Ministry Practices

[Dave Roberts]

I met a woman a few days ago whose husband died three months ago. When she learned that I was a pastor, she wanted my opinion of her pastor. I found myself tiptoeing around what to say. She said that she has not heard from her pastor or the associate at their church since the funeral, and she needed to be supported and visited. I was trained to model a ministry that tried to touch base after a spouse's death at one month, three months, six months, one year, and two years. Is the newer ministry model to leave them at the cemetery and let the church do all the grief ministry after that? How would you have handled her questions about her pastor and church staff. (I have no idea what the size of the church is.)

[Tim Bonney]

[Dave Roberts]

Tim, I agree with what you are saying, and in every church there has to be an adaptation to the church. When I pastored an 800-member congregation, it was far different from the 250 member church I served. Staff and designated teams of laypeople did a lot of the follow-up. The key was making clear to people that they would not be dropped when the funeral was over. I never did all those visits after I got to larger situations, but I made it clear that someone would be checking and programmed those efforts to respond to the critical times. Random visitation ended for me by 1980, for all I accomplished was leaving cards in doors while serving an urban-fringe congregation. The key is keeping clear expectations and communicating them, not in running every errand and making every visit myself. I still run into folks in my generation and older who assume that pastors go out and visit every house on a road for the church. My problem in what I was hearing was that there did not seem to be any active care ministry from that church.