A Space for All to be Heard

Conversation as hospitality

A note from Lindsey: Friends, thank you so much for your enthusiasm and support of The Virtue of Dialogue! In case you missed it: Last year at The Englewood Review of Books, we launched our publishing arm, Englewood Press. We believe good ideas and good conversation are essential for the church, and we want to publish books that help thoughtful readers and congregations connect with God and one another in meaningful ways. The Cultivating Communities Series is the first part of that effort! In October, we released The Shape of Our Lives: A Field Guide for Congregational Formation (currently on sale!). And last week, we released book #2, The Virtue of Dialogue: Becoming a Thriving Church Through Conversation, by our own

C. Christopher Smith

. This book tells the story of Englewood Christian Church’s practice of Sunday evening conversations and casts a vision for how churches can reclaim conversation as an essential part of their lives together.

(Englewood Press | Amazon | Bookshop.org | Barnes & Noble)

Here’s what our friend

Jen Pollock Michel

¹ had to say about the book:

As a friend and writing colleague, I have been in joyful conversation with Chris Smith for more than ten years. From afar, I have admired the common life, common work, and common gospel vision Chris has engaged with other members of Englewood Christian Church in his local context. This book—and Englewood’s story—illustrates how trust can be built and rebuilt, even in our polarized moment.

To imagine how we can begin faithfully and charitably talking to one another again in the Spirit of Christ, read The Virtue of Dialogue.

—Jen Pollock Michel is the author of five books, including In Good Time and Keeping Place.

Today, we’re excited to share an excerpt from the book with you!

A Space for All to be Heard: The Hospitality of Conversation

Common conceptions of hospitality depict two distinct roles: host (the one who is extending hospitality) and guest (the recipient of the hospitality). While Christian traditions and practices of hospitality certainly include this dynamic, they reflect the image of Christ when they go beyond this dichotomy to create spaces of mutuality in which gifts flow in both directions. Christine Pohl, whose book Making Room is an essential work on the practice of Christian hospitality, notes that “practitioners consistently comment that they receive more than they give.” At Englewood, although the church community as a whole functions as the host of our conversations, there are a multitude of guests from both inside and outside the congregation, and the lines defining host and guest are often blurred.

Pohl describes Christian hospitality:

In hospitality, the stranger [or guest] is welcomed into a safe, personal, and comfortable place, a place of respect and acceptance and friendship. Even if only briefly, the stranger is included in a life-giving and life-sustaining network of relations. Such welcome involves attentive listening and a mutual sharing of lives and life stories. It requires an openness of heart, a willingness to make one’s life visible to others, and a generosity of time and resources.

Although our practice of conversation has never fully embodied the sort of hospitality that Pohl describes, at some point our historical practices of hospitality aligned with our emerging practice of conversation, and we came to aspire to have our weekly conversations be this kind of hospitable space.

We regularly welcome visitors and neighbors into this space, as well as people within our congregation who are new or on the margins of our community, and invite everyone to participate together in exploring the current topic of conversation. At one point, our church building sat adjacent to three homeless shelters, and it was a regular occurrence for a neighbor staying at one of these shelters to wander into our building on a Sunday evening, looking for a worship service. Such guests were encouraged to participate, but a few times we had to stage awkward interventions when a guest would try to derail the conversation at length with whatever thoughts were rolling through their mind. In some of those cases, someone from the church would offer to continue the conversation about what was on the guest’s mind at another time. We did typically want to hear that person out, but also recognized that their thoughts flowed in a different direction than that which we were pursuing in our congregational conversations.

Inherent in hospitality is a tension between the aims of the host and those of the guest, something Pohl names as “the fragility of hospitality.” She tells the story of a church to which she once belonged that saw its primary vocation as hospitality, a congregation that strived to respond faithfully to the needs of all neighbors who crossed its path. “It was an incredibly fruitful and blessed time,” she writes. “Within only a few years, however, the church itself had collapsed under the weight of ministry, the leaders worn out from the unrelenting numbers of needy strangers, the parishioners wary of any further commitments.” We often recognized this sort of tension in our practice of conversation. We want to be generous in receiving guests in our conversations, in the same spirit of hospitality God extends to us in Jesus. At the same time, the conversations are a necessary practice for us inside the congregation, and we also have to be faithful to the ways we are caring for one another and growing together as a particular expression of Christ’s body. Navigating this tension requires patience, gentleness, and kindness, and an agreed-upon set of conversational norms to which we can refer back when necessary.

