Evangelicals have no shortage of advice about becoming a good listener. It’s one of their main evangelism strategies, after all! Being a good listener involves a number of soft skills, however, and evangelicals really can’t practice any of them without serious challenges to their beliefs. They find themselves, therefore, in a serious dilemma!
Today, we explore those soft skills, then put them up against advice from evangelicals about how to be a good listener.
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SITUATION REPORT: Being a good listener for successful soulwinning
For many decades, evangelicals have advised the flocks to become good listeners. They push “good listening” as an essential skill in evangelism. Without truly hearing and validating a target’s thoughts, their leaders tell them, evangelists cannot hope to convert anyone. Through Jesus’ infilling, they can become the master listeners that he wants them to be. As Grace Church’s writer puts it, “When we listen, we communicate the gospel.”
However, the flocks clearly lack this skill. Everyone takes it as given that in evangelicalism, nobody actually practices the skill of active listening—or even knows how to do it. Advice about becoming a good listener is thick in the sheepfold, along with admonitions of what will happen if the flocks don’t do it. And yet the flocks consistently lack this essential skill, at least judging by the sheer volume of advice out there about it.
Ironically, one Calvinist website accidentally reveals exactly why evangelicals can’t become good listeners: Active listening, at least when it involves real people, has three components that their tribe can’t ever possibly condone in themselves. When they actually listen to people, they learn that their beliefs aren’t as universally necessary—or even as universally good—as they might have thought.
Here, we will explore the world of good listening, see what evangelical leaders make of it, and then see why they can’t possibly ever do it.
A skill that was never hearty enough to be called dying now
The other day in voice chat, someone mentioned that they were learning not to interrupt others as a life skill. Everyone else in the chat immediately chimed in that we’d all had to learn the same thing, and one person noted that we had tacitly adopted certain mannerisms that help stop us from interrupting. I hadn’t realized that we all practice these habits until right then.
But then, it doesn’t always come naturally to people to listen well. Thirty years ago, I stood in a friend’s kitchen while helping with dinner. While steam rose around us in the chill evening air, she said that she liked one of our friends because when she talked to him, she could tell he wasn’t just waiting for her to stop talking so he could jump in with his own stories.
And twenty years ago, in training for a complicated customer-service job, I listened to an agent take a call from a woman who needed to cancel a service because its user, her son, was a military man getting deployed overseas. The mother was very upset and worried, and she kept hinting about her feelings. She was dying to be heard. But the agent didn’t notice at all. Listening to that exchange (as I could hardly call it a conversation) was driving me out of my mind. I couldn’t say anything, and yet every cell in my body was screaming to take that mother’s offered hand and hear her out.
It’s not only evangelicals who don’t listen well. That said, heathens aren’t trying to claim a god possesses us and makes us uniquely capable of good listening. Nor are we using the skills of listening to try to sell a product nobody wants.
How to be a good listener in Reality-Land
Let’s start with how to become a good listener in the real world. I liked some of the advice in this 2023 Reddit thread:
Let go of your own thoughts.
Be genuinely curious about what the others are saying – there is a big difference between listening and just waiting to speak, and you’re probably doing the latter.
In another, we find similar advice:
[My boss] succeeded in business simply by waiting until the person was finished speaking, then thinking of the next thing to say. That’s it, just a few seconds of delay and he suddenly became the greatest listener in all the lands.
Be with. Instead of focusing on what you like or dislike about what someone is saying, just be with them. Don’t worry about what comes next. Don’t worry about your responses. Don’t worry about having “that great story about that one time you did something similar” ready.
And perhaps most powerfully of all, advice from an article in The Guardian in 2016:
When a person wants to express their pain, your experiences aren’t relevant to them.” A similar, common mistake is to leap to offer advice before being asked. “Giving advice is not listening, and often it’s not helpful,” Pam adds. “It shuts people down. If you feel a responsibility to fix your friend’s problems, relinquish it.”
So we can get a good idea of listening as a full focus on the other person and their experiences and thoughts.
