Learning How to Listen in a Digital Age

I recently read Timothy Egan's "A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith." The travelogue depicts a multi-leveled journey. On one level, there is a physical trek through contemporary Europe. A a deeper level, there is a spiritual trek through Europe's Christian heritage. As Egan walks, he grapples with his own beliefs and faith commitments. Full of honesty and candor, Egan sets out to hear the voice of God amidst the frenetic pace of his experience. The book is captivating, raw, and poetic.

As he starts his walk from England to Italy on The Via Francigena, he encounters the first directive in The Rule of St. Benedict: "Listen." It is to be the watchword of his journey.

Again and again, Egan recalls the importance of listening to the Christian faith. Drawing upon the scriptures and the rules of St Benedict, the writings of the apostles and the teachings of Pope Francis, the book emphasizes how utterly essential listening is to a life of faith.

As I read Egan's memoir, I am struck by how he managed to re-connect to his faith. It was not through reason or logic as Augustine might instruct, nor through tradition, as some clerics might teach. He does not find his spiritual footing through attendance at mass or worship (in his memoir, he opts to skip such services when invited). Rather, the author found spiritual sustenance through silently walking the lonely passages of the Via Francigena. Clearly there is something to be said about how intentional, active listening makes us more likely to notice what God is up to in our midst.

Is it any wonder, then, that one's faith often feels contested in this digital age, a time defined by more noise, fewer conversations, and constant context switching?

Even when I try to be completely intentional about my listening, I am interrupted by texts and emails, Slack notifications and news alerts. I find it challenging to listen to members of my own family - let alone the voice of the divine!

But it's not just interruption that inhibits our willingness to listen.

It's that digital technology actively takes away opportunities to practice listening to one another. As digital tools for collaboration become more sophisticated and AI advances, I am able to work asynchronously and independently with increasing ease. The conversations and interactions I would have once required to solve a problem can now be solved through interaction with AI. The alignment I need with collaborators and co-workers can now be solved through updates and notifications on apps like Trello, JIRA, and Asana. Thus my week involves fewer actual discussions, fewer opportunities to listen.

Listening is also made more difficult by the expanding items on our to-do list. As AI and digital workplace tools make us more productive (at least in theory), we are expected to take on a more expansive set of commitments. If these tools reduce the weekly hours required for Project A from 40 to 20, then the supervisor will soon add Projects B and C to our list. And while these projects might not add more hours to our workweek, they will certainly add to our cognitive load. That's because a wider set of tasks on my list requires me to rapidly change contexts from one deliverable to the next. The pace of work in the digital age might not require us to work more hours. But it always requires us to pack more into the hours we work. This way of working depletes our capacity for focus and listening.

This isn't to say we shouldn't use AI or digital collaboration tools. These resources can remove much of the drudgery of our work lives, freeing us up to spend less time on mindless, rote tasks. If using an app like Monday.com or Confluence means I get back the hours I spend in tedious project update meetings I will gladly partake. If digital tools allow me to work remotely, to spend more time with family, than I'll gladly accept their requisite pings and dings. Simple unplugging is not the solution to the challenge of listening in contemporary culture.

Instead, we should return to Benedict's command to Listen.

I've heard it said that listening involves both "listening to respond" and "listening to understand." The former is a faster, more common form of listening, while the latter is more empathetic and relational. Yet I would suggest that these two levels of listening are not enough for what the life of faith demands.

Faith in a digital age is about listening to discern. That's the type of listening that Timothy Egan discovered while hiking the Via Francigena. And while most of us won't attempt a trans-continental pilgrimage, this type of listening afforded by the pilgrimage or other forms of contemplative practice can be a balm to the distracted souls of the digital age. Perhaps, then, growing in our faith isn't about believing more ardently, or praying more consistently, or attending church more regularly. Maybe its simply about learning how to listen.

2024 in a Tech-Shaped Culture: 5 New Year's Resolution for The Church

Happy New Year!

