Recall an experience where you were listened to well.

What did it feel like? How did it help you?

In our lives it can be hard to slow down and listen as so many things demand our time and energy. I know I get distracted easily.

‘I’m prone to distractions, God. I find it hard to keep my thoughts on you.’
God looked down and sighed: ‘I wish I could say the same about you. I can’t get you out of my mind.’

By Patrick Purnell, The Book of Furrows

If we can learn to sit and listen to God, enjoying His presence and His delight in us, from that place we are better equipped to listen to others. Jesus took time to rest with His Father (Mark 6:31) and then went out, listened to the crowd yet was drawn to the individual.

Then, because so many people were coming and going that they did not even have a chance to eat, he said to them, ‘Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.’

Mark 6:31

Otto Scharmer offers us 4 levels of listening (off-site link):

1. Downloading
2. Factual
3. Empathic
4. Generative

I pray that each day I may have the opportunity to step into the level of generative listening as I think it is what Jesus modelled - being fully present and engaged, connected to something larger and therefore enabling transformation. It can be a moment of holiness, a moment where God is present.

If I have been listened to I feel energised, free, able to lift my head and be who I am called to be. If we want to be good listeners we need to know that place of being heard and loved by God.

As persons are accepted and prized, they tend to develop a more caring attitude towards themselves. As persons are empathically heard, it becomes possible for them to listen more accurately to the flow of inner experiencings. As a person understands and prizes self, the self becomes more congruent with the experiencings. The person becomes more real, more genuine…there is a greater freedom to be the true whole person.

Carl Rogers

An Invitation

Who is God inviting you to listen to today? Maybe He is showing you how much He loves this person and He wants you to be His ears.

Listening is a form of spiritual hospitality by which you invite strangers to become friends, to get to know their inner selves more fully, and even to dare to be silent with you.

Henri Nouwen 

Next Steps

If you would like to join a community where people listen and where you can be known by others then we'd love to encourage you to join a small group. These mid-week communities meet in various places around the Island and exist to provide spaces for authentic community to flourish. Why not consider joining one today.

Christian growth rarely happens in isolation. Honest, loving relationships give us places to be known, challenged, forgiven and encouraged… and may help us move from Sunday attendance towards the shared life pictured in Acts 2.

The difference between being friendly and being known

Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends have an appealing habit: they keep turning up. Piglet doesn’t need to become less Piglet-like before he belongs. Eeyore has gloomy observations, misplaced tail, deflated balloon and all , but his friends continue to love him. Tigger’s enthusiasm sometimes arrives several seconds before he engages brain. Somehow, this unlikely sibling collection continues to share the Hundred Acre Wood.

Perhaps A. A. Milne understood something about community that churches occasionally forget … good relationships don’t depend upon our being alike.

Warm, busy and welcoming churches can still leave congregants relatively unknown. We can worship together, hear the same sermon, exchange news over coffee and go home having revealed almost nothing about what is really happening within us. Acts 2:42 describes believers devoting themselves to teaching, fellowship, breaking bread and prayer. Lives are shared, needs noticed, meals eaten and faith practised together.

Relationships matter

My work as a counsellor centres the importance of relationships. People rarely bring isolated problems into a counselling room. Anxiety sits beside loneliness. Depression and rejection are common bedfellows. Bereavement changes not only circumstances but also relationships. Self-understanding often develops through how others have treated us.

There is good reason to take social connection seriously. Recent studies evidence strong associations between social relationships and mental health but association shouldn’t be confused with causation.

More than sitting in the same room

This is where Small Groups can offer something a Sunday service usually cannot. Sermons teach that forgiveness matters. A relationship may reveal whether I actually forgive. They may tell me to bear another person’s burdens. A Small Group may introduce me to a burden that arrives inconveniently on Tuesday afternoon.They teach humility, but a conversation around disagreement may reveal ones lack of humility. Christian teaching and Christian formation are not identical. Attendance isn’t the same as community. Acts 2 doesn’t describe mere “attendees”. It describes people learning, eating, praying, giving and living in relationship.

The gift of appropriate vulnerability

In C. S. Lewis The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the children don’t enter Narnia as a harmonious group. Edmund is resentful and secretive. Peter gets things wrong. Lucy knows what it feels like not to be believed. Their relationships matter partly because truth eventually must be revealed. Christian relationships need something similar.