In the wild: Evangelical advice about listening to people
Evangelicals seem to know this, too, because their advice usually centers on that kind of focus. From Stephen Ministries (which appears to be an advice site for future ministers), we find this admonition:
Deliberately set aside your instinct to share your own thoughts so you can focus on what the person in front of you is sharing.
They continue with suggestions to be attentive, responsive, non-judgmental, and trustworthy. (Good luck with all of that. Evangelicals think they must judge others.)
The site Biblical Leadership offers this exhortation:
Let’s be sure each of us takes the time to listen a little more slowly to the people with whom we interact. Let’s slow our pace down a little.
A great many advice sites tell stories from the Gospels about how Jesus listened to people. One 2019 Gospel Coalition post consisted entirely of these stories. As well, we find them in an ancient 1983 post on Desiring God. Here’s one of the lessons it offers from those stories: “I put more emphasis on affirmation than on answers.” (I’d be supremely curious about just where Jesus did that. He ordered people around and fixed their problems all the time.) She had to learn to resist the temptation to try to fix the other person’s problems.
In 2019, a Christian coaches’ network offered this guideline:
In our coach training, we will usually hear this statement: “You will have had a productive coaching session if your client talks eighty percent of the time and you only talk twenty percent of the time.”
Overall, evangelicals employ a lot of doublespeak about listening. As Tim Challies observes, “Good listening reflects our relationship with God.” But he also says “few of us are good listeners.” Whoops!
And how their advice actually looks
Meanwhile, Midwestern Seminary teaches readers to “interrupt intentionally and gently, rather than habitually and rashly.” They also advise that “Good listeners are willing to stop listening to something that is perverse, wicked, or dangerously foolish.” When I saw that second quote, I immediately wondered what complete blithering idiot had written that post. I guess I wasn’t too surprised to see Gavin Ortlund’s name on the byline! A while ago, we pointed out his atrocity apologetics around slavery. He’s a hardline Southern Baptist who popped up in a recent post about the denomination’s Annual Meeting.
At Grace Church’s site, we learn about an evangelical who meets a woman recovering from alcohol addiction. She says that she thinks Jesus could be “God.” The evangelical writes about the reply he wants to give:
My mind raced with different rebuttals to her statement about prayer and apologetic defenses for the supremacy of Christ. But my friend was unfazed. He smiled at her and said, “I think that’s great that you think He could be God; because, if you are ever going to believe that He is God, you have to start with acknowledging that He could be. I would just encourage you to find out if He is or not. Because if He is, that changes everything.”
I was floored. What a gracious, wise, kind, and Jesus-like answer! [. . .] His response of listening looked like the gospel, and mine didn’t.
In reality, neither Christian was actively listening to her.
Being a good listener for better sales
On the University of Washington website, we find definitions of “the four listening types.” Evangelicals definitely fit into the third type:
The Evaluative Listener is already excited about what the speaker has to say. So much so, that they already have data they wish to share, an alternate opinion they wish to refute or an argument to be made as soon as you stop talking. You have their attention, but they are evaluating your every word and then crafting a response or rebuttal WHILE you are still talking.
Evangelicals listen to their evangelism targets to specifically better-tailor their sales pitch. In fact, evangelist Mike Frost specifically calls listening an “evangelistic art” in a series of posts. He even quotes Tim Keller, not realizing that he’s actually told us Keller is a horrible listener:
As Tim Keller wrote, “Everybody has got a story. If you’re able to inhabit that so well that [people] feel that you know their story better than they do, and then show in a compelling way how that story is only going to find resolution in Jesus, then they are going to find a compelling case for Christianity.”
Ah, okay. Listen so you can figure out how to fix the speaker’s problem—by suggesting conversion. That’s being a good listener, yep.
On the Cru website, their writer specifically makes a connection between listening and evangelism. From start to finish, listening occurs only to further evangelism goals:
As you listen for barriers to the gospel that others have, listen for:
Ignorance: They’ve just never heard, they don’t know.
Misconceptions: They believe something about Christianity that’s not true.
Fear: They fear losing community, wealth, identity, security, pleasure, a secret, an addiction, etc.
Pain: Trauma and other painful life events can cause people to distrust God and doubt God’s goodness.
