The Roving Listener

Broadway United Methodist Church had run the programs a shrinking urban church is supposed to run — a summer program serving 250 kids a day among them. Then nine young men died violently within four blocks in nine months, some of them program alumni. Pastor Mike Mather's verdict on his own good works was blunt: 'We felt so good about it that I broke my arm patting myself on the back.' A parishioner pointed at the food pantry's intake form: it asked, in effect, *how poor are you?* — and never asked anyone what they were good at.

So the church inverted itself. It retired the pantry, the tutoring program, the summer program, and the thrift shop — thanked in worship with 'well done, good and faithful servants' — and in 2004 hired De'Amon Harges, a neighbor, as its first roving listener: paid not to deliver services but to walk block by block discovering what people could do. 'I was curious about what was good in people, and that was what I was going to find out.' The craft: name the gift, bless it, connect it.

What the listening surfaced: Adele, a pantry regular, opened a restaurant within eighteen months. Forty-five backyard gardeners, convened over dinner with no agenda, started meeting monthly and planning a farmers market in a food desert. Sunday-school rooms became a dance studio, a pottery shop, and catering startups in the church's licensed kitchen. An 'Abundance Fund' paid neighbors for their gifts — a baker paid to bake for a sick neighbor, a woman paid to sing at a bus stop, until a funeral home hired her. Since 2008, the Jubilee summer program has hired neighborhood teenagers as junior roving listeners; Harges went on to co-found The Learning Tree, applying the practice across near-northwest Indianapolis.

What it teaches: the deepest resource question isn't what a neighborhood needs — it's who has been waiting to be asked.

Details

• era: 2003–present
• place: Fall Creek area, Indianapolis
• illustrates: gift-conversations, neighborhood-asset-map, connectors-table
• source note: All named outcomes per Faith & Leadership's long profile and Mather's book excerpt; Harges is now ABCD Institute faculty.
• practice kind: story