“Appropriate vulnerability” doesn’t mean telling everyone everything, and a Small Group should not become group therapy. It means becoming sufficiently “known”, that our Christian brothers and sisters meet the person behind our Sunday answer of “Fine, thanks”.

Vulnerability may mean saying, “I am struggling”, “I think I was wrong”, “I don’t understand” or sometimes the courage to say “I disagree”. Healthy community doesn’t mean agreement about everything. It requires enough trust to disagree without withdrawing affection.

Learning to listen

Counselling offers three ideas that translate well into ordinary relationships: empathy, genuineness and non-judgemental acceptance.

Empathy asks, “What might this be like for you?”

Genuineness/Congruence, means allowing our outward presentation to reflect what is happening inwardly.

Acceptance, refuses to make another person’s worth depend upon their agreement with us.

A good Small Group gives us somewhere to practise these things. Some need encouragement to speak. Others need the equally demanding discipline of finishing a sentence and letting someone else have one. Listening means more than waiting for our turn to talk. These skills travel with us into marriages, friendships, workplaces, families and the wider church.

From attendance to shared life

Small Groups don’t automatically produce healthy relationships. Groups can become inward-looking. One person can dominate. Confidentiality can fail. Advice may arrive where what was needed was simply a listening presence. That is why love, patience, forgiveness and humility matter.

Our goal isn’t to create perfect groups or unusually intense friendships, but to create enough trust for people to become increasingly real with one another, while remaining open to those beyond the group.

One of God’s gifts to us is community. Other Christians encourage us, comfort us and irritate us. They expose assumptions we didn’t know we held. They give opportunities to forgive and occasions when we need forgiveness, whilst noticing undervalued gifts and edges that still need refining. Pooh needs Piglet. Piglet hasn’t all the answers, yet Piglet keeps walking alongside him.

Perhaps moving towards an Acts 2 community begins quite simply. We keep turning up; Listening;. Risking being known; Telling truth with love. Making room at our table.

No one knows you. The language slows you… The things you brought from home. Look back at you; out of place here. They take on a lonely power.*

Lost

We find several stories about being lost in the Bible including the lost sheep, the lost coin and the lost son, all found in Luke 15. One lost by nature, one by accident, one by poor choices. These are often told as stories for children, but it is so easy, as an adult, to find yourself feeling a bit lost in life. Feeling disconnected, isolated, without purpose.

I remember arriving in Guernsey and despite feeling sure this was the right place to be, I also had a sense of disorientation. I didn’t know where to find the most basic things and my inability to pronounce any of the places properly marked me out as an outsider.

A New Family

The best choice I made in those early days was to come along to church . You may not be able to instantly replicate long-standing friendships from other places, but you can instantly find yourself a new family as you step into church. I found such a warm welcome, the answers to some of my questions and a community where all held together by God’s love.

I also found that the words of the songs and prayers and what was spoken about in the talks helped build my faith, that I was in the right place and that God would lead me into this next chapter of life and help me when everything felt so new.

Belonging

Reflecting on the last two years since those early days, I can see that being part of the church family here has helped me find a new sense of purpose as I help out in different ways. Whether working in the office or serving in the café, I love having the opportunity to extend to everyone who steps through the door the same welcome I received, through joining a homegroup I am getting to know a lovely group of people more deeply as we work through the highs and lows of life together and friendships are deepening. I’m still working on the pronunciation of some places and names… I’m a work in progress!

Gradually, you will come to find your way to friends who will open doors into new belonging. Your heart will brighten with new discovery, your presence will unclench and find ease, letting your substance and promise be seen. 

Slowly, a new world will open for you. The eyes of your heart, refined by this desert time, will be free to see and celebrate the new life for which you sacrificed so much.*

Next Steps

If you relate to that sense of 'lost-ness', do come and find a place of welcome at Trinity. Perhaps visit our First Steps page to find out more.

You can chat to any member of the staff team. You can fill in a card or message us through the website to ask us to help you find a small group to join or a way you can discover and use your gifts to bless our community and find a sense of purpose and belonging.

*John O’Donohue (2007) “Benedictus: A Book of Blessings”. Bantam Press.