It is still possible to have fresh and countercultural communication in the verbal excess of the Twitter Age. But unfortunately the list of ways to do it, already small, is dwindling fast.

Expressing outrage? It has become blasé, something that everyone with a meme generator can do. Snark? It has proliferated so much in the past decade that it doesn’t move us anymore.

And the same goes for many other rhetorical modes that used to be at least sporadically effective. Cuteness. Provocativeness. Bombast. Maybe it’s just me but it feels like the whole world is tired of all of these.

However, there is one act that is not likely to lose its currency anytime soon. It’s called listening.

To be able to summarise and represent someone else’s view, especially someone with whom we disagree, is a vanishing talent. If you have the talent you are among the most valuable people in the public forum.

And I would add that you are a Christian in the classic sense. Listening to multiple different groups and viewpoints–Jews and Gentiles, male and female, Easterners and Westerners, traditionalists and progressives– is central to the Christian task. God gave us the ministry of reconciliation, Paul wrote to the Corinthians. Not a side hustle of reconciliation, but our very ministry.

What are some ways we can take our charge seriously?

First, listening means that we suspend judgement and seek to understand. Recently, my wife and I made one of the most momentous transitions of our lives and stopped attending church with the Amish-Mennonites, the subculture into which we were born. Many factors contributed to this, but one of the main ones was the church’s requirement for people to wear the ethnic Mennonite garb to partake in Communion. To us, asking a woman to refrain from the central sacrament of the Christian faith until she wears a cape dress has come to feel incongruous and deeply wrong.

And yet we seek to understand. Our friends have done Communion, and continue doing Communion, in this manner. They feel that attaching lifestyle patterns to Communion–also known as closed Communion–gives them a connectedness to a multigenerational subculture that has yielded the outcomes they desire, including disciplined children, a low divorce rate and economic self-sufficiency. We do not agree with the practice but we want to understand it.

Second, listening might mean considering two schools of thought for an extended period of time. As Aristotle allegedly said, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” This especially applies in Christian doctrine and deciding which interpretation of a passage of Scripture we will favour. For instance, a Christian podcaster and author whom we follow has been wrestling for the last 4 years with the Scripture passages that talk about women holding public teaching and pastoring roles. As far as I know, he still has not decided on a final interpretation. I don’t call that being wishy-washy, I call it wrestling honestly with an issue that is impossible to solve with one seminar or book.

Third, listening means loving all individuals with fervency and commitment. On this point I will let Krista Tippett speak for me: “I can disagree with your opinion, but I can’t disagree with your experience. And once I have a sense of your experience, you and I are in relationship, acknowledging the complexity in each other’s position, listening less guardedly.”

In other words, it is surprising how much we can disagree if we are for each other and are seeking each other’s good.

Listening is indispensable because it is one of the few communicative modes that has not lost its currency in the 21st century and, what’s even more important, because it is the only path to fulfill Christ’s original vision of love and radical reconciliation.