Join Pastors Jim Eaton and Rod Hairston as they delve into the critical role of empathic listening in pursuing Biblical Diversity. Using a baseball diamond metaphor, they walk us through the foundations of meaningful connection: listening with empathy to better understand the stories, experiences, and perspectives of others. Grounded in scripture and personal testimonies, this conversation highlights how empathic listening can break down barriers, foster unity, and reflect God’s call to love and understanding.
Learn practical ways to listen deeply, dignify others’ stories, and embrace the transformative power of empathy in your faith journey.
Transcript
Jim: So what we’d like to do as we’re talking with you now is we’d like to take you through our vision for biblical diversity here at Converge, and we’ve created a baseball diamond metaphor. And so what we’d like to do is take you through the bases, so to speak, and each one walks us through different dimensions of what we think are essential components of how we can move together as the people of God in this time. So going from home plate to first base, we wanna talk about empathic listening.
Rod: What do you hear? No, listen, what do you hear? Right now, what do you hear? What do you hear in the environment? What’s playing in your house or in your car? So often, we don’t really hear what’s happening, right? We know there’s something being said, or there’s some sound happening, but we don’t often hear with distinction and clarity. And I think that’s where we are in our culture. So much is happening, so much is being said. We’re having so many experiences, especially with people, but we’re having a hard time listening. And when we talk about biblical diversity, when we talk about empathic listening, it is key to any effective relationship. So whether it’s in the corporate space, whether it’s in medicine, whether it’s in the arts, listening is huge. And God made it huge, Jim.
Jim: Yes, yes, he did.
Rod: Right? In Deuteronomy 6, we read the Shema, where God says to the nation of Israel, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord your God, the Lord is one.” Right, “You should love the Lord your God with all your heart, your soul, your mind, your strength.” But he begins this powerful command to the nation with a command to listen.
Jim: That’s right. That’s right. And that’s core to, even to the Jewish community today. You go to a service and the heartbeat, the essence of the whole service is a time where they bring the scrolls out, and they say those words again, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord your God is one.” And I just think about so many places in the scripture where God talked about how he wanted his people to learn how to listen. Like Jesus would say, “The one who has ears to hear, let them hear.”
Rod: Let them hear.
Jim: And Jesus knew, of course, he created the human ear, he created the capacity for listening. He’s going to a much deeper level than just, did you mechanically hear the sentence? He’s talking about going to a place where the spirit of God will take you empathically into the heart of God. And when you’re among God’s people into the lived experiences, the stories, the passions, the wounds of other people.
Rod: I love what you quoted when you said how Jesus says, hear what, say that again.
Jim: “Let the one who hears, let him hear what the Spirit is saying.”
Rod: Yes, that’s the part I was thinking about, right, let ’em hear what the Spirit is saying, right, so this invisible expression of God, God the Holy Spirit is speaking, and it takes a different kind of listening.
Jim: It does.
Rod: Right, to tune into God. It takes a different kind of listening to tune into other people. So often we see people, but we don’t hear them.
Jim: Yeah.
Rod: Right? We hear these cries throughout society, right? These cries of injustice, these cries of pain, right? These cries that people are carrying the cries of racism and racial oppression, right. Sexism, these cries of religious animosity. We hear these cries, but we don’t really hear. And I think if we’re going to be effective in our faith with other people, we’ve gotta become great listeners.
Jim: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think of like in the book of James where it says, you know, “Let everyone be swift to hear and slow to speak,” and we often will apply that personally. I mean, how many times have you heard someone preach this or teach this? And they’ll say, you know, you need to learn how to listen to your friend. You need to listen to your spouse before you give your rebuttal, before you give your argument. But this also applies culturally because people of different cultures live in different worlds, and they have different stories, and their parents have different stories, and their grandparents have different stories. And so when we start to say, we need to learn to listen with empathy, I think so often in our society that’s so programmatic and so driven by, you know, rationality, and projections, and metrics, and standards, and timetables, we forget that what this really means is we need to slow down and take the time even before we understand anything, to have empathy with the other person, because empathy is requisite to understanding. We often think, I think I understand, so I can listen to you, and then I need to give side. But really, we haven’t even begun to listen. We need to listen and then hear again, and then maybe ask a question that will take us further into someone else’s story.
Rod: So I love that scripture in James that you mentioned, because James goes on to say, he says, “Be quick to listen,” fast, swift to listen, “slow to speak, and slow to get angry” Because anger does not accomplish the purpose of God. So he’s really pointing us to what empathic listening is all about, right? Rather than reacting to what we’re hearing in society and what we’re seeing. A lot of people are sort of up in arms about this whole diversity conversation, right? Why do we need this diversity? Why are people whining? And why can’t we just get on? Why can’t we just preach the gospel? That’s really poor listening.
