Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

I know what you need: To meditate.
I know what you need: To eat better.
I know what you need: To watch less television. To exercise. To repent.

It’s sometimes easy to diagnose others. Our culture is full of those who want to solve each other’s problems with religion or self-help books or heavy-handed community projects. These things aren’t bad, but only if you know and understand the people you are trying to help first.

As I mentioned last week, a group from my church has been reading Life Together by Dietrich Bohhoeffer. In the passage on ministry, there’s this line that I loved: “Are we, like the professionally pious, to ‘talk away’ the other person’s real need?” This is a real danger, in which we speak so much that we forget to listen. In which we offer advice without offering any real help because we never listen long enough to understand the problem.

Bonhoeffer does believe we sometimes must act, and sometimes we must speak difficult truths to each other. Importantly, though, he only gets to this point after writing at length on meekness and listening and bearing with each other. We must respect each other’s freedom, he says. “To bear the burden of the other person means involvement with the created reality of the other, to accept and affirm it, and being with it, to break through the point where we take joy in it.”

In other words: not everyone is like you. Not everyone needs what you need or thinks like you think. When you speak, you have to speak to that individual person, not some projection of yourself.

My church has also taken on a “Season of listening.” People have spoken to owners of local shops and community organizers and people they’ve met on the street in order to better understand the community and its real needs. It would be easy for us—most of us who live in the neighborhood, though few of us for very long—to come in and try to minister without understanding. To say to the community, I know what you need and never give it a chance to speak. But we must listen first.