Healthy Communication for Healthy Community

“Community of Promise” plays with the idea of the Promised land being more about Quality of Community than about geography. So what constitutes a healthy community experience. Modern political culture identifies characteristics like order and prosperity as the most significant factors. A couple of years ago, I preached a sermon about Jesus' time of temptation in the wilderness. As I looked at the nature of his temptations, it appeared to me that Comfort, Safety, Power, and Status were the potential barriers to his ability to fulfill his destiny in the world. But an individual's personal experience of comfort, safety, power, and status is not at all the same as a community's experience. Is it perhaps not enough, then, for individuals to seek these things. What do they look like from the perspective of community?

Remember that these are temptations, which means that there may be other, deeper, values that are necessary for communities to be healthy. One of these is broadly practiced compassion. What distinguishes compassion from pity-based charity is understanding. And understanding can only develop in relationships by means of communication.

In my counseling practice, I meet with many couples whose stated therapeutic purpose is to improve their communication in the relationship. When I ask them to define their understanding of communication, they usually tell me that they want to be able to get their point across better to their partner. I try to teach them that the most useful foundation of communication is not the ability to speak more clearly (although that has its legitimate uses). The most useful foundation is the ability to listen deeply, respectfully, and openly.

Perhaps you recognize that too often our practice of listening attempts to support the beliefs we already carry about the other person. Open listening recognizes that this other person is a brand new creation today, so we commit ourselves to hear what is new, perhaps what is in the process of being born in the other. When that kind of listening happens throughout a community, the foundational needs of the community become clearer.

So if “The Promised Land” can be defined by quality of community, then careful listening to one another determines the eventual structure of particular communities. And each resultant healthy community provides the individuals in it greater opportunity to get what they really need.

In the wilderness, the Children of Israel needed to be a healthy community so that they could survive, and perhaps even thrive, in what they perceived to be a hostile environment. Their growing focus on Comfort, Safety, Power, and Status as they neared their destination actually got in the way of their ability to experience healthy community, perhaps because it broke down their practice of mutual compassion.

How much do our present day individualistic desires for Comfort, Safety, Power, and Status get in the way of our community, too.

“Community of Promise” gives at least one perspective on this question. I invite you to read it.

Wayne Gustafson
“The Promised Land is within and among you.”