As we turn the page to another year, here are five resolutions that I hope the church can keep in the months ahead. Each of these resolutions addresses or aligns with the values that shape our tech-shaped culture (values that I wrote about in "Grace and Gigabytes").

Resolution 1: Preach More Lived Stories and Fewer Theological Abstractions

Secularization has accelerated. Church attendance has plummetted. Belief in the trasncendent, let alone the dogma of organized religion, is constantly contested. In this default context of fragmentation and disbelief, the church cannot afford to preach the language of abstraction.

What is abstraction?

Abstraction is a claim about God that is made without a supporting story, example, or illustration.

In the year ahead, let's resolve to tilt the balance in our preaching towards to the lived stories of God's work in our contexts. Let's resolve to proclaim so many lived stories in our context that we discern a common "watch word," or statement of how God shows up in the particulars of our time and place.

Resolution 2: Enrich In-Person Conversations through Digital Content

As we continue to move beyond the pandemic, live streaming has become less appealing as a regular worship habit. According to Gallup, only 5% of Americans are attending services remotely.

Still, digital ministry will continue to serve as the front door to visitors and guests, necessitating that we continue to offer online worship.

What will happen to digital ministry? We might shift to a content-supported model of digital ministry, in which we create and distribute digital content in service to furthering the dialogues started through our liturgies. We might move from events (streaming worship, for example) to posts and stories that enrich our understanding of a topic and expand our theological imagination. This is the model we've tested at Good Shepherd with "Conversation Sundays" - discussions that start in worship and are furthered through digital content in the week ahead.

Resolution 3: Make Space for AI Experimentation

AI is a once-in-a-generation technological leap. AI will shape our culture, and how our culture makes meaning, in ways that we can only begin to imagine. This new technology will inevitably change not just how we execute tasks but how we process information - how we come to learn something, how we come to believe in something.

It's no exaggeration. AI will change what it means to have faith.

The church cannot sit by idly and observe the AI disruption. We must be active experimenters. From creating digital content based on sermon manuscripts to writing newsletters with chatbots, from using ChatGPT to help us articulate personal faith stories to using text to image generators for our newsletter and website, we must resolve to voraciously experiment with these new tools.

Resolution 4: Teach Tech Sabbath as a Spiritual Practice

Just as AI has the potential to be used for purposeful ministry, it can also create a vicious cycle that further retrenches us in digital isolation. As AI creates better content it will command more of our focus. As it consumes more of our attention, we become more enmeshed in the content of our screens.

Tech Sabbath, whether practiced regularly for an hour or for an entire day of the week, is the defiant claim that these vicious cycles do not have ultimate power over my being. To practice a Tech Sabbath is to remember that we are created for much more than digital consumption.

Resolution 5: Model Gratitude as a Leadership Practice

I recently heard Professor Tom Thibodeau define servant leadership in three parts. Prof. Thibodeau suggested that the first job of a leader is to define reality. The second job of a leader is to say thank you. Everything in between is service.

We live in a world where gratitude is missing - or where it is so shallow and superficial that it loses all meaning. When our technology accelerates our communication, we tend to jettison that which is most essential: expressions of thanks, and articulations of our stories. Each is fundamental to the formation of trust. Yet both become increasingly absent the faster we move.

In the year ahead, let's resolve to model how to set aside the drive towards productivity to give meaningful thanks for the service we receive, and to give thanks for those who serve at our side.

In all contexts, in any forums, we are called to partake in the spiritual practice of gratitude in ways that are deep, meaningful, and enriching.

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@ryanpanzer would like to wish everyone a Blessed 2024!

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How to Become a Servant Leader in a Digital Age

Perhaps no other thinker has done more to define the practice of servant leadership than Larry Spears. Spears, who runs a center for servant leadership and has written over a dozen books on the topic, has searched the canon of servant leadership texts, case studies, and examples to distill 10 characteristics of servant leadership.

