“Hearing to speech”: holy conversations in pastoral ministry and qualitative research

Pastoral ministry and qualitative research have more in common than I had expected. For me, as a priest-theologian, examining these resonances between these two facets of my experience and identity has been illuminating. In a world in which increasingly few of us inhabit only one role, I hope my reflections on my experience of conducting qualitative research interviews and having pastoral conversations with parishioners, and how those two distinct roles and encounters inform and enrich each other, will be relevant to anyone who is trying to juggle multiple roles and relationships and looking for the theological coherence within and between them.

I am an Anglican priest, and Vicar of two post-war estate parishes in the North East of England. They are poor in material terms (in the bottom 1% of the deprivation index), but they are rich communities in other ways, with a vibrant tapestry of stories and a tightly woven fabric of relationships into which I am privileged to be invited. I am also a researcher, a feminist theologian, a PhD candidate, and in my doctoral research I am looking at how women’s vocational narratives challenge and enrich our understanding of the vocation of the church as the body of Christ, and what sort of body we are called to be. I am interviewing older feminist women, both lay and ordained, about their understanding and experience of vocation, and this too is giving me a glimpse into a richly storied world in which vocation arises, struggles, and flourishes within a framework of community.

In this dual context of storied relationship, as both researcher and priest, one of the ways in which I understand the conversations I have with my research participants and with my parishioners is through the lens of Nelle Morton’s iconic phrase “hearing to speech”. Morton coined this term in the 1980s to describe the phenomenon she was experiencing among groups of women hearing one another’s stories: “a hearing that is far more than acute listening. A hearing engaged in by the whole body that evokes speech – a new speech – a new creation.”[1] This is a kind of hearing I recognise as a core part of both pastoral conversations and research interviews.

In the context of a research interview, the kind of hearing we think we are engaged in is a substantial epistemological question, and key to shaping both the interview and the research project to which it contributes. Are we eliciting existing knowledge from our research participants in order to use it for our own purposes, or are we co-creating knowledge with our research participants, so that at the end of the research interview knowledge exists which neither of us previously had? The latter model is the one I find more persuasive. It is more consonant with a feminist commitment to valuing knowledge which arises out of relationship, and also more reflective of my experience of conducting research interviews.

In many of the interviews I have conducted with women, new understandings, images, metaphors and frameworks for thinking about vocation have arisen out of the conversation. Sometimes research participants have named this explicitly. One of my research participants, Nanny, reflected towards the end of the interview: “for me, making that connection which I hadn’t done explicitly before… that for me has been… thank you for helping me to think that through.” The connection Nanny is referring to is one which did not exist in her mind (or mine) before the interview. It is something which became clear to her as she spoke, and as I heard her. She has been ‘heard to speak’. And as a result of that hearing to speech, both she and I have encountered some knowledge of who God is and how God works in the life of the church which neither of us had previously known.

To approach a research interview as a collaborative encounter in which knowledge is co-created, rather than an exercise in which the researcher extracts pre-existing data from the participant, is a foundational element of feminist research methodologies, which seek to prioritise the agency and humanity of those who participate in research. Just a few years before Morton coined the term ‘hearing to speech’, feminist sociologist Ann Oakley argued that it is both impossible and undesirable to apply the received wisdom that a research interview should be a hierarchical, one-way encounter to the practice of a feminist researcher interviewing women.[2] Oakley’s descriptions of her interview encounters with women, their shared development of knowledge and insight which neither party could have articulated before the interview, bear a striking similarity to Morton’s descriptions of her experiences within the context of women’s groups, which she describes as ‘hearing to speech’. Oakley, and the generations of feminist researchers who have come after her in a wide range of academic fields, have heard into speech the wisdom and insight of her research participants.

In pastoral encounters too, there is frequently a moment of knowing, in which the space to be heard enables the person who has arrived thinking they are asking for pastoral advice to instead realise something for themselves about their situation. Many clergy will recognise the experience of a parishioner thanking us for clarifying something for them, when we feel we have said very little. This is another kind of ‘hearing to speech’: by being fully present and attentive, we enable people to bring to consciousness (and sometimes speech) knowledge of themselves and their pastoral situation of which they were previously unaware. They move forward in their understanding of their situation not because of anything we have said, but because of how we have listened. In doing so, they may gain some new awareness of God in that situation. Or they may experience the quality of love which is inherent in truly attentive listening, and which I would name as a manifestation of God’s presence in the conversation.

Margaret Guenther, writing about the quality of attentiveness required in the context of spiritual direction, as well as other forms of pastoral encounter, terms this ‘holy listening’.[3] Sue Pickering, drawing on Guenther’s work, describes how “as pastoral listeners we do not try to shape the experience of those we listen to according to our understanding or tradition. Instead we listen with them for signs of grace, for what God – recognised or unrecognised – might be doing in their life.”[4] The form of non-directive pastoral conversation which both Pickering and Guenther are describing, with its emphasis on attentive listening to God, the other person, and the self, has clear resonances with Morton’s description of ‘hearing to speech’.

