In today’s highly charged social and political environment, we often don’t know how to talk well with other people–especially with people whose backgrounds differ from our own. In this episode we talk with writer, editor, and community developer Chris Smith about:
- why conversation has become such a challenge in the 21st century,
- why conversation is perhaps the most-needed spiritual practice of our individualistic age, and
- how to have hard conversations in the church.
We must learn to converse effectively with those who differ from us in the body of Christ so we can embody Christ together in the world. In community, we learn what it means to belong to others and to a story that is bigger than ourselves, presence and embodiment is key with people and communication, which leads to the most transformative and productive relational communication.
How would we communicate differently if we really believed that we belong to one another in the body of Christ?
Links from this episode:
- Chris’s Book How the Body of Christ Talks: Recovering the Practice of Conversation in the Church
- The Englewood Review of Books, where Chris is the editor
- Follow Chris on Twitter
- Our Membership Community on Patreon
- Our upcoming Enneagram Transformation Workshops
Christopher Smith (MA, Indiana University) is a writer, community developer, and founding editor of The Englewood Review of Books. He is coauthor of the award-winning book Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus and the author of Reading for the Common Good: How Books Help Our Churches and Neighborhoods Flourish. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, USA Today, the Indianapolis Star, HuffPost, Christianity Today, the Christian Century, Relevant, and Sojourners. Smith lives on the urban Near Eastside of Indianapolis, Indiana, where he is a longtime member of Englewood Christian Church, a congregation that has been learning to talk together for over two decades.
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