Fruitless Christians: No one want’s [sic] to become like their unloving, self righteous, angry, or unhappy friends.
And immediately after this list, Cru offers pointed, loaded questions to ask the target. It reminds me of a quote from the 1983 movie Rock & Rule: “Enough about them. Let’s talk about you. What did you think of my last album?”
None of this is real communication. It’s being done to avoid real communication. If the outcome always looks like “making another sales pitch,” that’s not real communication.
Being a good listener can work in specific sales contexts
And it’s not even like active listening can’t be a part of salesmanship. It can be part of excellent salesmanship.
If the salesperson knows that their product isn’t perfect for everyone, that sometimes a customer just isn’t suited to anything on offer, then active listening can uncover that mismatch. It ends a sales engagement quickly, allowing agents to move to the next person. As one example, when I began working for a TV company, one perk of the job was getting their largest channel package for free. When I called my cable company to disconnect, the person taking my call conceded that she couldn’t compete with “free” as a price. When she found out I’d literally get everything she could offer for free, she didn’t hassle me about disconnecting. In similar fashion, someone who needs to cancel cell phone service for poor coverage can’t really be “saved.”
But evangelicals can’t ever concede that some people just aren’t a fit for evangelical Christianity. They’re taught that everyone needs their faith system, so everyone needs their product (which is active membership in a church holding that faith). They cannot allow for any virtuous reason to reject their product. So every rejection is invalid.
Worse, evangelicals listen only to tailor the sales pitch. That’s it. While they’re ostensibly listening, they’re not hearing dealbreakers; they’re hearing apologetics prompts and manipulation opportunities. They can’t truly hear our real (and often quite painful) reasons for leaving their religion, if we left it; instead, they hear us and parrot back “so you’re mad Jesus didn’t give you a pony” and “but you couldn’t have really believed.” Their antiprocess shields are operating at max power.
I’d just about rather evangelicals not even pretend to listen to us at all than to listen in such a deceitful way.
And one funny endnote of being a good listener, just with one particular target
It’s not even like evangelicals can’t practice real listening. They just only do it with targets that will never, ever challenge their beliefs or get too close to real intimacy. One Calvinist site perfectly illustrates this truth. Yes, a Calvinist site! Here are their 3 suggestions:
- Consistency.
- Patience.
- Seeking transformation.
And the context of listening here is listening while in prayer with Yahweh. Yes. Yahweh, a nonexistent god, is perfectly safe as a listening target. No matter how much they try to listen to him, their god will never, ever tell them anything that directly challenges their own opinions. It’s like that intense scene from House MD where House realizes he’s been in a dream all that time (content note: some medical gore):
In this scene, House tells his three assistant doctors:
House: How come you guys have never tried to yank me off this case? I’m having hallucinations. Blackouts. [. . .] Every time I’ve had an epiphany on this one, you guys were right on board. No challenges, no need to explain. No offense, but either you guys are getting smarter or I’m getting dumber.
Chase: We’ve worked with you long enough to know—
House, interrupting: —The test results even before you entered the room. We have identical knowledge. How is that possible?
And House realizes that it’s not possible—in the real world. If he’s just imagining the entire case, their uncharacteristically constant agreement with him, as well as their knowledge of all that he knows, suddenly makes perfect sense. Those three doctors are to House what Yahweh is to Christians who pray.
Evangelicals cannot listen while allowing the possibility of their own transformation. They cannot allow for the possibility that listening could “reorient us and transform our relationships, our character, and our engagement with the people and world around us.” That’s a kind of listening they only allow for targets that could never do that.
When it comes to real people, evangelicals like Gavin Ortlund must hamfistedly redefine poor listening as great listening actually. No wonder the flocks can’t truly listen. And no wonder their evangelism falls so flat, on the rare occasions they try it. If we wanted fake communication done for better sales, we could get that just about anywhere.
Real listening brings people closer. It doesn’t drive people apart.
Maybe that’s what makes evangelicals so incapable of it.
NEXT UP: Speaking of listening, Alpha Course #14 teaches viewers how to do personal evangelism. See you soon! <3
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