The Virtue of Dialogue
Why Conversation Matters for Congregations and Communities
A note from Lindsey:
If you’ve been here awhile, no doubt you know that conversation is one of our highest values. (It is in the name, after all!) We’re excited to share the following excerpt from the latest book from Englewood Press, The Virtue of Dialogue: Becoming a Thriving Church Through Conversation by
. In addition to managing this Substack, Chris is the Founding Editor of The Englewood Review of Books and a longtime member of Englewood Christian Church here in Indianapolis. What follows is an excerpt adapted from the book, which releases on March 25 and is available to preorder now!(Englewood Press | Amazon | Bookshop.org | Barnes & Noble)
“There is something very First Century about Englewood, and there’s also something very postmodern — that’s because Englewood is seeking to be missional, not by theorizing about it but by actually doing it. Where they began is where we all need to begin: with conversation. We must face one another in a listening mode. Only then can our words become genuine conversation. This little book could be revolutionary for your own faith community.”
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In 2012, The Virtue of Dialogue became the first piece I published on Englewood Christian Church’s weekly practice of conversation. It was a small ebook, and it set the stage for my books Slow Church (2014, co-written with John Pattison), Reading for the Common Good (2016), and especially How the Body of Christ Talks (2019), an in-depth exploration of the practice of conversation for churches.
However, even after a dozen years, when someone wants to know about our practice of conversation at Englewood—how we got started and what it means for us—I still point them to this book. It remains a clear and concise introduction to our congregational experience with talking to one another. It also challenges readers to consider what a practice of conversation might look like within the context of their own particular churches. I am often asked about where our Sunday conversation has gone over the years since that first edition was written and where it stands today.
For these reasons, we decided to publish an updated and expanded edition as part of our Cultivating Communities Series.1
Like the history of the Ancient Israelites told over the pages of the Hebrew scriptures (which Christians know as the Old Testament), our journey with conversation has been anything but linear. Three steps forward, two steps back, a season of spinning in circles and not going anywhere at all, and so on. To the frustration of some members, every few years we inevitably find ourselves in a conversation about why we talk together and how we might do it better. Personally, I think these sort of evaluative conversations are helpful, but we tend to get mired in them for way too long.
In a life together often full-to-overflowing with conversations, it can sometimes be easy to lose sight of the role our practice of regular weekly conversation plays. It is not just a niche where like-minded folks gather to discuss their work on this project or that one, or to study a portion of scripture or an important theological work (although we have plenty of these kinds of conversations at Englewood). Rather, it is a space all members—and visitors too—are invited into, one in which we struggle together to make sense of who we are as a body knit together by God. Just like our human bodies, our church body is an interconnected network of diverse members (diverse ages, diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds, diverse vocations, diverse political perspectives, and on and on.) And just like our physical bodies, our church body is healthiest when its members are paying careful attention to one another and learning to work together in spite of our differences.
Our weekly Sunday conversation is also a vital place in which we orient new members to the practice of talking together. If they are able to stick with us in the Sunday conversation for weeks or months, they will get a decent understanding of who we are and how we strive to embody the way of Jesus together in this particular urban neighborhood. I hope they see that this way of conversation, although it encourages everyone to contribute, is primarily about learning to listen. Simultaneously, we sharpen our capacity for paying attention to one another and to the time and the place in which we find ourselves gathered together by God. We certainly aren’t a perfect embodiment of these aspirations, but I hope that in our conversations, visitors and new members are able to catch at least occasional glimpses of the loving, attentive, and compassionate life of Jesus unfolding in our midst.
It might be easy for outsiders to look at who Englewood Christian Church is today—and to find us so peculiar and so unlike most churches—that they dismiss our story as not having any relevance for their own church. But once upon a time, not all that long ago, we were a fairly standard evangelical church. We want to tell the story of how we began to become the peculiar sort of congregation we are today. We had no idea where the journey of conversation would take us, but we committed to the slow and often messy work of talking together.
