Start with emphathy

When I encounter new ideas and new social movements my first reaction is analysis and critique. This probably stems from being an intellectual, being male, and being a reflective personality. When I was newly married I went out for lunch with an older married friend and he gave me one piece of advice about relating to my wife, ``sympathy before solutions".  This eventually became a catch cry in our family. However, I think this idea has much broader implications, particularly in living as a Christian.

For all their faults, it is striking and challenging that Job's friends actually sat and wept with him for days before they presented their "solutions" to the suffering of Job. They entered his pain.
When Jesus saw the crowds, "he had compassion on them because they were harassed and helpless.'' He did not immediately lecture them about their "poor life choices" or their "wrong theology". There are countless scriptural examples from the Old Testament prophets to the letter of James that rebuke God's people for not listening to the cries of the oppressed.

Everyone has a story. Everyone's life has produced a rich raft of experiences, with a diverse mix of joy, pain, disappointment, struggle, ... These experiences shape their world view and response to their circumstances.
Many of my experiences are probably quite different. In particular, although my life has not been devoid of pain or struggles, I have had a privileged existence as a wealthy white male living in one of the most privileged countries in the world. I really don't know what it is like to be a Dalit, to live in a slum, to be an African-American living in the southern USA, to be a refugee, to live under military dictatorship in a poor Latin American country, to be a Muslim in Australia, to be a woman who has been sexually assaulted, ...

So when I encounter issues such as liberation theology, #metoo, economic inequality, racism, immigration, ... a challenging starting point is to listen and try and put myself in the shoes of those who cry out. What is their experience? What is their pain? How does that affect their perspective?
That does not mean I have to agree with absolutely every single detail of their agenda, their perspective, their claims, their politics, their theology, their methods, ....

In discussing the idea of "double listening" John Stott says

For the voices of our contemporaries may take the form of shrill and strident protest. They are now querulous, now appealing, now aggressive in tone. They are also the anguished cries of those who are suffering, and the pain, doubt, anger, alienation and even despair of those who are estranged from God. I am not suggesting that we should listen to God and to our fellow human beings in the same way or with the same degree of deference. We listen to the Word with humble reverence, anxious to understand it, and resolved to believe and obey what we come to understand. We listen to the world with critical alertness, anxious to understand it too, and resolved not necessarily to believe and obey it, but to sympathise with it and to seek grace to discover how the gospel relates to it. . . .

The Contemporary Christian: An urgent plea for double listening, page  28.