The Surprising Power of Sacred Listening in Building Trust and Faith Formation

0:01 Welcome to the What's Next podcast. It's so great to have you with us. And I'm so excited to have Josh Packard with me today. Josh is a new friend, but becoming a very dear friend. And I'm so excited, Josh, to geek out with you a little bit today on sociology and the future, as you are a part of the leadership of Future of the Faith, actually a founding member of that organization. And I'm so excited about what you guys are doing As you guys know, this podcast is about what's next for you and what's next for the faith. So Josh is such a great addition to this conversation.

0:42 And we're going to speak a little bit about trends, what's changing, how is it changing, how do we know that it's changing, how do we respond to it, and how is trust changing? in particular changing in our world. So I'm really excited about this conversation today. But Josh, I'd love for us to just start out with people getting to know you a little better. So share a little bit about when is it that this idea of the future being something you wanted to give the rest of your life to clicked in your heart? And why the future? Good question. And thank you for having me, Jared. This is really great to be here. I think, you know, maybe like a lot of us, I sort of stumbled into the future. You know, you don't always have a plan.

1:25 I was a PhD faculty member in sociology, right? Like that was, but all, and so all my training and all that is, in the United States especially, is very empirical, not very theoretical. And what that, very simply what that means is like we live in the world of data. But data lives in the world of the past. I mean, there's no data about the future. It has to have happened for us to be able to collect any information about it. And even though I always thought of myself as an applied sociologist, one whose real gifts are maybe in translating other academics' work out to the hands of practitioners, it still wasn't like For me, it was always a little backward-looking, always a little diagnostic.

2:07 And sure, there were lessons to be learned there. And maybe at my best, I was doing some sort of extraction to move us forward. But when Megan Bissell, my co-founder at Future of Faith, and I sat down, we realized we really just wanted to live on the other side of that line. And so we called it Future of Faith almost as a reminder to ourselves of the work that we're doing here today. is meant to understand what all that data tell us so that we can then inform what the church does for the next week, the next year. Where are things headed? What's coming up with the next generation? So all the tools and sort of the way we do translation and insight work is really headed in that direction on the heavy side of application.

2:50 I love it how you're kind of taking data to identify trends to change action, right? That's right. Ideally. Ideally. We know people are not moved by data alone. Well, people aren't moved by data alone, but at least if you could project a trend, it helps people to do that, to prepare for a future that they're not ready for in a world that's changing quicker than ever before. Right? So, there's this reality of getting to prepare for that and getting to change the way people act to make them more effective and efficient in the process.

3:33 with some information that would help them position for what's heading their way. I called my book on the future of the faith, the hitting the ball you can't see, right? Because this ball's heading our way, and you've got to anticipate where it's going to be if you're going to hit it. And that's just the reality of the day we live in. But let me maybe just start with a real simple question, and it is an oversimplification, so forgive me. But what's next? If you had to say what is next for the faith, what's the major, what's the biggest shift that you're perceiving right now as you're looking at the trends and you're looking what's happening in the church around the world?

4:14 How are things changing? How are things changing? I don't think it's a, I mean, I'm not a technologist, a futurist in that regard, but I don't think it's, I don't think you have to be in that, you know, immersed in that field to understand that, you know, in a hundred or 200 or 300 years, when we look back on this, the internet is going to be a blip. You know, social media won't even matter. The story of this age is going to be the story of AI. And that will, that's going to be the thing that moves people. And the very practical way that that's already starting to play out for, I think the church today is accelerating this trend of distrust, mistrust, move away from institutions. So a couple of years ago, for example, it's 2024.

4:55 We asked this question, to what extent are you getting skeptical of the stuff that you see online because you don't know what's made by AI and what is it? And already we could see over half the people were starting to be skeptical. That's two years ago. And now if you think about it, like how often do you open your feed on Instagram or TikTok or whatever? You think like, was that made by AI? Is that real? Well, you just need a gen alpha in your life. They'll tell you what's real and what's not all the time, right? They do think they know, but like I do have a gen alpha. I'm a 16 year old and his default is like, I just think mostly everything I'm seeing is not real. Yeah. And so, you know, the church isn't typically at the bleeding edge of technology.

