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Since we resumed the monthly publication of our Supportive Ministries newsletter and conversation starter last September after a summer hiatus, we’ve covered a variety of topics that can contribute to “Becoming the Beloved Community,” from nurturing awareness, to the role spirituality plays, to creating hospitable space, to youth in community and, lastly, to lifting up the mystics in our congregations. As we close out this season, we turn to an essential dimension of Becoming a Beloved Community: Empathy and Compassion.
Being in community involves skills in relating to others. Daniel Goleman calls this Emotional Intelligence, as important as Intellectual Intelligence. ("Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ," Daniel Goleman, 1995). Empathy is a key component in our emotional intelligence, along with knowing one’s own emotions, managing emotions, motivating oneself and handling relationships. Empathy has been much in the news these past couple of months ever since Elon Musk was quoted in an interview on a Joe Rogan podcast saying, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” It would be easy to disregard the comment if it didn’t echo a chorus of voices from so-called Christian authors in recent months such as "The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits" (2025) by Joe Rigney and "Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion" (2024) by Allie Beth Stuckey. Behind these authors lies the research of John W. Compton published in "The End of Empathy: Why White Protestants Stopped Loving Their Neighbors" (2020).
These perspectives gave rise to a recent lengthy article in The Guardian, “Loathe Thy Neighbor: Elon Musk and the Christian Right Are Waging War on Empathy.” (It’s worth a read.)
“Loathe Thy Neighbor?” What about “Love Thy Neighbor?” Which one sounds more like Jesus to you? If we are truly to live into Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of becoming the Beloved Community and Jesus’ message about entering the “Kin-dom” of God, we would do well to consider and embody the empathy and compassion that Jesus lived every day. Being part of a Beloved Community begins with empathy – sharing one another’s joys and heartaches. Em-pathy is “feeling into” the experience of another. “What would I feel like if that were me?” We don’t assume that our response to that question would be the same as the other, but we seek to understand how they’re experiencing life. Feeling into the experience of another can lead to “feeling with” the other – com-passion. Empathy and compassion go hand in hand in fostering a Beloved Community. Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. It is essential for building the Beloved Community. It allows individuals to move beyond their own perspective and recognize the shared humanity of all. Compassion involves a deeper level of concern for another’s suffering and a desire to meet it. In addition to inspiring us to “love our neighbor,” Jesus also said “Be ye compassionate as God is compassionate” (Luke 6:36).
“Becoming the Beloved Community” implies a process, even a daily process, of transformation in a given community. Richard Rohr notes in "The Naked Now" that “the two universal paths of transformation are great love and great suffering [feeling with and feeling into]. Only love and suffering are strong enough to break down our usual ego defenses. Love and suffering are a part of every human life. They are the primary spiritual teachers.”
Rohr goes on: “Love is what we long for and were created for – in fact, love is what we are as an outpouring from God – but suffering often seems to be our opening to that need, that desire, and that identity. Love and suffering are the main portals that open up the mind space and the heart space, breaking us into breadth and depth and community" – a Beloved Community.
In these days, our days, when the very heartbeat of our faith – an expansive love of neighbor as an expression of our love for God – is being called into question, it is our time to practice the empathy and compassion that lie at the heart of loving our neighbor. Becoming the Beloved Community takes intention, time and practice. As John Pavlovitz observes in "The Beautiful Mess": “If your faith doesn’t make you a more compassionate human being, it’s worthless. Yes, love wins, but it often requires overtime.”
Questions to consider for deeper conversation:
- How would you describe empathy and compassion?
- When have you experienced empathy, either by sharing it with another or receiving it from another?
- How can compassion be expressed beyond the temptation to fix another’s hurt?
- What challenges and opportunities do you see for helping your congregation respond to the questioning of empathy in the popular culture?
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