Reorganizing a Wealth of Resources: The Listening Hearts Ministries Website
For Listening Hearts Ministries, a Baltimore based ministry that teaches the practice of spiritual discernment, the challenge was never a shortage of good material. It was making that material easy to find.
Over nearly three decades, the ministry has built a substantial body of work: three published books, including Listening Hearts: Discerning Call in Community, Grounded in God, and Keeping in Tune with God, along with workshops, retreats, and trainings held in more than twenty five states. They have worked directly with bishops, clergy groups, vestries, sessions, and congregations of all sizes. As the team put it in their own words when the new site launched, the goal was simple: to keep making their materials “freely available and accessible in helping people hear God through prayerful listening and conversation in community.”
Worship Times partnered with the Listening Hearts team, led by Program Associate Joe Gill alongside Trustee Mike Croghan, Program Associate Tim Grayson, and Office Manager Laura McConnell, to give that material a clearer home.
Same Content, Easier to Find
The project, which spanned roughly a year from July 2025 through its July 2026 launch, kept nearly all of the ministry’s existing content intact. What changed was the organization. Worship Times‘ Justin Near worked with the team early in the process to sort everything into three main pathways from the home page:
- Learn: guides, meditations, discernment resources, and stories of discernment
- Experience: workshops, retreats, and trainings
- Share: manuals and the ministry’s songbook, resources for people leading discernment sessions in their own communities
Where content used to be buried several clicks deep, most resources are now just one or two clicks from the home page. The team also simplified a lot of the menu language itself, moving away from insider terminology toward wording that would make sense to someone encountering the ministry’s work for the first time.
Behind the scenes, the rebuild made use of a couple of different tools depending on the content type. How-To Guides, Meditations, and Stories of Discernment were built out as blog style posts, while the Explorations newsletter archive and the Songbook, including its audio accompaniment, continued to run on Worship Times’ Publications tool.
A Collaborative Process
What stood out most in this build was the rhythm of collaboration. Early on, the Listening Hearts team asked for help figuring out how to organize their existing content for editing, so the two teams built out a set of content buckets together. From there, the ministry’s team took ownership of editing and rearranging their own material before the two groups worked side by side to lay it out on the new site.
Mike Croghan, a Listening Hearts Ministries board member, later described the experience as “completely positive,” crediting Justin with striking the right balance of expertise, patience, and warmth throughout the project, even when the team’s requests or timeline shifted along the way.
A New Home for a Growing Ministry
The new listeninghearts.org went live in July 2026. With its content organized into clear, intuitive pathways, the site reflects the same spirit the ministry has always brought to its work: helping people listen more closely, whether to God, to each other, or to themselves.