5:37 And so just as it, in some places, in sort of spits and starts and stops, it's starting to come to terms with social media and what it means, all that's going to be undone. Like it won't, it's not just that your tactics on social media will change. I mean, they should probably, I guess, but your strategy around how to engage with people is being undone by the fact that they don't know if you, if you are out there representing your congregation or your church or They have no idea, the consumer has no idea if what they're seeing is real, which pushes everything down to this relational level. You know, I wrote a blog post about this, like we're all doubting Thomases now, you know, until we can touch it and see it and taste it and feel it.

6:21 It's not real because the only thing we're sort of left with is our senses in this increasingly, you know, saturated AI world. But I love that, Josh, because I think it's the same trend we're seeing all around, right? As AI and technology increases, the value of human interaction, human touch, human engagement is increasing as well, right? So there's an increased desire for the authentic. There's an increased desire for the real. As people are kind of being confronted with more and more artificial, whether it's intelligence or technology, pictures or ideas, whatever's artificial is becoming devalued in our lives and whatever is authentic is being valued at a higher level.

7:08 Yeah, well, I mean, it's true, but it's this weird place where people want something that's real, but they literally lack the social skills to know how to get it. And so for any single choice, it's often easier to just engage with some sort of mediated technology, whether that's a text message or social media or, you know, a video game or whatever. Like, In that moment, the harder thing is to go out to a coffee shop and strike up a conversation with a stranger. I mean, that's a terrifying prospect for most 20-year-olds, right? But for our long-term, like, what are our long-term desires? We desire to be in authentic relationships and embodied experiences and encounters with other people. But, like, am I really going to make that choice right now?

7:49 So I think this is the gap where the church can really step in and say, like, you know, for a generation being raised without those social skills or generations, I don't want to put this, I mean, this has been going for a while now. How do we provide those kinds of experiences that reconnect people to their humanity and to what, you know, God sees for them in the world and confronts them sometimes with hard and difficult places, but also is, you know, doing what, you know, Catholics call a real accompaniment work, you know, this walk alongside you for a very long time until, until we get to where we're going. But Josh, I'd love to just double click on that for a moment as if you think through what do we need to change in particular, right?

8:32 So this shift is happening. This is the trend. What do you see as some of the best things that a leader could do different? Right. So somebody is listening to this. They're planning their next week. They're planning their next month. They're planning their next year. And they're saying, OK, so if this is true, then what do I need to change in my strategy with regards to leading my church? Or am I strategy with regards to running my business or engaging my teenager for that moment? Right. As a parent, what can we do to respond to this new world? Well, I think the first thing is that it starts with us, right? Like you have to change your heart, many of us do, and our understandings and our preconceived ideas about especially what young people and people in their 20s, you know, teenagers, people in their 20s, even millennial parents now are in their 30s and they're having kids the first time.

9:23 We need to make sure that we are approaching them in the same imago Dei sense of empathy that we would have had for other generations. that's a critical point. Because if we're walking around with one mental model that these people don't care about church, they're not engaged, they don't have any social skills, they don't care, well, we're going to send us down the wrong path. And so I think about a lot of times this idea of, the metaphor I use here is about blockbusters. So in the United States, of course, blockbuster, you could go and rent movies and take them home and plop them into your DVD player, your VHS player, if you're old notes, remember that. And of course, those don't exist anymore. I mean, there are no blockbusters. There's no video. I mean, there's a few, but not really of any note.

10:06 But it's not because people stop watching movies, right? We watch more movies now than we've ever watched. And the issue wasn't the goal. The issue was the format. That delivery mechanism doesn't work anymore. And I think if we can understand that people still desire God, they're still interested, but maybe our delivery mechanism has to change a little bit. So if we get our hearts in that right place, it allows us to let go of some things. And so the first thing I would start in and recommend starting in is prayer and just understanding, like opening your heart up to empathy for the world that these people have been growing up in. so that you can then begin to redesign your delivery mechanisms. And I would say that generally speaking, it probably will entail some kind of move away from mass-produced programs as the world moves away from institutional trust and towards something highly relational.

