But communication is indispensable in all relationships, and not only in the personal ones like marriage. In labor disputes, for instance, the bargaining relationship breaks down when either one or both parties abandon the attempt to communicate with the other. Therefore, we may conclude, in paraphrase of the Scriptures: If any man says that he loves God and will not try to communicate with his brother, he is a liar! But what is communication, and why is it so difficult to achieve? Most people seem to think of communication as getting a message across to another person. "You tell him what you want him to know." This concept produces a one-way verbal flow for which the term "monologue" is descriptive. Much of the church's so-called communication is monological, with preachers and teachers telling their hearers, both adults and children, the message they think they should know. The difficulty with monological activity is that it renders the hearer passive. It assumes that he is a receptacle into which the desired message may be poured. It eliminates the possibility of his active participation in the formulation of the message, and seems not to heed that a part of the message is in the person who is to receive it. Those who have studied the dynamics of communication and the process by which it occurs are convinced that the monological principle is contradictory to the nature of communication, and as a method is the least effective. Reflective observation of our own learning indicates that communication is most effective when we become a part of the process and meet the message with our own content. Furthermore, the monological principle is not one that was used by our Lord. He, Who was the full incarnation of love, made people participants in the Good News that He proclaimed. We think, for example, of His conversation with the woman at the well, in the course of which she moved from her superficial understanding of water to His understanding of the water of life, wherein the meaning of her life was revealed to her.[21] Again, we think of the lawyer who put Him to a test by asking what he must do to inherit eternal life, and our Lord drew him out in such a way that he answered his own question.[22] The Gospels are full of such illustrations of our Lord's method of communication. It is curious, therefore, that the church has settled for the opposite monological principle which is quite unequal to the task of conveying the full meanings of the gospel. _Communication Is Dialogue_