From Forced Consensus to Holy Inquiry
Conversation as the path toward resonance and receptivity
Today, we are bringing you a guest post from Brad Fruhauff. Brad is long-time reader of The Englewood Review of Books and has reviewed for us in the past. He was kind enough to send us this review of The Virtue of Dialogue, which is the second title in our Cultivating Communities book series.
If you’ve been around for awhile, you might remember that this Substack was originally called “The Conversational Life.” Conversation is a concept and skill that’s so easy to take for granted, but in reality, it is a difficult practice that requires constant negotiation with messy, complicated humans. At the same time, it is our conviction that it is an absolutely essential practice for all people, and especially for those of us who seek to follow Jesus!
We’ve written about these ideas quite a bit here on Substack:
An introduction to The Virtue of Dialogue:
More about conversation as a sign of a thriving congregation:
#2: Growing Capacity for Conversation and Discernment
Today, we’re continuing with our exploration of seven signs of thriving congregations by turning our attention to the second sign: a growing capacity for ongoing conversation and discernment.
We are grateful for the thoughtful way Brad engaged with The Virtue of Dialogue and appreciate him sharing this thoughts with us!
Conversation is Essential
In The Virtue of Dialogue, C. Christopher Smith declares his conviction that “conversation is the central practice of congregational formation.” This is the second book in Englewood Press’s Cultivating Communities Series, a project of Englewood Christian Church (ECC), Missio Alliance, and the Ekklesia Project, funded by a grant from the Lilly Endowment. The series aims to equip churches for the long, slow work of cultivating a life together.
When Smith wrote the first version of this book in 2012, we were a divided country getting back on our feet after the financial crisis of ’08. As I recall, the divisions felt pretty great even among Christians as we reckoned with Hurricane Sandy, Sandy Hook, the ACA, and Obama’s support for same-sex marriage. Calling fellow believers to conversation felt, frankly, inadequate—it wasn’t sexy enough, dramatic enough, fast enough, or far-ranging enough for what we felt was needed.
Fourteen years later, we are more divided than ever, and Christians continue to entrench in partisan positions with regards to scripture and their faith. I don’t think most of us would say that, as a nation, we’re doing great at conversation.
The Loss of Third Spaces
I’m not conflating congregational formation and cultural identity, only asserting up front that Smith’s guidance about conversation for churches can apply equally well for other communities, and it may be the kind of small, good thing that we need more than ever as partisanship plays a larger and larger role in our sense of ourselves as social and political beings.
Philosopher Robert Talisse has diagnosed our present moment as one of in-group polarization. That is, we are growing more radical in our thoughts by hanging out with political allies; our echo chambers amplify our convictions. Part of the problem, he argues, is the disappearance of non-partisan spaces, what we sometimes call “third spaces.” More and more, we only interact with people who share many of our values and beliefs and only encounter otherness in the impersonal and anonymizing sphere of social media. We cannot form bonds of trust and benevolence—as “co-authors of a shared world,” in Talisse’s words—when we only see others as Right or Left.
[W]hen politics comes to dominate our social lives such that everything we do is understood in terms of our partisan affiliations and rivalries, we erode. We begin to lose the kinds of cognitive and emotional capacities that are necessary in order to regard our fellow citizens, both our allies and our enemies alike, as our equals. We come to see our enemies as mere obstacles to be overcome, to be “owned,” as they say. And we come to see our allies as merely resources for achieving our political ends. In neither case do we see our fellow citizens as co-authors of a shared social world. — Robert Talisse[1]
Anecdotally, we know this divide is infecting our churches, and Lifeway Research recently found that the number of churchgoers who prefer to attend a church that shares their politics—or who believe they already do—has crossed the 50% mark.[3] Certainly, in the era of deconstruction, many exvangelicals have either stopped attending church or sought out one more aligned with both their politics and theology.
In other words, even church is ceasing to function as a third space.
How Conversation Shapes a Community
Smith does not argue that conversation can solve all our problems by breeding unity—far from it. In fact, the story he tells includes conflict, hurt feelings, divisions within the church body, and inconclusiveness about important topics. This is not the polite conversation led by the pastor where everyone knows to eventually fall in line; it is the impassioned exploration of matters of deep concern to people of faith who have chosen to fellowship together.
This is conversation as liturgy, as routinized, formative practice, guided by evolving expectations and informed by a constantly transforming congregation. Englewood Church sort of fell backward into this practice. At a moment of deep division and diminishing numbers in the late 90s, the church decided to turn its dying Sunday evening service into a small-group conversation, beginning with the question, “What is the Word of God?”