11:00 What the data tell us, what our research and others tells us is that the more relational we can get, the more embedded into really good listening we can get is probably where we're going to see the greatest gains. I love that. I love how you're distinguishing between what is changing and what's not changing, because I think that's the first step of any change management process, right? Prayer, hearing from God, the truth of the gospel, that's not changing, but there are some things that are changing, right? So even in the movie example, people are still watching movies, but the medium is changing. And I think if we could figure out what's changing, what's not changing, it'll set us up for victory in adapting to the new age, let's move into what you just said something about institutional trust is changing I just heard you mention that word and I know this is a part of study that you're passionate about and you guys have done a lot of good work speak to us a little bit about how is institutional trust changing because I think You know, even the example of AI, when we say, is this AI?

12:03 Is this real? Is this authentic? Is this artificial? That question that we're dealing with essentially comes down. If you apply the two-year-old principle of doing why, why, why, why, why, until there's no more whys, you're going to get to trust, right? Can this be trusted? How is trust shifting in the world we're in? And how do we respond to that? The data on this are thankfully really, really clear. I mean, I don't think that there's any debating it among sociologists. And it's not just the United States. It's global, primarily in the sort of what we would call the global west or developed world. I mean, just include Australia as well, where the confidence and trust in institutions— and in institutional leaders, has been on the decline now for five decades or so.

12:53 I mean, really post-World War II, coming right out of World War II was the height. And this is not a shift that most people would have felt because it's not like I ever fell off a cliff. We've just been losing a couple of percentage points every year. Now, they felt it sooner in Europe because a lot of their institutions failed in the war or in the lead up to it. You know, in part to constrain Germany, but also to respond. In the United States, we've been slower to feel it. But nevertheless, I mean, we've gone from, you know, we have 50, 60 point declines in trust and government and, you know, our like education, health care and religion. And when I do this in the keynote, I think maybe even the one you saw, Jerry, I say all the time, if it was just the case that religion had lost trust and it was a mixed bag everywhere else or some others had gained, everybody else was going up, it's a very different kind of talk.

13:49 It's a very different kind of point to be made and probably not one for me to make as a sociologist. You're probably like a church historian or something. But when we see all of them declining, What that tells us as sociologists is that there's something shifting in the entire culture. It's not that any one of them did something bad. It's just that our culture is shifting away from this. And so I think that's a fact. So you just have to understand it. So let me just remind you that, Josh, so institutional trust isn't just in the institution of the church. It's in institutions in general. Right. And what I'm hearing you say, and tell me if I'm listening correctly, is I'm hearing you say that to some extent the church needs to deal with it, that the church is losing trust, but part of that loss isn't the church's fault.

14:33 Well, that's exactly what I was just about to say. So if we accept that truth that, you know, the data are telling us that there's a loss of institutional trust, but it's everywhere. Well, the implication means like we didn't break it. Like we didn't break the church. You know what I mean? Like it's not a thing that anybody has to apologize for or, you know, don't. do some sort of recompense or reconciliation. I mean, sure, people make poor choices individually, and they should, you know, atone for those. But there's not, like, this generation, if you're, say, 45 and older, it's not like you did something to cause irreparable damage to the institution of the church. It wasn't your fault. And, like, this is the way our whole society has been shifting.

15:17 So then, okay, so it's shifting, it's shifting all around. Yeah. But I mean, as the church, the, you know, the thing Jesus is building on planet Earth, what do we do? How do we adjust to, you know, I was just in Istanbul a couple of weeks ago, and I was standing in the Hagia Sophia and just kind of standing in that building again. because it's one of my favorite buildings in the world because it represents the saddest and the happiest moment of the church. So it's the happiest moment because it was originally built at the first version of the one standing today as one of the first churches in Constantinople after the persecution of the Christians stopped. But it's also one of the saddest moments in Christian history because it symbolizes the beginning of the institutionalized church.

