There’s no shortage of data about the nature of American Christianity. National studies from organizations like Pew, Gallup and the Public Religion Research Institute offer valuable insights into trends in religious affiliation, attendance and generational attitudes. While these large datasets are useful for understanding broad cultural shifts, they fall short when it comes to capturing the specific, lived experiences of individual congregations and communities.
In today’s diverse and complex world, no single study can address the unique dynamics within every church. National data can point to trends, but it’s listening — deep, systematic and local — that drives meaningful transformation. In an era of declining institutional trust, the future of the church depends on leaders who prioritize relational ministry by hearing the needs of those they serve.
Knowing that 25% of Americans identify as “nones” offers context but doesn’t explain why someone in your congregation feels disconnected. Similarly, learning that one-third of young people feel lonely doesn’t address the struggles of a student in your care. While data points provide context, what truly matters is listening to personal experiences.
Listening is especially vital in this moment when institutional trust is at an all-time low. Across faith traditions, listening is emerging as a priority. One study by Gallup found that for Gen Z, “listening is more important than giving advice and reassurance.” A recent study on spirituality from Barna concluded that “positive spiritual conversations are more likely when Christians prioritize listening, not just speaking.”
To thrive in their own contexts, however, faith leaders must go beyond studies and treat listening as a sacred practice that builds trust and scales relational care to meet the needs of their unique communities.
Our research and personal experiences as churchgoers and parents indicate that listening is the radical approach needed to move the church forward. It’s how we dig deeply into our communities and build the kinds of relationships that can transform ministry.
The challenge with traditional relational ministry is that it’s not scalable. Religious leaders who are committed to this approach often rely on rudimentary systems to manage it. We call the most common method Sticky Notes and Lattes, which is meeting with people over coffee and making a note or reminder to follow up later. But we warn people that as these conversations multiply, leaders can face burnout and guilt from trying to hold too much information.
Relational ministry like this is limited by the carrying capacity of any one person. As one youth pastor told us last year, “I’m afraid to even have one more conversation, because I don’t know what I’d do if I had to keep track of another piece of information. I’d just end up letting that student down. There are only so many Post-it notes I can stick in my brain!”
We co-founded Future of Faith to address the core challenges surrounding relational ministry and listening. As sociologists, we recognized that other professions, like fundraising, sales and community organizing, manage hundreds or even thousands of relationships effectively. While these fields are different from ministry in many ways (especially in being more transactional than transformational), we felt that there was much to learn from their tools and approaches.
No one can sustain hundreds of relationships without a system. That’s why we’ve been developing listening tools based on what we call Sacred Listening Theory, designed to make relational ministry scalable and sustainable. You can’t have 300 cups of coffee each week, but with the right tools, you can build relationships with 300 people by having the right 10 cups of coffee each week.
Sacred listening transforms listening from a practical skill into a sacred act. At its core, it involves recognizing the divine in conversations and responding to each person’s needs.
Sacred listening is rooted in the concept of imago Dei, the belief that every person is created in the image of God. This principle frames every interaction as a sacred encounter, where the act of listening affirms the inherent dignity and divinity in the speaker. Listening is a spiritual practice that fosters connection and builds trust while gathering information.
Sacred listening also involves pattern recognition, identifying recurring themes and needs in multiple conversations. This helps leaders understand both individual and collective issues within their communities.
Together, these principles make sacred listening scalable, as the insights gleaned from individual conversations can be applied to the broader community and even involve more people in the collective ministry, guiding pastoral responses that are both relational and effective.
Trust in institutions may be historically low, but the one thing people do trust is relationships. The most promising pathway forward for engaging people and revitalizing our faith communities is to understand your community from the ground up. We often say at Future of Faith that the only data point that truly matters is the distance between you and the person sitting across the table from you.
It’s time to start closing that gap by using approaches that are smaller, more local and more attuned to the divinity in all of us. Sacred listening helps faith leaders create ministries that respond to the real, spiritual needs of their communities, one conversation at a time.
More than 16 years ago, on the first day of my first real job in higher education, my supervisor treated me to lunch. Over grilled cheese and tomato soup, she said something that has stuck with me all this time: “I believe in you, and I want this job to be an opportunity for your growth and development, so let’s be sure to focus on that.”
I was coming out of a toxic church situation, and my new supervisor’s offer of support and mentorship gave me hope in my new role.
I am grateful for having had many wonderful mentors in my career as a pastor and higher education administrator. Their generous investment in me has inspired me to mentor others.