If someone were to arrive at a Sunday evening conversation at Englewood, they would see chairs arranged in a large circle and a handwritten list of “conversational norms” on the wall.² We call the room “The Parlor,” and though it’s an informal multi-purpose space, even the name implies a space built for and focused on conversation. A rotating team of people are responsible for transcribing and taking notes on every week, which are then provided via email for all church members. Any congregation that wishes to implement a conversation practice will need to think carefully about the unique individuals who make up their specific community. For example, are there language differences that might require translation and interpretation? Do members with hearing or speech impairments require accommodation to participate fully? Hospitality and inclusion are not limited to these practical considerations, but they are certainly necessary to consider.

The type of hospitality that was cultivated as we continued to practice conversation—and particularly as we extended it to one another within our church—is a sort that is rarely found in twenty-first century churches. Specifically, it was a space where all members were welcome and invited to be seen and heard, and not just once or occasionally, but week after week, year after year, as we each continued to learn and grow. In many American churches, the closest approximation of this dynamic happens in small groups (which are often called life groups, home groups, community groups, etc.). These groups can provide a tiny taste of this kind of hospitality, but necessarily only for the tiny segment of the congregation within a particular group and not for the congregation as a whole.

At Englewood, it felt essential that our conversations were experienced by and contributed to by as large a portion of our church as possible. Being seen and heard is vital for cultivating our personal belonging in a particular community, and for the flourishing of a community as it grows in its understanding of its members and their gifts. Some participants in our conversations exhibited, over time, gifts in carefully reading scripture and interpreting what it might mean for us today. And it’s important to note that these gifts didn’t always line up with academic training: some members cultivated these gifts over years of practice in the local church context. Other members demonstrated gifts in careful listening and asking good questions. As we eventually expanded to a team approach in facilitating our conversations, we would draw upon these gifts that were uncovered in the course of our talking together. Even certain anxieties some members had—about scarcity or ambiguity, for instance—were, in an indirect way, their own sort of gifts that taught us to move slowly and be attentive to these concerns that arose among us. As an increasingly ideologically diverse community, we are slowly learning to receive the gifts of both our more conservative and more progressive members. Our conservative siblings remind us, among other things, that history and tradition matter and we should not hastily abandon them. On the other hand, our progressive siblings teach us not to simply settle for the status quo, that God is at work transforming not only us as a congregation, but indeed all humanity and all creation.

Our experience of receiving one another as gifts in our practice of conversation is quite rare among churches. Like infants who do not yet know that the parts of their body are connected and can be orchestrated to do wondrous things, many churches do not really know their members and the manifold gifts they each bring. Growing in our recognition and knowledge of one another was a gift of God’s grace that rippled through every corner of our life together. This sort of recognition could not have been cultivated without our enduring commitment to hospitable conversation. Over time, these conversations formed us into a community that resembles the human body, consisting of many strikingly diverse members who recognize each other and the distinctive role each member plays—not only in the body’s health, but in the sort of witness it bears to a fragmented and polarized world.

Hospitality guided us at Englewood Christian Church into the practice of conversation, and sustained us as we stumbled forward in this new practice. Conversation requires the mutuality of Christian hospitality, but it also transforms us into increasingly hospitable people. The desire for diverse congregations that embody practices of hospitality and inclusion is not uncommon among churches today, but healthy embodiment of that diversity does not happen without intentional practice. Perhaps these desires may lead others churches into their own intentional practices of conversation.³

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Englewood Press | Amazon | Bookshop.org | Barnes & Noble

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1. Jen is the author of five books, including In Good Time and Keeping Place. She has been a host and contributor to The Englewood Review of Books podcast, and we highly recommend her Substack!

2. These conversational norms, as well as many of the questions explored during Sunday night conversations, are included as an appendix in the book.

3. This excerpt has been adapted from Chapter 4 of The Virtue of Dialogue.