16:04 where the church actually lost a lot of its original drive and evangelism and growth and and just purity that was in the early church that got lost in church becoming an institution and not being just an organism of humans following Jesus. You know, so, I mean, we can dig into that moment in history. But for me, I feel like we're in a moment like that where the institution of the church and the practice of the church needs to adapt to the reality of the people we want to reach. Because it's not about the institution. It's about glorifying Jesus and reaching people to have a relationship with Him and be in community with one another.

16:48 The institution serves the organism of the church, not the other way around. Not the other way around. Institutions have to adapt. They have to adjust. Yeah. I mean, it's an odd place to quote Jeff Bezos, but he once said that, you know, when your process becomes your product, you're doomed to fail. And, you know, when you get so beholden to one way of doing things that you forget the outcome. And there's a lot of, I want to be really clear to the thing that we said earlier, like there are things that don't change. And some of those things that don't change in the church are process. Yeah. Lots of faith traditions and expressions have figured out a liturgy, an ecclesiology that is biblically rooted, that matters to them.

17:31 I'm not suggesting that those things should change. But where there is room for change, I think we should be really clear because the question that we naturally ask as sociologists is, you know, as those of us in sociology who are trying to live on the other side of that line, it's like, okay, given this lack of trust in institutions, does it mean that people don't trust anything or does it mean the trust has shifted? And I think pretty clearly we see a world without trust is not one that can hang together, but this world so far is managing to go along. So where has this trust been relocated? And consistently in the data we see that it's been relocated down to, I mean, down meaning in terms of macro, micro, it's been relocated down to relationships.

18:14 And so if I'm building a church program right now and I'm taking this, you know, an approach, I'm taking this seriously, I'm thinking, how can I be more relational? You know, maybe my big programs are not going to get it done like they used to. You know, I tell, I hear people all the time saying, you know, it still kind of works, but it feels like we're working harder and harder. than we ever did for less and less results. And I think that's the sign of that lack of automatic trust. So I'd be trying to push everything to what the data are saying, where we can lead with relationships and particularly relationships rooted in listening to others. In a world where nobody feels heard, listening becomes a radical act. And that's just the data, I think, are pretty significantly pointed in that direction.

18:58 I love that. And I want to dig into the listening a little deeper. But first, you said something very briefly, which I think is world changing, is you mentioned that a world without trust can't work, right? Because trust is currency to the world, right? Trust is currency to relationship, and relationship is currency to life, right? You just simply can't live without trust. But then you said, it's not that it went away, it's that it shifted. I'd love for you to expand that a little bit because I think that's critical that people get their heads around that. It's not that the world's trusting less. It's the world's trusting differently. That's a really good way of saying it. Yeah. I mean, it's impossible to like, I don't know if we could like roll up and sum up the total of trust in the world.

19:43 That's weird. But I love the, you know, in terms of empirically, but theoretically, I think you're spot on this idea of like, well, there's you, I think you can make the case that there's as much trust as there ever has been. But when I, like when I think about this through the lens of my father, you know, who once told me that he trusted the priest in his parish. And I asked him who that was. And he said, no, not a particular person, just whoever the priest was. You see just in that change in generations, right? My dad's talking about an institution, an office, a position. I'm immediately thinking he's talking about a person, right? So we've shifted a lot of that. We're replacing the burden of trust more and more on the people that are around us that we know.

20:25 I had a person in an interview just recently tell me, You know, sermons are fine. I don't dislike them, but they're not for me. Sermons are for the whole congregation. And I'm much more interested or inclined to trust somebody who has gotten to know me and then gives me advice or speaks into my life than I am to take the lesson from a sermon as applying to me. Which is, again, I think it's a wild departure from two or three generations ago. You say, oh, well, the sermon is given by somebody who's super well-trained, and they have this credential, and they've been thinking about this a lot. Of course, that's the best that you could possibly get. And now, just in the span of our lifetimes, now we've got this person saying, ah, sermons aren't really for me. Well, as somebody that delivers sermons and actually delivered one yesterday, you know, I wonder how many people left the room saying the same thing.

