Before the Carols Begin: The Sacred Pause to Listen

By WJ de Kock, ThD

Educational Consultant to Partners in Ministry

Professor of Practical Theology at Palmer Theological Seminary of Eastern University

9 minute read

It is Mid-November heat is climbing the thermometer like a determined cyclist heading up  Mt Baw Baw. Your church calendar is already a puzzle of colour-coded chaos—carol services pencilled in, Christmas decorating committees forming, community care packages stacked in the office corner. Outside, the Wattles are thinking about their yellow moment in August. Inside, someone's asking about the new Bible study, another group is scrambling logistics for the summer kids' program, and you're realising that somewhere between now and Boxing Day, half your congregation will drift away on holidays.

But then we barrel through November like a runaway semi, talking at people—about Advent preparations, about serving others, about what Christmas means. And somewhere in all that righteous chatter, we forget to ask anyone what their Christmas looks like, what their story is, what God is already writing in their lives.

Most Australian ministry leaders can preach about listening. But from personal experience, I know we often confuse hearing with listening. We're masters of the program, anxious about the metrics, concerned about who's showing up—and we miss the person right in front of us. We hear, but we can miss the opportunity to listen.

Listening is not sitting silently while formulating your comeback. It's not hearing words while mentally drafting next Sunday's sermon. It's not that thing we do in church foyers—the polite head-nod while we are actually thinking about afternoon plans, the "Mmm-hmm" that fools no one.

Real listening? It's what the apostle James was getting at when he wrote: "Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger."[i] But here's the thing—we've made that verse sound like pious wisdom. Safe. Manageable. Quick to listen. Yeah, sure. We can do that. Toss out a few affirming nods and we're good.

Except James isn't talking about hearing. He's talking about something that requires you to stop. To actually pause the running commentary in your head. Because here is what happens when you barrel forward with your own story, your own agenda, your own certainty about what the other person needs: you close the door. You shift from receiving to defending. From curiosity to correction. You turn listening into a performance—waiting for your turn, already composing your response, convinced you know where this conversation is heading.

That's not listening. That's impatience wearing a friendly face.

Real listening is something else entirely. It's presence without agenda. It's being so attentive that you can hear what someone isn't saying—the tremor under the words, the fear they are not naming, the hope they are afraid to admit. It's staying in the conversation long enough for the other person to actually find their truth, not the truth you expected them to have.

In pastoral care, when someone experiences that kind of listening—genuine, unrushed, genuinely received—something shifts in the room. Anxiety doesn't just reduce; it visibly loosens. The shoulders drop. The guarded expression softens. As one research team notes: "When someone is truly listened to, especially in times of crisis, it helps reduce anxiety, increases feelings of being heard and cared for, and fosters emotional resilience."[ii] But it's not the research that matters. It's the moment you see someone's face change because they realised: This person actually cares about what I think. They're not waiting to fix me or correct me. They're just... here.

This is incarnational ministry. It's how you enter another person's world, just as Jesus entered ours. When Jesus scandalised the religious establishment by eating with tax collectors and sinners, he wasn't making a political statement (or rather, he was, but that wasn't the primary point). He was enacting the kingdom. "The meals are where the magic is," as one author puts it.⁵ In those meals, the excluded found belonging. The question shifted from "What's wrong with you?" to "What's your story? How can I help?"

Not all questions are equal. Some probe; others welcome. Some demand; others invite.

There's a reason Jesus asked so many questions throughout the Gospels. He wasn't fishing for information. He was drawing people into themselves, honoring the wisdom and experience already resident in their lives. He was asking questions that said: Your voice matters. Your perspective has weight. You belong in this conversation.

Questions that probe often sound like: "Why would you think that?" or "Don't you know that...?" They put people on the defensive. They close doors.

Questions that create belonging might sound like: "That sounds important to you—tell me more." Or: "I'm curious what brought you to that conclusion." Or simply: "How are you really doing?" Questions that assume dignity, that invite depth, that signal genuine curiosity rather than judgment. When you ask someone to tell you their story—and you actually listen, you are saying: You matter. Your life has meaning. You belong here.