My first leadership mentor was my mother, who, after serving as a super church volunteer for more than 30 years, finally accepted a call to ordained ministry and served for 15 years as a senior pastor.
My mother modeled inclusion; for example, she took a special interest in the youth group kids. Every year, we hosted a big Halloween party at my parents’ farm in rural Illinois, with my dad driving the hayride tractor. Mom would work the phones, organizing transportation to make sure all the kids could get there.
She frequently disrupted our church system by not only serving as a woman in a leadership role but also including other women in leadership positions.
Achieving inclusion in leadership continues to be a problem across institutions. The number of women, and particularly women of color, who reach senior leadership roles continues to be small. In higher education, a clear majority (58%) of college students are women, yet only 33% of college presidents are women. Approximately half of college students identify as a race other than white, yet 73% of college presidents identify as white.
Representation is not more abundant in the church world, and in many ways, is worse. In my own United Methodist Church, where women are widely accepted for ordination and are a clear majority of members, only 32% of clergy are women. And the church remains one of the most racially segregated institutions in the United States.
This lack of representation in senior leadership roles is a wicked problem that requires individual, institutional and systemic solutions. I’ve come to believe that one important piece of the solution on an individual level is mentoring.
All along the way, I have felt frustrated that I am not making a bigger impact — and a bit terrified that I, as a white male, will do more harm than good by seeking to mentor people with identities different from mine. It puts a knot in my stomach to write publicly about my intentions in this area where I have so much to learn, but it is starting to seem more problematic to be silent. I recognize that white men can play a key role as gatekeepers.
I’ve had successes and failures. I’m happy to say that of the 21 employees I have had the privilege of hiring, most have been women and/or people of color, and most of them are thriving in new leadership roles. One of my proudest professional accomplishments was pivoting the leadership of a church I planted to a woman who has since led that church for more than 10 years.
I’ve also made mistakes. In one instance, I pushed one mentee too hard in my eagerness to develop what I saw to be her talents. In the end, I apologized and acknowledged, “I did a bad job of listening.”
In the academic literature on leadership development for women and people of color, mentoring comes up frequently. Recent studies that center the voices of women and people of color suggest that while mentoring may be helpful, what’s needed most are people who will move beyond merely mentoring to advocacy on their behalf.
I am now convinced that mentoring and advocating for mentees is crucial to progress. I’ve found success with a particular style of mentoring I think of as “mindful mentoring.”
Mindful mentoring moves beyond simply investing in someone to identifying, addressing and dismantling the systems that lead to disparity and inequity. The starting point is awareness of who is in your sphere of influence.
One theory I find useful is Leader-Member Exchange (LMX), which attempts to describe the quality of exchange in the relationship between leaders and the people influenced by them.
It describes an in-group and an out-group. In the workplace, those in the in-group have a deep connection and high-quality relationships with the leader. Studies have shown that being in the in-group leads to higher job satisfaction, commitment, performance and innovative behavior.
Those in the out-group are under the supervision of the leader but lack the high-quality connection of the in-group, and all the outcomes previously mentioned are worse.
The first step to being a mindful mentor is awareness. I know how easy it is for a white male in a senior position to forget his privilege, and I recommend a simple exercise to help leaders be mindful of their relationships.
Take a sheet of paper and draw two large circles, one inside the other. Label the inner circle “in-group” and the outer circle “out-group.” Next, write in the in-group circle the names of the people in your sphere of leadership with whom you have a great connection.
Then fill in the out-group circle. Finally, apply the lens of gender and race to the names on the paper. Who is in your circle(s) of influence? Who is missing?
When I first tried this exercise, I was surprised and disappointed to see how many people in my inner circle looked like me. I now complete this exercise twice a year. It’s helped me be aware of who is in my in-group and to strategize about how to move women and people of color from the out-group to the in-group.
Being a mindful mentor includes doing your own work of self-awareness, striving for cultural humility, uncovering your own implicit biases, and perpetually attempting to understand why these representation disparities exist in the first place.
It’s easy to get overwhelmed at the scale and scope of the work that needs to be done, but being a mindful mentor is practicing hope by focusing on what is within your control. Be aware of your immediate context and think concretely about what you can do today to make a difference.
I have two little daughters, and my deep desire is that they will grow up in a world where their gender will not limit the leaders they can be. Currently, their primary care physician is a woman, and we have many female family friends who are medical professionals. The other day, one of my daughters asked me, “Daddy, can boys be doctors too?”
I said, “Yes, boys can choose to be doctors too.” This kind of upside-down thinking motivates me to be the best mindful mentor I can be.