What followed was weeks of exploration, discussion, argument, and aggravation. Some people quit attending Sunday evenings. Some people left the church altogether. What was going on?
Englewood’s conversations took an unusual shape for a church body: They were genuine inquiries. Smith describes authentic interactions among people raising serious questions within a context that was not anxious to dispel all questions with “right doctrine.”
As Smith describes it, it wasn’t always pretty. They did not really know how to have such conversations at first (would any of us today?). But those who toughed it out discovered something unexpected: “[W]e were beginning to love and trust each other in meaningful ways,” says Smith.
Then they began to cooperate on new initiatives, which led to creating a daycare, then a school, and then mixed-income housing—all while continuing to argue and disagree on Sunday evenings.
Genuine conversation eventually helped ECC grow into a coherent third space where a diversity of people could find common ground in their faith that enabled them to have tough conversations most congregations simply avoid.
Sociologist Hartmut Rosa argues that modernity has developed to a point of profound individual alienation because isolating the self from the world is a founding principle of modernity. I think, therefore I am. The world becomes something we act upon, not with. Rosa proposes the concept of resonance as our way to a healthy relationship with the world. Resonance is “the state of mode of a dynamic relationship in which the subject and the world … are touched and transformed by each other.”
Smith does not use that word, but I get the impression that ECC’s Sunday conversations occasionally achieve resonance because of the way they require receptiveness and vulnerability.
[R]eification and the closing of the world have become the dominant relationship mode of late modern individuals, whose experience of the world is so fragile because society’s prevailing attitude to the world is epitomized by the building of walls and barbed-wire fences. These attempts are designed to keep the world at a distance and to avoid the call of the Other which is cast as a threat. — Hartmut Rosa[2]
It seems to me that, if the church is to be a light to the world—as in, this concrete historical moment—then we could do worse than to learn how to love and trust one another even while disagreeing with one another. This practice promises to lead not only to more just and equitable relations but to a fuller experience of our rootedness in the world.
The Nature of Formative Conversation
There are many more pearls of wisdom in this slim volume, but I will limit myself to three.
First, formative conversation must be grounded in hospitality, the desire to include everyone—but hospitality is fragile. Someone will be the host and someone the guest, and the hosts and guests may have different agendas—we all know what it’s like when that one person dominates the group discussion. Thus, virtuous dialogue requires a set of norms to set expectations and govern how to handle going off track.
Second, conversation enables us to share the gifts of the Spirit with one another as peers rather than through the asymmetrical exercise of power. Conversation becomes a metaphor for the movement of the Spirit within the church body and, perhaps, within the Godhead. It also allows us to experience one another as gifts.
Third, conversation is countercultural. Smith describes a process that is non-hierarchical, slow, and “unproductive.” The goal is not to have action items each week but the practice of conversation itself, which teaches us to listen, empathize, and practice hospitality. In authentic conversation, you can’t have an agenda.
How to Have Christian Conversations
Partly because ECC’s own conversational practice developed organically, Smith seems reluctant to present a particular program or method for replicating it in your own church. In fact, he might suggest it cannot be replicated, only imitated until it becomes its own thing, organically related to your congregation. He does, however, offer two core principles.
One, formative conversation must be Eucharistic. By this, Smith means we must adopt the self-emptying attitude of Christ when we enter into it, seeking the good of all rather than individual gain.
Two, conversation must be legitimately open to everyone. We must presume that the Holy Spirit can speak through anyone and that all God’s people have something to contribute.
Both of these principles are no doubt aspirational, and both are still tempered by conversational norms, but can you imagine if our churches began to explore these kinds of interactions? What kind of spiritual power might we discover if we let go of forced consensus and unleashed holy inquiry?
And perhaps the church could start to model a way toward greater pluralistic unity for our whole nation. If nothing else, we could create the kind of third space that can become a respite for those of us who want to find a sense of identity outside of partisanship.
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[1] Greg Berman, “‘There’s Nothing Inevitable or Permanent about Democracy’: A Conversation with Robert Talisse.” The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. Oct 7, 2024. hfg.org/conversations/theres-nothing-inevitable-or-permanent-about-democracy-talisse/
[2] Hartmut Rosa, Time and World, trans. Christophe Fricker (Polity Press, 2026).
[3] “Churchgoers Increasingly Prefer a Congregation That Shares Their Politics.” Lifeway Research. Nov 1, 2022. research.lifeway.com/2022/11/01/churchgoers-increasingly-prefer-a-congregation-that-shares-their-politics/
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On this note, Stanley Hauerwas points out that Pentecost undid Babel—not by erasing diversity with uniformity—but by granting patience and understanding to listen across difference (War and the American Difference).