21:13 Yeah. But here's the question that it leaves me with, Josh, is if trust is shifting and people are trusting something, then… adapting to invest in the areas that people are trusting is going to have a direct impact on my level of effectiveness. And, you know, it's effort versus impact, right? And what you're saying is some of the things that used to have impact still has impact, but it's taking twice as much effort to get the same impact. So then what I need to shift is I need to figure out how do I have impact What are the things that I can work with the trade winds? How can I work with the current so that when I'm putting in effort, I'm having twice the effect and not the other way around?

21:59 So that's where we need to shift, right? So trust was in institutions and it is in people, relationship. Where has it moved to? Yeah, it's in the relationships with people who have taken the time to get to know somebody. So I think this is true. I'm going to give you an example from a ministry practitioner who works with this Future of Faith, who has been doing youth and family ministry for a long time. But I think what he's saying here applies across the board, not just in ministry, but also in nonprofits and in organizations that work with young people. And what he said was, You know, when I started doing this work, we thought if we told people the truth, not just thought, we knew.

22:42 If we told people the truth, then they would want to spend time with us because they would recognize the truth, the good news. And I'm sorry, then they would come to trust us and they would want to spend time with us. And he said, so this is this truth, right? Then time or trust rather and then time. And he says, now we recognize that it's the complete opposite. He's like, we're seeing such lower and lower results every year with that approach. And so now he says, we find young people wherever they are and spend as much time with them as we can. And whenever we get it, whether it's their sporting event or if it's their checking with them after a test or if it's chatting with them in a conference, wherever they'll have us, playing video games online, wherever they'll have us, we're going to spend time with them.

23:28 And because they see that we have their best interests in mind, they come to trust us. Because they know that we've taken the time to get to know them and understand them. It doesn't mean we agree or condone everything that they're doing, but they know that we know them. It says, then we get to live out the truth with them. And it's this time, trust, truth model that he talks about, which I think is such a, like, for me, it was so clarifying. Like, oh, that's right. That's exactly. We used to think that truth was the entry point and that people would be convinced. There was a generation when it was, right? Because information was scarce. So whoever had the truth. had entry to my heart, your parents' generation. But information isn't scarce.

24:08 What is scarce is time. So if you give me the scarce commodity, then I'll trust you enough in order to imagine the truth. That's exactly it. Where, you know, where the most valuable thing that you have is time. In a world where everybody's got, you know, the ability on their phone to get any information they want, then this becomes this, then you get this chance. I love the way he put it. It's like at the end, it wasn't that we could tell them the truth. It's right, right? We spent time and developed trust so we could live out the truth with them. This is radical. If we applied this to our programming, our programming would look radically different. But I think we'd hit that current.

24:50 We'd hit that twice the impact for the effort as opposed to working against the trends that we're seeing here. Josh, I love this. I'm assuming some of the materials and things are available on futureoffaith.org, which is kind of the… the space you guys come from. You guys wrote a couple of books, did some great things. I want to speak to you about listening. But before we do that, just tell us a little bit about what resources are available. If someone's listening and they're going, man, I need to dig into this deeper, how can they get a hold of you? Where can they find more information? So yes, futureoffaith.org, that's the website.

25:33 It looks decent right now. I think it's going to be, I'm in the process of redoing it. But the biggest thing to go and look for is this concept called sacred listening that we've been working on. And it's a theory, but it's also an approach that we have developed and then embedded into these free, everything on the website for you is free. I mean, we're giving all this away. You don't have to pay anything for it. the, and it's the sacred listening tools. They walk you step by step through how to, like if you want to start leaning more into listening, but you're wondering, which I think most people would, like how do I do this at scale? You know, I've got, 35 adult small groups across the city on Tuesday nights, or I've got, you know, 100 kids on my campus ministry, I can't have coffee with all of them.

