The hardest part of listening online is that there is almost nothing to listen to.
Someone types eleven words. No face, no tone, no pause before they said it, no idea what kind of week they are having. You get a sentence and a display name, and your brain fills the rest in automatically — with a tone of voice you invented, belonging to a person you assembled.
Then you answer the person you assembled.
The L in BLESS is listen, and this is the specific way it goes wrong on a screen. It is not that we interrupt. It is that we finish the sentence for someone and then respond to our own ending.
The test that takes ten seconds
Before you reply to anything, try this: say their point back in one sentence they would agree with.
Not a fair summary — a sentence they would nod at. If you cannot produce one, or if your version has a small sting in it they would object to, stop. You do not yet know what they said.
It is uncomfortable how often this fails. The sting is the tell. When my summary comes out as “he’s basically saying the church doesn’t care about people like him,” that is not a summary, it is a rebuttal wearing a summary’s clothes, and I built it so I could knock it down.
What makes this hard is that the wrong version is faster. You can read, assume and reply in about nine seconds. Listening costs you the nine seconds plus the willingness to find out you were wrong about someone.
Ask one question before you answer
If the ten-second test fails, you do not need a better guess. You need to ask.
One question, genuinely asked, with no rebuttal hidden in it. Not “don’t you think that’s a bit harsh?” — that is a verdict with a question mark on the end, and everyone can hear it. Something closer to: “What happened that made you feel that way?” or just “Say more?”
Two things tend to happen.
Sometimes you get a real answer, and it is almost never the thing in the original comment. The argument about worship music turns out to be about a funeral in 2019. The aggressive reply about hypocrisy turns out to be a person who was asked to leave a church and has never told anyone. You would not have reached that by being right about the first sentence.
And sometimes you get nothing back, or you get more noise — which is also an answer. Some people want an audience rather than a conversation, and one question surfaces that quickly and cheaply. You can stop there with a clear conscience, having lost a few minutes.
Either way you learn something, which is more than any reply would have given you.
Listening is not agreeing, and it is not silence
Two ways this practice gets misread.
It is not agreeing. You can understand somebody completely and still think they are wrong, and say so. What changes is that you are now disagreeing with what they actually said, which is the only kind of disagreement that ever goes anywhere.
And it is not silence. Refusing to engage is not humility, it is just absence, and it reads to the person as being ignored by a church — which for a lot of people online is a repeat experience, not a new one. Digital evangelism is largely a matter of showing up in the places where people are already asking their real questions. Listening is what makes showing up worth anything.
The leader’s move
Here is where a church quietly makes this impossible: response time.
Somebody decides the digital team should answer every comment within an hour. It sounds like care. It is the single biggest enemy of this practice, because the ten-second test and the question and the waiting all cost time, and a team measured on speed will stop doing them by about week two. They will not tell you they stopped. The numbers will look better.
So:
- Stop reporting response time as a virtue. If you measure only speed, you will get speed, and you will get it by cutting out exactly the part that mattered. Replace it with something like: how many conversations went past three exchanges? That is a number that only moves when someone actually listened.
- Give people explicit permission to be slow. Say out loud that a thoughtful answer tomorrow beats a fast one today. Volunteers will not believe this until a leader says it, and they will believe it properly the first time you defend someone for taking a day.
- Make “I asked them a question” a reportable outcome. Right now, on most digital teams, a conversation that did not resolve counts as nothing. A question asked in good faith is a real piece of ministry and should be able to show up in a debrief without anyone feeling like they are reporting a failure.
- Model it in the room. In your next team meeting, when somebody raises a hard comment, ask “what do we think they actually meant?” before anyone drafts a reply. Ten minutes of that does more than a policy document.
The uncomfortable part is that this makes your team’s output look worse for a while. Fewer replies, slower, less visible activity. What you are buying is the small number of conversations that go somewhere — and those were never going to show up in a response-time report anyway.
B.L.E.S.S. is Dave and Jon Ferguson’s framework. The digital adaptation is Dr. John Harris and Jeff Reed’s, in Sharing Jesus Online, with Dave Ferguson’s foreword.
Part of the BLESS series. The full framework is The BLESS Framework.