Jim: That is.
Rod: It’s interesting that Jesus asked a lot of questions. So I checked in with my AI assistant, Claude. I said, “Tell me how many questions that Jesus asked in the New Testament.” And some of them are replicated, of course, because they’re repeated in different ones of the gospels. But I counted 52 questions that he asked. He was much more a listener than he was a speaker. And I think that is central to how he ministered.
Jim: Absolutely.
Rod: Right? So he meets this woman at the well, and he asked for water, right? And he says, “Go get your husband,” right? So, but he’s listening. He’s in a listening posture. And I think that’s really what we want to, we have to get to if we’re gonna really, really move forward in our effectiveness with people. In my work with couples, Jim, we do a lot of empathic listening. You and I have talked about this. Listening empathically is very different than just listening.
Jim: Yes.
Rod: Right. A lot of times we think about hearing God means I read the scriptures, right? And we sort of pay attention to the print, and we think, what does the scripture say? And that’s important, but it’s also, what is the intent of God?
Jim: Yes.
Rod: Right. And what is the application for me? And what is the, what is God saying for me to change or do in my life? Well, we can’t get that without listening in a different way. And I think that way is a part of what empathic listening is about. It’s not just about what did my spouse say?
Jim: Yes.
Rod: Right. Because if I listen rationally, and that’s the difference.
Jim: That’s right, right.
Rod: If I listen rationally, then I miss all of the other, the other non-verbals, right? Because most of communication is 80% nonverbal.
Jim: That’s right.
Rod: So, there are things being said by the non-verbals, right? When I’m with my, when I’m with Sherry, or as I’m working with couples in my coaching work, I’m teaching them how to listen by looking at the eyes of their spouse. And I say, if you look at your spouse’s eyes long enough, you will see a child version of them. If you just stare long enough and look at them, you can see pain in a person’s eyes. If you look at the shoulder posture, you’ll see a person can be afraid, right, if you watch body language. So this empathic listening has to do with understanding on a deeper level what people are conveying.
Jim: Yes, yes. So good. So good. So good. I’m just thinking of different stories that I’ve experienced that have taken me into this world. I think about when our family moved to Germany, and we were living in Germany, and, you know, we went there with assumptions of the German people and the German culture, and the assumptions were, you know, they’re very thrifty and they’re hardworking, but they’re maybe hard to get to know, and maybe they’re not very sensitive or deep. They just want to build things and make things orderly, and those things are true to a point. But what we discovered is we rented a home in a German town, and we began to get to know our neighbors. We discovered they are very sensitive, very thoughtful, very deep, reflective people. But what often kept them removed from Americans was they perceived us as being very shallow. And that we would simply, we would say hi quickly, and we’d smile quickly, but then we’d move on. And when we began to discover, as we got to know our neighbors, when they began to see we were going to listen to them, one of our neighbors across the street had moved from Eastern Germany, and his wife was from Poland.
Rod: Wow.
Jim: And we began to listen to their stories, their stories of pain, and the time under the Soviet system. And we began to realize they were incredibly rich, and beautiful, and textured, and varied and emotionally deep people. It was just different because they were different than us. And we have experienced this. I think Natalie and I are often now in public spaces, we’re in spaces with Muslims and Jewish leaders around the Washington DC area. And when October 7 happened a year ago, and I would go and be with Jewish leaders or Muslim leaders, I could not pretend to go in and say, “I understand.” I don’t understand what that is. I don’t understand what it’s like to feel as a Jew. And as people began to say, “It felt to me and to my family like the Holocaust was happening again.” I couldn’t out of presumption say “I get that,” but I could walk with them-
Rod: Wow.
Jim: And hurt with them.
Rod: Wow.
Jim: And as I walked more deeply, and the same thing with Muslims. I remember sitting with a Muslim leader one time, and he said, “The chief of staff in our mosque last week lost 13 family members in an Israeli bombing in Gaza.” And I was thinking, what would that feel like to lose 13 members of your family in one day? And all you could do is just to listen and to walk with them, and to ask God to take you further into their stories. And I think that’s what God wants us to do as we start to encounter one another in our respective cultural stories, to not pretend like we understand, but instead to really hear people and encourage them to tell us more of what they’re feeling, not kind of come back with, “Well, did you think of this?” or “Maybe it wasn’t,” or. But just invite them to say more of where their story is.
Rod: Oh, man, you have said so much, Jim. You talked about it being willing to hurt with people, right, and Paul says this, right? We rejoice with those who rejoice, right, but we also grieve with those who are grieving. And I feel like we don’t have this, how would I say this? I don’t know that we really get this in Western Christianity, right? Because we’re so impacted and influenced by enlightenment thinking, and rational thinking, and what it means to be logical.