After years of analysis of servant leadership scholarship and theory, Spears determined that servant leaders share the following characteristics:

• Listening: clarifying the will of a group

• Empathy: listening with positive intent

• Healing: creating wholeness

• Awareness: of the self, and of the situation

• Persuasion: convincing, rather than forcing compliance

• Conceptualization: seeing the bigger picture

• Foresight: identifying likely outcomes

• Stewardship: "holding something in trust for another"

• Commitment to the growth of people

• Building community

According to Spears, not every servant leader embodies all or most or even some of the characteristics on this list. But chances are, those who are committed to this practice will find some overlap with these characteristics.

Still, I question whether this list holds up today.

Spears published this list in an article printed in the 2010 edition of the Journal of Virtues & Leadership, and 2010 was a remarkably different cultural moment. Social media was gaining popularity but was still mostly the domain of the young and tech-oriented. Smartphones were widely available but were mostly owned by affluent, professional consumers. Today, digital distraction is the default experience: swiping and scrolling having replaced small talk and conversation - multi-tasking and messaging having become the normative ways of working.

Can you really listen deep enough to clarify a group's sense of will when pings and alerts divert both your own attention, and certainly the attention of other group members? Can you actually create a sense of group wholeness when digital distractions cut into our moment to moment experience?

I would argue that Spears' list is still a useful and authoritative compendium of the habits of the servant leader. I would also argue that such a list has pre-requisites for a distracted, digital culture. In other words, these traits of servant leadership require pre-work.

The pre-requisites are simple: First, slow down. And then, tell stories.

Slowing down: Each of Spears' attributes requires the servant leader to step aside from the fast flow of the digital age. One can't listen deeply if you're sprinting from one task to another, nor is it possible to take the time to persuade others without effort and intentionality. Conceptualization is constrained by our tendency to sprint from one meeting to the next. Thus the first-prerequisite of servant leadership is to "slow the proverbial roll" that engulfs our efforts. While slowing down seems simple in theory, it is nearly impossible to adopt in practice, with everything in our surrounding culture pushing us to accelerate. It's not so much that the servant leader creates intentional moments of slowness: leadership retreats, mindful pauses, cleansing breaths. Rather, it's that the servant leader consistently deploys micro-habits to subtly slow things down.

A few specific habits of slowing down come to mind from the servant leaders I have worked with:

• A commitment to small talk: Idle chatter is not irrelevant, and the servant leader recognizes this. Not only does the servant leader tolerate small talk at the start of a call, a meeting, or a presentation - he or she welcomes it. Moreover, the servant leader remembers the details that emerge from these conversations: who is seeing which movies, who supports which sports teams, who is doing what over the weekend. When prioritized, small talk makes a big difference in slowing the pace.

• An elimination of digital distraction: The servant leader recognizes that multi-tasking is a myth. Whether closing a laptop screen and turning off a phone in a face-to-face setting, or turning on one's webcam in a group Zoom, or taking a weekly digital Sabbath - the servant leader sees the tension between analog focus and effective service.

• A return to shared values: Many organizations have shared aspirations, many workers take assessments to understand their core values or personality types. The servant leader draws upon these commitments and sources of motivation at the start of a shared effort.

When we slow down, we create one of the pre-conditions for servant leadership, and make it possible to share stories.

Telling stories: A few years ago I toured the offices of Menlo Innovations, a small software development firm in Ann Arbor, MI. Menlo is led by Rich Sheridan, who describes himself as the company's Chief Storytelling Officer. Among the standard executive-level responsibilities, Rich sees himself as responsible for the telling of stories: those of the customer, the employee, and the end-user. It's this ability to create coherent, compelling narratives that makes Menlo Innovations a joyful place to work.

The digital age is saturated with content but short on stories. We know what people do but we rarely understand the why.

Telling stories is about creating coherent stories from the scattered, fragmentary data of our day-to-day existence. It's about pushing ourselves to understand purpose - of our own efforts and those with whom we collaborate. It's about starting with small talk and gradually moving towards the big picture conversations that create deep trust.

When we commit to slowing down and telling stories, we begin to practice servant leadership. When we slow down and tell stories, Larry Spears' list of 10 characteristics is all the more likely to describe how we lead people. And our communities are more likely to say they were better off because of our leadership.