Here's the thing we need to call out: deep listening isn't some trendy pastoral technique we invented last Tuesday.

It's ancient.

It's the practice that kept cultures alive through centuries of interruption and displacement—people who knew that if you wanted to survive, you had to remember how to actually hear each other. Knowledge written in stone gets destroyed. But knowledge held in the attentive presence of one human being listening to another? That survives everything.

Australia's First Nations peoples understood this. For millennia, they practiced deep listening under the word dadirri—a term from the languages of the Daly River region. Aboriginal writer and elder Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann describes it like this: "Dadirri is inner, deep listening and quiet, still awareness... listening to the stillness... in the water flowing, the wind blowing, the birds singing, the ground humming."[iii]

That's not about technique. That's presence—the willingness to get so quiet, to listen, that you can actually feel what's alive in the world. What's breaking. What's being born.

For thousands of years, this was how truth moved forward. Not through lectures or documents. Through circles of conversation around fires. Through the sacred responsibility of one human being actually receiving what another has to say. You couldn't half-attend. You couldn't check out mentally or compose your rebuttal while someone was speaking. You had to show up. You had to let their story change the shape of yours. The teller and the listener weren't separate. They were in covenant.

And here's what will blows my mind: this is exactly what God did.

Christmas isn't about God uploading a message to humanity from on high. It's about God listening—God entering into the actual, sweating, crying, bleeding, hoping reality of human life and saying: I will be with you. I will sit in your mess. I will hear your story from the inside.

When God became flesh, God didn't shout down from heaven. God bent low. God took on ears that could actually hear our groaning. Eyes that could see our fear. Skin that could feel the cold. The manger wasn't God's broadcast booth. It was God's listening post—the place where infinity stopped performing and started receiving what it means to be human, to be broken, to be longing.

That's incarnational listening. It's God saying: your story is so sacred that I will enter it. I won't fix you from a distance.

And when we listen to our people the way God listened to us—present, unhurried, genuinely curious—we're not just being good pastors. We're embodying the incarnation. We're practicing the posture God already modelled: I will sit with you. For as long as this takes. Without agenda. Without rushing you toward my ending.

Listening is the beating heart of incarnational ministry.

Not program.

Not performance. 

Presence.

Real curiosity.

The willingness to sit with someone and actually hear what God is already speaking through their life.

November is tightening. The calendar is screaming. Christmas is accelerating toward you like a freight train.

But what if this week you did something radical? What if you made space for one genuine conversation? Asked one real question and then actually stayed silent while someone answered? What if you invited someone to dinner not to perform hospitality but just to know them—the real them, not the church foyer version?

What if the most revolutionary thing you did this season wasn't another program, another carol service, another event—but the simple, sacred act of listening the way God has listened to us?

The table is set. The fire is ready. The stories are waiting to be told.

All you have to do is ask: "Tell me your story."

And then—this is the whole gospel, really—listen.

Endnotes

[i] James 1:19 (NIV). This verse sits within a passage about receiving God's word and being transformed by it—the foundation of all Christian listening. See also Proverbs 17:27–28 on restraint of speech and Ecclesiastes 5:1–2 on reverent listening.

[ii] ROSE Training Australia, Active Listening to Promote Mental Wellbeing (2025).

Research confirms that active listening—especially in crisis moments—reduces anxiety and fosters emotional resilience through the experience of being genuinely heard and valued.

[iii] Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann, Aboriginal writer and senior elder from the Daly River region. Her articulation of dadirri appears in multiple sources including CreativeSpirits and Planet Corroboree, emphasizing that "dadirri is in everyone. It is not just an Aboriginal thing.” See TMA: The Melbourne Anglican. “Dadirri: The Aboriginal gift.” https://tma.melbourneanglican.org.au/2017/02/dadirri-the-aboriginal-gift/ (accessed November 7, 2025).