Stay in touch during the pandemic

 While many churches have now reopened for onsite worship services, others have not. Even those who have opened have noticed fewer people sitting in the pews. There are still many people fearful of getting out in public. As I have talked with numerous folks I have learned that many of them are ordering their groceries and picking them up outside the store or having family members drop them off on their front porches. Others have told me they have not eaten in a restaurant since this all started. Some visit with families through the windows in their homes or ask family members to maintain distance inside the house. These folks are not going to return to church services until they feel it is absolutely safe to do so. It is imperative that church leaders do whatever it takes to check on them from time to time so they do not feel abandoned by the church.

When churches were first shut down, many began providing their services through social media or their website. The church I am serving offers a live service on Facebook and then downloads the service on their website so people can view it at a more convenient time. As I have called some of our members who do not currently attend the services I find that the majority of them are watching online. Every one of them have told me how meaningful it is to still be able to worship with their congregation even though they can't be there. If you offered your services online I hope you will continue to do so after you open the church up for live worship services. If you did not do anything online, I encourage you to begin doing so. It's not expensive nor is it difficult, and those members of your congregation who are concerned about getting out in public will appreciate the opportunity to share in the worship experience.

Years ago while serving as a judicatory minister I noticed a trend among many younger pastors who were unwilling to do any form of visitation. I first learned about it from some pastor search committees I was assisting in finding a new pastor. A number of them called saying the candidates they were interviewing were telling them that they did not see visitation as part of pastoral ministry.

I admit to being old school, but I don't see how as pastor can effectively lead a church if he or she is not involved in the life of the members of the church, and that involvement includes making visits and maintaining regular contact with the members. This is especially true in the smaller churches. I agree that lay leaders need to be equipped to make these visits as well, and in larger churches they may handle many such visits, but the pastor cannot neglect providing pastoral care to the members either.

This is especially true during times such as we are in now. People are fearful, they are worried, many are lonely as they are reluctant to leave their homes. They need regular contact. They need to know the church continues to be there for them and to care for them. While they need to hear that from many people in the church, they certainly need to hear it from their pastor.

While home and hospital visits may not be an option right now, telephone calls will be welcomed. It takes very little time to make 3-5 calls a day, and they can make a big difference in the life of the ones you called. Stay in touch with the members of your congregation. They will appreciate it.

Pastoral visitation part 2

A few commented on my blog post yesterday in which I was critical of pastors who refuse to visit members of their congregation. One person responded that he understood the importance of pastoral visitation but wondered whatever happened to the responsibility of deacons to do visitation.

It's a fair question and one that I considered including in yesterday's post. However, I don't like to make these posts too long or people won't read them so I can't always cover everything I might want to in a single post.

In a couple of my books I write about the need for churches to practice congregational care rather than relying on pastoral care. Ephesians 4 teaches us that the primary role of a pastor is to equip the saints to do the work of ministry. Not only should the deacons (or similar group in your tribe) be involved in visitation and congregational care, everyone in your church should be trained to minister to one another.

When I was a pastor I introduced the Deacon Family Care Program to our deacons and congregation. We assigned every family who attended our church, whether they were members or not, to a deacon. Each deacon had 8-10 families assigned to them. They were given a book where they could record information about their families and the visits/contacts they made with each family.

In the training I encouraged them to contact at least one family a week. That is very doable and would mean that each family in the church would have at least one contact each quarter. That's four contacts a year. The contact could be in the form of a personal visit, a phone call, a card or letter depending on the situation at the time. For instance, if a family member was in the hospital the deacon would normally make a visit to the hospital. On the other hand, a birthday card might suffice as one contact.

We discussed how to make hospital visits and home visits. We talked about proper boundaries such as not visiting a single woman at home by themselves. Either a spouse or another deacon should accompany them if calling on a single woman. We talked about the need for confidentiality.

As a result of this training, our deacons began to handle the bulk of our visitation. When a deacon rotated off and someone new replaced that deacon, the book was given to the new deacon who would take up where the previous deacon left off.

However, none of this precluded me from doing visitation as well. A deacon might call to tell me about a visit that probably needed my follow-up, and I would do that. If someone was in the hospital I would normally visit that person even if their deacon had already been there.

Every bivocational minister struggles with time issues, and having trained lay people who can do much of the visitation can help ease some of that pressure. That does require training them, and it requires training the congregation to accept ministry from the deacons. However, that training time is time well spent. It allows the pastor to focus on other pastoral chores and on being with those who have more critical needs while still providing on-going ministry to the entire congregation.

Whatever happened to pastoral visits?

For the past fourteen years in my role as a resource minister in our judicatory I've worked with dozens of pastor search committees. Early in this role I was surprised by the number of these committees who contacted me concerned that the persons they were interviewing were very upfront that they did not do pastoral visitation. I couldn't explain it then to these committees and still can't.

The pastors I had growing up were very good about visiting their members when they were sick or needed special attention. That was the model I followed as a pastor. But, later in my pastoral ministry I noticed that a number of pastors no longer felt the need for such visits. It wasn't that these were pastors of megachurches with other ministers assigned to that responsibility. These were pastors of what we would call pastoral churches, but their concept of what it meant to be a pastor seemed to be much different than mine.

In some of my books and in this blog I've written that our churches need to move from a pastoral care model to a congregational care model. I believe that is a more biblical model (Eph. 4) for any size church, and especially for a bivocational church. As church members learn to minister to one another they are also better equipped to minister to those outside the church. This leads to more effective outreach as more people from within the church are ministering to more people both within and without their congregations. However, this does not exclude the pastor from providing pastoral care when it is needed.

Most of my ministry now focuses on congregations and pastors, but last week I made two pastoral visits on individuals. One is a gentleman whose mother is in hospice. They do not have a church home. A mutual friend asked if I could stop by and visit them so I did. I made sure they had a pastor who could conduct the service when that time came, and the son had just contacted a pastor to do that. We spent time talking about this time in this family's life, and I had prayer with him. It was a great visit.

The second visit was to an assisted living facility where I visited a member of one of the churches I serve. She and I have known each other since I pastored my church. I heard she had recently moved into this home and had said I should visit when I had the chance. We had a great time talking about things that had happened in our churches and people we had known. She shared with me a prayer need her family had, and I closed our visit in prayer. Again, it was a great time of ministry.

Pastors, don't ignore these ministry opportunities. You cannot serve your people well spending all your time in your office with your nose stuck in a book. Pastoral ministry means that the pastor ministers to people at all stages of their lives. Yes, train your congregation to minister to one another. This expands the ministry of your church. But, don't ignore the call of God on your life to be with your people during the transition times in their lives.