conversation is an engine

ListenTalk: The Promise. The Mission. The Chapters.

Dear Reader: A word, please.

Speakers’ Corner, London, mid-1960s

Over the next few months I’ll be writing in response to a couple classes I’m teaching at the University of Northwestern—St. Paul. That means I’ll be dealing with questions and ideas that pop up in class. The classes tend to be quite collaborative and the students have interesting contributions that I may work out in this forum.

I’m also trying to work out how the notion of ListenTalk applies to the different audiences I work with as a copywriter. ListenTalk: Conversation is an Engine is built on a theological basis and is first a meditation on a new (or—I maintain—a very old) way of looking at how we spend time with each other. Over the course of the year I hope to enlarge the argument to help workers talk with bosses (for instance) and vice versa. I’d like to enlarge the argument so conservatives and liberals can put down their label (and libel) machines to engage in productive talk. I hope to work out the notion of commercial conversation so companies can begin to talk with customers in a way that treats people as rational collaborators versus emotive flesh-encased ATMs.

But first, and to bring a bit more focus on this initial argument, I present the promise and mission of ListenTalk, as well as the chapter synopses:

ListenTalk Promise:

Read ListenTalk and you will be stimulated to reconsider how even your smallest, most ordinary conversations are part of a much larger story.

ListenTalk Mission:

ListenTalk was designed to help individuals in faith communities see how God works through the most ordinary and common conversations—and to see how those conversations transform everything from personal calendars to cultural mandates.

ListenTalk Chapter Synopses:

1. The Preacher, Farmer and Everybody Else. What do you expect from a conversation? Preachers preach and hope for the best. But farmers work the soil in a studied way that collaborates for growth. Meet five thinkers who have studied the ways and means and opportunities hidden under the surface of ordinary conversations. These five show that ordinary conversation is full of collaborative potential and regularly turns into some of the most important, creative and lasting work we can do together.
2. Intent Changes How We Act Together. If we enter a conversation itching for a fight, that’s just what we’ll find. But we can change our intent. And one thinker shows a better way to engage in persuasion, while the apostle Paul shows God’s intent to pull us toward Him without a fight.
3. How To Be with a God Bent on Reunion. The first thing to know is that conversation with God is not limited to a lifetime. Second: talking with God over a lifetime tends to change a person. Third: what does it look like to befriend, follow and serve a God whose full energy is spent on connecting with people?
4. Your Church as a Conversation Factory. Peter found a way to incorporate God’s old words into a very new situation. Conversations among believers do the same, person to person, with world-changing results. How conversations emerging from within a church change everything outside the church.
5. Extreme Listening. Extreme listening opens us to live in a larger story: Just ask Hannah. Five misconceptions about listening. Become an extreme listener by adopting three attitudes, four motivations and three strategies.
6. A Guide to Honest Talk. How to walk your talk in three steps: 1. Show up. 2. Know this about people. 3. Join in and move out.
7. Prayer Changes Our Listening and Talking. What really happens when we engage in conversation with God? Conversation with God as our model for talking with each other.
8. Go ListenTalk. We are most alive when helping others see the true thing inside us. Marching orders and opportunities.

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Image credit: Moyra Peralta via Spitalfields Life