Jim: That’s a good insight.
Rod: So that when somebody’s hurting, we tell them what they should do.
Jim: Yeah, that’s right.
Rod: “Well, you should just,” “Well, it’ll be all right. Just believe God.”
Jim: And sometimes we tack a scripture in there too.
Rod: Yeah, we gotta tack a scripture in there, right? And we feel like we were godly. But what we don’t do is what you described is sit and listen, as you talked about the textures of this German family’s experience and life. You couldn’t get to know that apart from listening and saying, “Well, tell me more about that.” So you’ve done that with me, by the way. You’ve done that with me. When I share painful stories with Jim, he’ll just listen, and he’ll say, “Well, man, what was that like? Man, how did that make you feel?” Right, and you don’t even realize that you’re doing it, but what you do is you express empathy to me for things that I have experienced in a negative way, so that now the sting of it is not nearly as bad as it would’ve been without that expression of empathy. And I think it’s something that we really have to learn as people who announce faith in Christ, right? He was a great empath. In fact, empathy is the quintessential emotion.
Jim: It is.
Rod: It’s a quintessential emotion, and Jesus displayed it, right.
Jim: That’s right.
Rod: When he saw the crowds in Matthew 9-
Jim: That’s right.
Rod: He said, “The people are harassed and helpless, like sheep without shepherd.” And the Bible says that he was moved in his guts.
Jim: That’s right. That’s right.
Rod: Right. He felt their pain. I think about all these movements in our nation, especially with the political tension, with the racial tensions, and what I see mostly is a failure to listen. Right? So rather than say, I wonder why Black lives matters to them. Right? The question often comes back, “Well, don’t all people matter?”
Jim: That’s right.
Rod: Right, it’s not a listening posture.
Jim: That’s right. And I think it’s thinking that we understand what the person means when they say Black lives matter. And from our frame of reference, from our narrative, we then quickly put a judgment on it.
Rod: Sure, sure.
Jim: Rather than listening to what has been your unique story, not just you as a man, but stretching back decades and hundreds of years. What does that mean to you?
Rod: Yes.
Jim: And the more Natalie and I have walked with you, and it is such an honor to walk with you and Sherry, and others who have been so gracious to let us into their worlds and their lives. And I remember times that you would call, I remember after that horrible event in Buffalo a few years ago, and you called me the next day and you were really, really hurting. And that was a deep, deep experience for me. And I thought, this is such a privilege God has given us to walk with you in the midst of this, and to be able to say, so if this is a sacred stewardship from God, what does God want from us in that? But I think too many times we’re just, we’re in a hurry, or we think we know, and Natalie and I have sometimes talked about on this intercultural journey, how it’s like, you go to the shore. You know, we’re beach people. We love the ocean, you know? And so you go to the shore and you first, you know, as a child, you dip your toes in the water, and that’s exciting. And you think you’ve really done something, and the waves are way out there. And then a little bit later, you go out and you’re waist deep, and the waves are hitting you, and then you think you’re really there. And then you get to the sandbar and the really big waves are out beyond, and then you get the courage to go out and surf those waves. Then one day you realize there are ships out there in the deep, and they’re out there for weeks and months. And that’s what the journey has been like. At first, you know, you get close to someone of a different culture and you think, whoa, I know so much. And one day you saw, I’ve just got my toes in the water. And then people allow you to go deeper-
Rod: Wow.
Jim: To waist deep. And then you get to the sandbar.
Rod: Wow.
Jim: And then you get out to the really big waves. And then you realize, here are people who’ve lived this for generations, and I’m just a child.
Rod: Yeah, yeah. You know, I love the way you described it as going out beyond the sandbar. You don’t go deeper until the other person’s story matters to you.
Jim: Yeah, yeah.
Rod: Till the story matters, till you dignify the story. And that’s what you’ve done for me in our relationship but I think-
Jim: Oh, you’ve done it to me as well. It’s been great. A lifesaver many times-
Rod: Amen. Amen.
Jim: Just your friendship.
Rod: I think-
Jim: We’ve lamented together about different things.
There’s no doubt about that, no doubt about it. I think that’s what people are crying out for though, right? And I think it’s across the ethnic makeup of our nation, right, that people, and not only ethnically, racially, religiously, people are crying out, “Can my story matter to you?”
Jim: That’s right.
Rod: Right, as recently, we were in a Muslim country, in Africa, in Morocco, and it was just amazing to see how open people were as you listened to them, as you listened to their story. And I learned something, it brought me back to this nation, be quick to listen. Right, there are people who have political views for reasons. Right, and so I try to understand what is important to them. Right, I try to understand what their fears are, right, because behind each person’s story, there is a deep emotion.
