure I can dignify much about my writing life with the phrase or term “practices.” Q: In your latest book you say that “rote, unshowy behavior” is perhaps typical of the middle period of spiritual life. Why? I think that it is perhaps a blessed reality that most of our spiritual life is not spent in ecstasy. For me, the most sustaining and sustained rote, unshowy behavior is just going to church. I recognize that sometimes people have very good reasons for not going to church. Sometimes people have been really burned in a church situation and may need to remove themselves from institutional church life. But for me, the kind of routines and rhythms of the local church are bedrock in my spiritual life, and they’re terrifically rote and unshowy. That’s the behavior that holds me to the Christian story and allows me to sometimes notice when God shows up. I don’t think that I would have the capacity to ever notice if I were not moored in the patterns and habits of communal life.
Mel Williams: We need to teach our people to pray and to weep
A crying angel organist statue at Malostransky Cemetery in Prague, Czech Republic. Bigstock / JosefKubes by: Mel Williams
These two practices help us connect to the Holy One, the source of love, compassion and justice, writes a retired Baptist pastor.
After 40-plus years as a pastor, I’ve come to the conclusion that the church has failed to teach its people two basic practices. They are simple but crucial for the development of core values and moral action in alignment with the teachings of Jesus. We must teach our people to pray and to weep.
To pray: The gift of silence
Of course, we pray all the time in church. But too often, we turn to rote verbal prayers rather than interior prayer. We pastors have allowed parishioners to cede the praying to us, the professional clergy. (“Pastor, would you offer a prayer?”) And we tend to overemphasize liturgical prayers rather than teaching a deeper, direct, personal connection with the divine source. I believe that to pray, in the deepest sense, is to connect with God’s love, mercy and justice -- the source of the moral life. In the past 20 years, thanks to the influence of writers such as Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen, Thomas Keating, John Main, Richard Rohr and Cynthia Bourgeault, we have rediscovered contemplative, wordless prayer, which was alive in the early centuries of the church. Jesus frequently left the crowds, going to “a secluded place” to pray (Mark 1:35; 6:46). He also urged his disciples to “come away by yourselves to a secluded place and rest a while” (Mark 6:30-31 NASB). The practice of contemplative prayer can be restful and restorative. It invites us into a deeper communion with God through sitting in silence, releasing jangling inner thoughts. It’s a steady process of training ourselves to drop down into a state of stillness where we can connect with the inner wellspring, the Holy One, the source of love, compassion and justice. Rohr has prompted me to think about the role of pastors in teaching this practice. It’s clear to me that the pastor’s spiritual development must come first. It took me many years before I finally learned to say during my annual review that my No. 1 goal for my ministry was taking care of my own health: spiritual, physical and emotional. For me, taking annual retreats at New Camaldoli Hermitage was the thing that cracked me open to this careful attention to the inner life. I’ve been captivated by the teaching of St. Romuald, the founder of the Camaldolese monks, who wrote: “Empty yourself completely and sit waiting, content with the grace of God.” A vital part of being still is breathing -- exhaling the tensions and inhaling the goodness. In the silence, our breathing serves as an ongoing reminder of the life force that continuously reinvigorates our being. One of my Jewish friends told me that her breakthrough happened when she mentioned to a friend that she was frazzled by her social justice work. The friend asked, “Do you have a practice?” The question jolted her and set her on a new path. I’ve long felt that the endless activities of church life, including planning and leading worship, can prevent us from learning to pray. Yet many of our people are hungry for a deeper inner life. Contemplative prayer has emerged as a restorative path, a deepening practice that over time yields vitality and connection with God’s love, compassion and justice. After retiring from an active, progressive congregation, I have now chosen to sit in silence with Friends at a Quaker meeting, where a form of the contemplative tradition has been practiced for hundreds of years. Individuals who experience an inner prompting may speak; however, an old maxim has long reverberated in my mind: “Speak only if you can improve upon the silence.”
To weep: The gift of tears
The early mystics referred to “the gift of tears.” When I first heard that phrase, I felt a window opening to fresh air. These early saints have helped us understand that weeping is not weak; it’s restorative and cleansing. As Alan Jones puts it in “Soul Making,” tears “soften the soul, clear the mind, and open the heart.” Weeping invites us out of fixing, judging and blaming, and into a closer communion with the person seated next to us -- and a closer communion with the Holy One. At the monastery, I often find myself weeping, not from sadness, but from an overflow of gratitude. In Durham, for many years we’ve held vigils against violence, often at the spot where someone has been murdered. We gather in a circle in the evening, with some 20 to 50 people holding candles. We usually read one of the lament psalms (such as 13, 22 or 88). We read the names of those who were killed and invite family members to speak. Inevitably, there is weeping, a crying out from family members or friends. Such weeping is what Walter Brueggemann calls “the public processing of pain.” We can do this in our congregations as well. Funerals already provide a space for tears. Over the years, I repeatedly told my congregation, “If you can’t weep in church, what’s a church for?” We come to church to weep. This idea is fundamental to my understanding of authentic spiritual life. Grief makes it possible for newness to emerge. As we weep, we are releasing energy and gradually transforming that energy toward effective community change. Grief expressed releases hope, and social change movements can emerge from it. In our community, the support group Parents of Murdered Children works for gun safety and greater community involvement in children’s lives. The civil rights movement grew out of pain; the same is true for the push for women’s rights and gay and lesbian rights. Weeping becomes a motivator for action. One veteran civil rights pastor told me, “It’s crucial to bring the pain and suffering into the sanctuary.” In the presence of the gathered community, we need to release the grief, release the sadness -- whatever the pain may be. I once heard the cantankerous Baptist preacher-prophet Will Campbell begin an ordination sermon by saying, “I question the sanity of any person who would request ordination at the hands of an institution which has been the biggest failure in the history of humankind.” That’s a strong statement -- but understandable, considering what he experienced in his lifetime in the church. I dare to say that we can address some of those failures with the practices of praying and weeping. These are revolutionary practices that can release the energies of our people and prompt us to rise up and awaken a new era of love, compassion and justice. We can start the revolution by teaching our people to pray and to weep. And we pastors have the opportunity first to practice what we teach.
Listening skills, and the perspective gained through careful listening, are more important in congregations than ever. Many factors make attentive listening a significant contributor to healthy congregations. As we enter into a post-Christendom culture, the people coming into congregations, as well as the people in the wider community, are less likely to be operating from a shared set of assumptions. With world-wide migration reshaping our communities and congregations, diverse perspectives coming from varied cultural backgrounds are also more common. The breakdown of many support structures in society has created profound pastoral care needs, making listening increasingly significant for both ministers and lay leaders. Polarization over so many issues and the increasing emphasis on story-telling in the journey of faith are two additional reasons why listening matters today. Careful and loving listening nurtures care, connection and depth, which contribute to congregational life and health. Listening to God is another aspect of listening which is gaining increased attention today. Many congregational leaders have become weary of church as a business and are looking for authentic experiences of God's guidance. Congregations are increasingly engaging in communal discernment. Many listening skills used in human interactions are also building blocks for listening to God.
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