26:16 So these tools are really designed and the theory too is designed to help us think through, all right, how do we do listening based ministry across the whole, you know, our entire congregation or parish or church, whatever. And there's some, I think the ones that we have there, obviously we put them up because we think that they're ready to use right off the shelf. But more important is the approach. Once you do one of them, you'll be able to see very quickly how you could adapt it and refine it for your context and do all kinds of stuff. That's great. And some of the research behind some of the things we said today is also on there. Also there. Josh, you've got this behind you, for those of you that are just listening and not watching.

26:57 Behind him is a statement, listening is sacred. So Josh, that is a very strong statement to make, right? That's a bold statement to elevate the act of listening to being sacred. trust and listening being sacred for us well i do i do think there's a bridge to be made i mean it's it's the and again the evidence there's really clear that when you sit and listen to somebody you are building trust with them you know getting in a world that where nobody feels heard listening is one of the ways that you can establish trust but that i don't think that um I don't think it's the right thing to do to make a transactional claim leading to something that's sacred.

27:44 That is not our position at all. So yes, you will build trust with somebody if you sit and listen to them. But what we mean by listening is sacred is a reminder that when you sit and listen to somebody, you're not just getting information, you're doing everything. Formation. So in that moment, what we've had people tell us in our qualitative interviews and our surveys is that they're doing something deeply formative when they get to work out in real time something about faith with somebody that they can trust. Meaning that like, we ask these questions again, all this research is on our website for free too. People saying things like, you know, listening was really critical in the moments that mattered most in my faith life.

28:28 And I think this is the only study in the world that I know of that attempts to understand is there a formative element to listening? Not just this like, it's not just, do I get information that I can act on later? But is something happening in that moment? And so we come to that claim that listening is sacred, not just theoretically, but empirically. For us, it's not, I'm sure you could probably make a biblical claim for it, but that's not who we are. We're not theologians. We come to this as sociologists like, well, the data tell us that this is a sacred moment. And if we can... put ourselves in that headspace when we have a chance to listen to somebody, you know, not jumping into correct, not, you know, trying to judge, but simply letting them work it out with somebody who they trust to hold this for them and do that long walk of, you know, relational ministry where, yeah, eventually you're going to get a chance to do the correction and the guidance and the inspiration.

29:24 But the first step is just creating a space where they feel safe enough to talk. We forget that a lot. So Josh, I'm fascinated by this because I think it's counterintuitive to a lot of things, right? So if I just think about the different strategic conversations I'm a part of with churches, with missions organizations, with media organizations, with young people, right? So I mean, we're in the influencer generation. Influencers are not learning how to listen. They're learning how to talk. So the reality is we're in a society that isn't looking to listen more. They're looking to talk more. And you're essentially saying you're putting your effort into the wrong thing.

30:07 If you're focusing on how to broadcast or get your message out there, we need to make a 180 degree turn to listening. Well, I think those people have different roles, right? Like the medium is the message, as, you know, Marshall McLuhan told us so many years ago. And so we're involved pretty heavily in some Catholic digital missionary work to try and understand the field globally. And I would say the best of them understand, you know, what is the time to talk, right? Like, what is the time to broadcast? But even in those moments, they're often lifting up the voices of other people, whether it's through an interview on a podcast or telling a story on Instagram. But it's like iceberg work for the best of those digital missionaries.

30:51 I mean, what you see publicly is just a piece because behind the scenes, there are these Discord chats, right? And there are all these communities that they're building and really bridging from this digital world to this sacramental space, this embodied world. And that is highly relational in listening. I mean, even going back and forth over email and in the message boards and things like that is... really what consumes a lot of their time and identity. So I would put them in a different category maybe than like the Kardashians. Well, it is a different category. But even if you look at the things, you know, I'm looking at what, you know, Gen Alpha, you know, what's trending online.

31:33 So what's trending online is what millions of people are showing up to watch live right now is typically something with a chat running on the side of the screen on YouTube. So it's a community you belong to, you're a part of. And this whole trend in social media, which is going members only, why do they go that route? It's not just the economy of it. It's unless you're building community online. to support the broadcast. People are going to disengage your broadcast to engage somewhere where they belong. And because they belong, they trust. And I think that's where this listening tool has to be elevated.