Currently, we find ourselves in another season of reflecting on why we talk together and how we might do so in ways that invite the participation of more of our members. We don’t plan these sorts of reflective conversations, but it seems like we find ourselves in them every five years or so. Sometimes the forms change a bit—we’ve gathered, for instance, at different times and in different spaces over the years—but we continue to talk together and to seek to know the ways in which God is guiding us. After over 25 years of our Sunday conversation, we still commit ourselves to doing this communal work.
For the last decade, I have coached distance runners of various ages, and I find a lot of parallels between running and the practice of conversation. Our Sunday conversations at Englewood aren’t the big, flashy achievement, like the personal record we set for ourselves or the marathon that earns us a medal for completing. Rather, they are more akin to the hundreds of daily, routine workouts without which the big achievements wouldn’t happen. Yes, we have accomplished many things over the last quarter century, but it is routine things like conversation and caring daily for one another and our neighbors that have enabled us to do so. These everyday practices form us and strengthen us in preparation for when opportunities arise to do more extraordinary things together.
I hope you find this portion of our story—how we began and waded into the practice of conversation—challenging. Particularly, I hope it might encourage you to reflect on what a regular practice of conversation might look like in your own church.
In his extraordinary 2008 book, The Big Sort: Why The Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart, journalist Bill Bishop, in conjunction with sociologist Robert Cushing, describes American society over the last thirty-five years as sorting itself into increasingly homogeneous social circles. Bishop begins his book:
[In] every corner of society, people were creating new, more homogeneous relations. Churches were filled with people who looked alike and, more important, thought alike. So were clubs, civic organizations, and volunteer groups. Social psychologists had studied like-minded groups and could predict how people living and worshipping in homogeneous groups would react: as people heard their beliefs reflected and amplified, they would become more extreme in their thinking.
And as the convictions of citizens bent toward the extremes in recent decades, they gradually lost the capacity for civil conversation with those of differing perspectives. Over the latter half of the era Bishop examined, the geographical sorting was amplified by the rise of internet technologies into which many people poured increasing amounts of time and energy, typically seeking out conversations with people around the globe who shared similar convictions or practices. This emerging internet culture only served to energize the social divisions already underway in the United States.
In the midst of this atmosphere of fragmentation, Englewood Christian Church, one congregation among many in our neighborhood, carved out some time on our Sunday nights and began to talk together. As we talked, we began to build trust among ourselves. Eventually, these conversations overflowed Sunday nights and began popping up throughout the week, and our church community also began finding ways to converse with our neighbors. And out of these conversations, things began to get done—not just impulsive acts ignited by a “just do something” reaction, but meaningful acts flowing out of the convictions that—after the dust we kicked up during the struggles of our conversations settled—we found we shared in common.
We were and continue to be changed by the process of talking together, and these conversations have led to the tiniest ripples of transformative change in our neighborhood. We are broken people in the midst of a profoundly broken neighborhood, and conversation has not been a quick fix for any of our problems; yet, God continues to meet us in the middle of our conversations and slowly and patiently transforms us. Most, if not all, church congregations long to experience the reconciling presence of God in their midst, and also out of that center of divine reconciliation to begin to spread Christ’s love to their neighbors. I share this story here out of our deep conviction that conversation is an essential practice for the people of God. As we learn to set aside our personal agendas and talk together in Christ-like ways, God is at work behind the scenes shaping us into the reconciled body of Christ.
Congregational conversations might take forms as different as the places our churches inhabit, but God’s people are all called to share life together, gradually coming to know others and to allow ourselves to be known. At the heart of this life of communion is conversation. I hope our story will be a means of God’s grace for your church, challenging you and ultimately blessing you.
May God give us all the courage to buck the incivility and fragmentation of our times.
Pre-order this book now:
(Englewood Press | Amazon | Bookshop.org | Barnes & Noble)
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The first book in the Cultivating Communities Series is The Shape of Our Lives: A Field Guide for Congregational Formation.