In both pastoral conversations and research interviews, it has been my experience that insight and knowledge is generated in relational encounter. To take these conversations seriously as sites of theological insight and encounter with God, to name them as holy conversations, is to take seriously the presence of a God who chooses to reveal Godself within human lives and relationships. That is to say, it is a fundamentally incarnational approach to both research and pastoral ministry.

Holy conversations in which people are heard to speech – especially people who have been overlooked, dismissed and disempowered, as is the case in both my pastoral context and my research context – are a site where incarnational theology is embodied and developed in conversational, communal, encounter-based modes. In the incarnation, the relational nature of God who is love enters, in the person of Jesus Christ, the sphere of embodied human relationships of mutuality and compassion.

The incarnation of Christ is fundamentally conversational. In the gospels, we see Jesus in conversation with those who were overlooked, dismissed and disempowered in his own context, as well as in challenging conversations with those whose power and authority he brings into question. Jesus does not only speak, but he also listens. And when he listens, people are enabled to say things they did not previously know. Jesus hears the ‘good confession’ of Martha: “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah” (John 11.27). He also hears the challenge of the Syrophoenician woman: “even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs” (Mark 7.28) and allows himself to be challenged and changed by what he hears. This is Jesus co-creating theology in conversation.

The incarnation is also conversational in a way that extends far beyond the conversations Jesus had in his earthly life and ministry. At the heart of the incarnation is a conversation between the human and the divine, a conversation enfleshed in the body of Jesus himself, and continued in the embodied life of the church as the body of Christ. To ‘do theology’ within such a paradigm of embodied conversation is to speak and listen in ways which are generative and co-creative, whether the context is pastoral, academic, liturgical or formational.

Morton, in her account of hearing to speech, encourages us to “see God as the hearing one, hearing us to our own responsible word.”[5] This account of theology which emerges not only from God’s word but from God’s attentive listening, speaks of a deeply feminist and deeply incarnational commitment to valuing the humanity of God’s and our interlocutors, and recognising relationship, community and conversation as a significant site of theological co-creation.

Taking seriously the full humanity of those I encounter in pastoral conversation and research interviews, and my own humanity as researcher and as a priest, is a vital underpinning for developing a theology and a pastoral practice which reflects the nature of a God who hears us to speech, and draws us by listening as well as by speaking into deeper understanding of who God is and who we are in relationship to God. Feminist theologians have long insisted on the importance of paying attention to the full humanity of all people, especially women and others whom patriarchal theologies have tended to disregard. While this is not a claim which is unique to feminist theologies, it is a claim which is essential to feminist theologies, and one which shapes the ways in which feminist theologians, myself included, approach and understand our conversational encounters.

When we make the claim that conversation is holy, a site of revelation and encounter with God, theologically generative, we are laying claim to the central importance of conversational encounter in our human lives, in human encounter with God, and in the relational nature of the Holy Trinity itself. To claim the mutuality of conversation as holy is to make a profound claim about the mutual, non-hierarchical nature of the trinitarian relationship into which we are invited. A God who listens as much as she speaks calls us who are made in God’s image to listen to one another in ways which reflect the deeply attentive love of God, and which call new ways of knowing into being.

For me, as a priest and a researcher, the holy conversations I have in each of those roles inform each other by shaping me to become a more attentive listener in both contexts, more ready to allow myself and my theology to be formed conversationally, more aware of the extent to which my whole self and that of my interlocutors (whether research participants or parishioners) is engaged in a co-creative process in which knowledge is generated as it is spoken and heard into being.

More than 40 years after Nelle Morton first described the experience of ‘hearing to speech, it retains the powerful potential to deepen our encounter with one another, with the self, and with God, to foster co-creative, conversational modes of theology, to speak deeply of the relational nature of the incarnation, and to reflect and reveal the nature of God who calls us into being and hears us to speech.

Notes

[1] Nelle Morton, The Journey is Home (Beacon Press, 1985), 127

[2] Ann Oakley, ‘Interviewing Women’, in Helen Roberts ed. Doing Feminist Research (Routledge, 1981), 30-61

[3] Margaret Guenther, Holy Listening: the Art of Spiritual Direction (Cowley Publication, 1992)

[4] Sue Pickering, Listening and Spiritual Conversation (Canterbury Press, 2017), 16

[5] Nelle Morton, The Journey is Home (Beacon Press, 1985), 129

© Ruth Harley, 2026. This article is a part of a series in collaboration with the FTN (Feminist Theology Network). FTN social media: https://www.instagram.com/feministtheologynetwork/ and @feministtheology.bsky.social

This work is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

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