Introduction
Our church is seeking to become more vulnerable, honest and confessional with one another. This is hard. It’s contrary to our fallenness. The first response, after the fall in Eden, was to cover and hide. We’ve been doing it ever since. However, if we want to faithfully follow the commands of Jesus for his church, we know we need to come out of hiding. We need to be vulnerable.
After all, you can’t weep with me when I keep my weeping secret. We can’t bear each other’s burdens if we don’t know about them. I can’t rejoice with you over your patient endurance in suffering, or your victory over a certain sin, if I’m not aware of your suffering or sinning.
So, vulnerability is a must. But so too is treating the vulnerability of others well. Vulnerability involves risk. It’s a privilege when someone entrusts their sin and suffering to us. If we don’t listen well, we make vulnerability harder for each other.
We don’t want to force people into being vulnerable. Rather, imagine when someone is struggling, instead of covering and hiding, they want to share with their church family, they want to ask for help, they want to be vulnerable, and they know they have a group of brothers and sisters in Christ they can come to.
Crystal and Babies
Imagine someone handing you something made of crystal. It is precious, but fragile, and should be treated with care. If you hold it well and then gently pass it back to them, they will trust you again. If you drop it clumsily, start juggling with it, intentionally smash it, leave it sitting perilously on the edge of a table, they are going to struggle to trust you again.
There are rules to follow for holding a newborn. Don’t lift them by the ankles is an obvious one. Make sure to support the head and neck. As parents pass their baby over to people who want to hold them, they usually watch carefully to make sure the baby is safe with the other person. If you are clumsy and careless, the parents are understandably going to be reluctant to pass the baby over another time.
And so it is when people are vulnerable. When people talk to you about what’s hard, we should treat it with great care. We’re not naturally great listeners. We don’t naturally treat the vulnerability of others with care. Naturally, we’re selfish, presumptuous, careless.
Our hope is that this series will show you how ten ways of poor listening can prevent people from being vulnerable. Which will then encourage and equip you to listen well, and so create a culture of vulnerability in your church family.
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