32:14 Because I think we come out of a time where You know, initially broadcasting or media was in the hands of a few with a lot of capital because it took a lot of capital to get it out. And then we saw the shift in our lifetime where it shifted to now media is in the hand of all. And it's just whatever the populace clicks on gets elevated and the algorithms is kind of pushing certain things to the fore. But now we're going into the next phase because now what happened was in this process, community got lost, right? So trust is shifting and now listening is becoming so important. So, I mean, I love the direction you're taking this because I think it's, I don't think we fully implemented or responded to the shift in the global church.

33:03 And I'm wondering, how do we, because the goal is spiritual formation. The goal isn't broadcasting. The goal isn't listening. The goal isn't speaking. It isn't people showing up on a Sunday. It's not even trust. It's not even trust, right? Trust is the tool. Spiritual formation, relationship with God, growing in that relationship with God, being activated as a person that shares the faith. Those are the things that matters. So how do we shift so that we do that spiritual formation better? That was exactly what led us to this. So in researcher speak, to translate what you just said into my world, is to say that faith is the dependent variable.

33:46 In all these inputs, what we call independent variables, leading to some sort of output or dependent variable, we had to keep reminding, Megan and I just kept pounding on that nail of like, The outcome isn't, you know, the outcome that we're after, what we're trying to model for is not trust. What we're trying to model for is not like, you know, emotional health or social. All those things are great and would be awesome. I mean, I think everybody on this podcast would love to see those things pursued. But the ultimate dependent variable is faith formation. And that's what led us to this, to ask those questions. And I said nobody's ever asked them before because I think, like, there's not a whole lot of people working in this space, right? Like, yeah. Does listening as an input have an actual...

34:31 impact on that output of faith formation. And, and, you know, this is the first study and, you know, there'll be more for us. And I think there's a lot more work to do in this regard, but I think you could do a lot worse. You ask like, how do we respond? Well, I think you could do a lot worse than simply, you know, moving your program budget to a coffee budget, you know, an open tab at a coffee shop. That, you know, that as a very simple place, but there are some things that we suggest. I mean, I think really what we need are some structured tools that allow right now, if somebody in your church has a family member who dies, everybody listening to this, whether you're an employer or if you're a minister, you're going to respond so well in that moment.

35:13 It's what you were made for. It's probably why you got into ministry in the first place, right? It's to be there for people in those times of need. But how many of you, if you're being honest, would do a really good job a year from now? following up with that person on the anniversary of their spouse's passing or their grandmother's death or whatever it is. And when we ask that question live, you know, the hands go down real quick because they know. And it's not because they don't want to, right? Like everybody would love to be able to follow up well in a year. It's just that we don't have very good tool. We have great tools for delivering program, you know, all kinds of amazing curriculum. We've got logistic tools, you know, 50 years of building tools for that.

35:55 we need better tools for doing relational ministry. And that's part of what the sacred listening tools are trying to help offer. But I think there's a whole lot more that can and should be built. And if I was betting, I bet most of them are going to come from practitioners, like the people listening right now, who are like, that's a problem that I can help solve. Because if we're going to be reliable listeners, we've got to have a way to solve that kind of problem. How do I follow up in a year? Yeah, I love that, Josh. I think our process mechanisms has been focused on program and our process mechanisms has to start focusing on follow-up, on listening, on individual journeys, on listening.

36:38 on how to help people along those paths. And I think that isn't intuitive. And for most of us, that's not the direction we were in. But that's the shift that I'm hoping this conversation would bring about in the hearts of those listening. Thank you for this time. It's flown past and I wish we had another hour. We'll have to pick up this conversation again soon, Josh. Thank you for doing this. futureoffaith.org. I really want to encourage you guys. I've been blown away by these things. They're challenging the way I think and do ministry. And Josh, this conversation has done the same. My prayer is for everyone listening that they will make the shifts to have the greatest impact in their generation.

37:26 Thank you so much for having me.