Jim: Yes.
Rod: Right. And if we don’t seek to grasp the emotional experience they’re having, more than the words perhaps, or even the things they’re saying, then we will miss the textures. I love, I’m gonna steal that word, right? We miss the textures. Let’s talk about this, what empathy looks like practically some more, because I think it’s being willing to hear someone’s story. I think it’s being open to dignify their story, not understand their story, not even like their story, right? I don’t have to agree with your story, but can I dignify and be open to your story, your experience, without shutting it down as somehow not valid or, you know, not worth hearing?
Jim: Yes, I think of a practical one that I’ve tried to follow for years is when you hear someone start to share a story that’s very different than yours, develop the art of suspending your judgment. We often think that empathy always has to imply agreement. It doesn’t. There are certain things you may never quite agree on, but you can suspend your judgment out of, you know, the dignity, you’re offering someone the dignity they deserve. They’re a bearer of God’s image. So when you listen, you walk toward them, even if internally you’re experiencing cognitive dissonance, you’re experiencing, this isn’t the narrative I’m used to, but you walk further and you continue to suspend your judgment. You’re not abandoning your convictions or your beliefs, but you’re simply putting them to the side so that you’re able to walk with them. And there’ll be plenty of time later to then say, okay, have my perspectives shifted? And I’m not talking about biblical absence, I’m talking about ways that we perceive life. And there have been hundreds of ways, as Natalie and I have been on this journey, that as time has gone on, we will then look back and laugh sometimes at the assumptions we once thought were certain. And as we’ve walked with people, we’ve realized, oh, we see it so differently now.
Rod: Yes, yes. Jim, what you’re describing about this suspending judgment is important in all of our relationships, right. This empathic listening is huge. It has huge implications for how we connect with our children.
Jim: Oh, absolutely.
Rod: How we connect with our spouses, how we connect with our neighbors, our coworkers. There’s so many implications for this that I believe the ripple effect will have to be how we relate to people across our communities, and cities and states and nations.
Jim: Absolutely.
Rod: This empathic listening could change the game.
Jim: It absolutely could.
Rod: It could change the game. And I think Christians, we have the greatest opportunity on our doorstep, right, to set our nation, our churches on a course of Jesus-like empathy, right? Nobody, by the way, nobody can threaten our love for Jesus.
Jim: That’s right.
Rod: Our commitment to his word.
Jim: That’s right.
Rod: Because we listen, right? We actually gain credibility. And people give you the right to talk more about your faith when they know that you care enough to listen.
Jim: Amen.
Rod: Yeah. Wow. We can say so much about this, and we will continue to drop some-
Jim: That’s right.
Rod: Messages in this area about empathic listening, because it’s so pivotal. It’s a new learning, Jim. It’s a new learning for many of us. Again, we’ve been taught in our western construct, in all of our educational systems, if we can say the right words-
Jim: That’s right.
Rod: If we can memorize the stuff that, you know, was lectured to us, and we can get the grade, but our relationships are failing across the nation.
Jim: That’s right.
Rod: And our politics are failing across the nation.
Jim: That’s right.
Rod: And I really believe that empathic listening is a gift from God-
Jim: Amen.
Rod: To help us begin healing in all those areas.
Jim: Amen. Amen. All right, here’s a call to action for you, a practical step. When you are building a relationship with someone who’s from a different culture, and they’re starting to explain a story or perspective, just internally slow yourself down, and instead of being ready for your response, be ready for another question. “Would you mind telling me more about this?” Or “How do you feel about that?” Do that and see if doors start opening up further than where you were before.
Rod: That’s a great exercise. I love that. Right. I love that. Tell me more about that. Tell me how you feel about that. Giving people room, permission to express what’s really deep within. I do this exercise with a lot of my clients when I’m working with couples, and I’ll ask them to grade your spouse on how good a listener they are on a scale of 1 to 10, right? So I want you to grade somebody close to you, right, how good a listener is your spouse, is your pastor, your bible study leader, right? And then maybe ask them, somebody else to grade you on how good a listener they feel like you are on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the highest, and one being the lowest. And open up the dialogue and say, “So, why did you say I’m a two or three or four?” You’d be amazed that people are experiencing us as listeners, and if they had the opportunity, they could say, “You are a tremendous listener,” or, “You got a lot of work to do in that area.” And just be open to that. So give that a shot. Hey, hit us in the comments and let us know if these videos are helpful. We’d love to hear your questions. Let us know how these practical steps that we’re offering are helpful to you. And if there’s anything else you want us to talk about and address, let us know.