Pastor Terry A. Smith has been the lead pastor of The Life Christian Church (TLCC) for 26 years. TLCC is located in West Orange, NJ, serving the New York City metro area. This church is known for attracting an incredibly diverse congregation—drawing people from a multitude of nationalities and seventy-five surrounding communities. Pastor Terry is recognized as one of America’s top Christian experts on leading multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and a vast socio-economic congregations. He has also become a dear friend.
His new book The Hospitable Leader: Create Environments Where People and Dreams Flourish tells the story a how a church can reach multiple races and nationalities, business leaders from Wall Street, the poor and under-resourced, entertainers and athletes – all at the same time in the same church. Click HERE or on the image provided to get your copy now.
The following is an adapted excerpt from the book.
The following are 3 Activities Pastors Can Do To Create Hospitable Communicative Climates In Their Churches:
A hospitable leader creates environments of welcome where moral leadership can more effectively influence an ever-expanding diversity of people. A key part of practicing hospitable leadership is to foster hospitable communicative environments where truth can be spoken and received. Here are three simple activities that help create hospitable communicative climates:
First, we must accentuate areas of common grace.Communication begins with finding things in common. Our English word communication comes from the Latin communis,which has to do with having something in common.
Knowing that communication is rooted in common bonds leads me to explore the space of common grace. Common grace was a prominent theme in the theology of Abraham Kuyper—a Dutch politician, journalist, statesman, and theologian who was prime minister of the Netherlands from 1901 to 1905. Kuyper made a distinction between the special grace that comes to those who believe in Jesus and “common grace as the universal bestowal by the Spirit of natural, moral and artistic gifts to believer and nonbeliever alike. Public and natural conscience, natural pity, some religious knowledge and a universal God-consciousness are parts of common grace.” As human beings, what we have in common—different as we may be—is a larger part of our story than we often acknowledge.
We are all created in God’s image. We all have a need to love and be loved. We all have an instinct to connect to the Transcendent. Regardless our culture, we generally find commonality in what we consider to be beautiful—a sunset, for instance. And we each have a God-given awareness that there is a difference between right and wrong.
Hospitable communication begins with a desire to find things in common. Before we discuss what we don’t agree on, we need to revel in the good and beautiful things we can appreciate and enjoy together. This could be art or athletics—a concern for the community or love for our children—common business goals, or a desire to make a positive difference in the world. In Leadership Communication, Richard L. Stoppe noted, “By His words and actions, Jesus observed a cardinal rule of effective communication: You persuade a person only to the extent that you come into his world of experience, speak his language, and identify your message with his needs, motives, and desires. . . . In a similar manner, we are always preconditioned by our needs, goals and desires.”
Second, for us to practice hospitable communication, we must focus on empathetic listening.Jesus said that we can listen but not hear. When we really listen we genuinely seek to understand another person. We want to comprehend their thoughts, feelings, experiences, and point of view. We want to see what they see, whether agree or not. We must listen to understand before we speak in order for what we speak to have a greater likelihood of being received.
If we are going to connect with our audience, we must bea good audience first—before the conversation or speech or sermon. Robert McKee, the legendary screenwriting teacher and author of the breakthrough Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting, wrote that when talented people write well it is usually because they are “moved by a desire to touch the audience.” He talks about how smart an audience of filmgoers is and that “it’s all a writer can do, using every bit of craft he’s mastered, to keep ahead of the sharp perceptions of a focused audience. No film can be made to work without an understanding of the reactions and anticipations of the audience.” I try to always keep in mind that my audience is smarter than I am. We must each find our own ways of gathering intelligence from our audience—whoever that audience may be.
I also listen whileI speak. People are always communicating, even when they are not saying anything. I love that line in A River Runs Through It when the Presbyterian minister/fly fisherman/father sits reading on the riverbank while his sons fish in the rapidly flowing river. When one of them comes over to where he is sitting, he says, “If you listen carefully, you will hear that the words are underneath the water.” Great communicators are able to hear what is not being said, especially while they are talking. I think any of us can learn to do this if we care enough about our audience to pay attention. To listen.
Third, we speak.And we do not only speak what our audience wants to hear. We love people too much for that. We speak what people need to hear. We speak truth as best as we understand it and as carefully as it can be said. If we have begun our communication effort with accentuating what we have in common, and if we have listened to understand, then we have presumably created space where truth can be spoken. Even then we never just rush in and hit someone over the head with it. We take care to find just the right moment to speak because as Stoppe wrote “truth uttered prematurely is a serious liability.”
We must always remember that we are obligated to speak truth—to whoever it is in whatever leadership context—because we love people and want them to grow. “Better is open rebuke than hidden love.” And we must also remember our obligation, as hospitable leaders, to speak lovingly. We speak the truth, and when we do we wrap it in grace. We speak the truth and hope that as we do, people feel home. That their hearts are warmed. And that they welcome us in. This is hospitable communication.
Adapted from the new book by Terry A. Smith, The Hospitable Leader: Create Environments Where People and Dreams Flourish. (Bethany House Publishers)