Quick to Listen: Understanding Viewpoints that Challenge Your Faith

Do you know how to talk to people with different beliefs than yours?

Throughout their faith journeys, Christians encounter people with lifestyles, outlooks, and worldviews that test and even defy what they believe. Many Christians don’t know how to react to those encounters.

How do you have meaningful conversations that don’t devolve into heated arguments with people who don’t share your beliefs? Your instincts might tell you to refute opposing viewpoints with clever arguments and witty retorts, but those responses can push people away. Even worse, they don’t clearly reflect the loving attitude of Jesus.

Quick to Listen is made up of open and honest conversations and interviews held by the authors with evolutionists, atheists, Bible skeptics, and friends and members of the LGBTQ+ community. When asked what it meant to have his story shared in this book, one man replied, “It meant there’s at least one Christian out there more interested in understanding me than lecturing me.”

That’s what Quick to Listen is all about.

It’s a helpful tool to instruct you in listening and learning to talk with people who don’t share your beliefs as a Christian. It will equip you to acknowledge and understand their experiences and perspectives while also pointing you straight to the Bible to affirm and clarify your faith and beliefs. It will help you build relationships based on genuine Christian compassion so you can share Jesus and his love with them.

Degner serves as a Professor and the Director of Student Field Services at Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary in Mequon, WI; Doerr serves as a pastor in metropolitan Milwaukee after editing at Northwestern Publishing House; Schmoller serves as Professor of Theology and Foreign Language at Martin Luther College (MLC) in New Ulm, MN; Thompson serves as Professor of History/Social Science and Theology at MLC in New Ulm, MN.