This past summer I participated in two funerals: one for a gentleman in his eighties whom God allowed me to lead to Christ in the month he died, and one for a pastor in his sixties who taught me how to lead dying people to Christ
The pastor was my friend and mentor, Bob Cahill
Bob learned care for the dying from his own dying-in his short life he endured ten surgeries and two life-threatening cancers. He outlived his cancer fifteen years and died of something else. I served as his associate during his years of radiation and chemotherapy and learned from him as his cancer sharpened his pastoral work
“Since my cancer I preach as a dying man to dying men,” he told me. “When I look out at the congregation I see people whose lives are passing away and who need Christ. You can’t imagine what this does to your sense of unction.
Another time he said, “I have learned through my own cancer that in working with the dying we must be bold. As I lay there nauseated from my treatment, wondering if I would live or die, Christ himself helped me. That is what people need when they are dying . . . they need Christ.
Bob loved to quote from George MacDonald’s Diary of an Old Soul:
I rise and run, staggering-double and run.
But whither-whither-whither for escape?
The sea lies all about this long-necked cape-
There come the dogs, straight for me every one-
Me, live despair, live center of alarms!
Ah, lo, ‘twixt me and all his barking harms,
The shepherd, lo, I run-fall folded in his arms.
Bob knew all too well that I tend toward reticence in my dealings with people. He never feared I would force my way into a situation; his concern was that I allowed situations to force me out. His normally gentle face became quite stern: “You must urge the dying to look to Christ. . . . With the dying, you must be bold. To be a pastor you must be willing to endure the bad breath of the cancer patient. If a pastor can’t hold the hand of a dying woman, he shouldn’t be a pastor.
His heirs
Ernst, the father of one of our church members, was a man of honor and humor but not of Christ. I got to know him in the convalescent hospital following the removal of his leg due to gangrene. We didn’t talk about much. Our conversations obeyed the reluctance of my reticence. But his bedridden days worked evilly on his lungs. He developed a persistent, pervasive pneumonia. As I saw the sickness setting in deeply, I remembered the words of my friend: “Urge them to turn to Christ. With the dying, you must be bold.
Christ-boldness worked powerfully in him. He received Christ, eternal life, and the basis for peace in his final days. Although Ernst had never attended church as an adult, he had participated in church as a child. His early exposure to the Word of God laid a groundwork for his final days. It turned out that Ernst had spent seventy years of his life feeling alienated from the church. After he accepted Christ and received Communion he told his daughter, “I joined the church!” He told me, “I don’t feel on the outside anymore. You can’t believe how good it is to be on the inside. No minister ever cared about old Ernst before. Thank you for caring enough to come see me.
At that moment I was so grateful for Bob’s words: “Urge them to turn to Christ. With the dying, you must be bold.
As the pneumonia robbed Ernst’s body and his brain of oxygen, his consciousness went in and out of focus. Yet he was able to recite the Lord’s Prayer, the Twenty-Third Psalm, and John 3:16. His daughter was amazed
“This is why we teach Sunday school,” I said. I couldn’t really explain that my ministry to them was something of which I was only an heir. We were the benefactors of another man’s suffering and commitment to Christ
My first books
Bob Cahill grew up in a decidedly nonChristian home. His father spent time in the Oregon State Penitentiary in the 1930s. Bob was an outgoing, fun-loving pagan. He was president of his high school class in Portland. As a body-builder, he won Mr. Oregon in 1950. That same year he made his way south to Los Angeles to join the Marines. He attended Billy Graham’s historic 1950 Los Angeles Crusade where, as Bob put it, he walked the sawdust trail. He kept walking, straight into Korea as a foot soldier. After the war he went to college and married; he graduated from Fuller Seminary in 1962
My history with Bob goes back to my freshman year of college. In The Art of Pastoring, I recount my first encounter with him
“When he preached, the power, the conviction, and the tender mercy of the gospel made the human sanctuary resonate like Pavarotti, getting overtones from the rafters. As I watched and listened, my conviction grew that what he did was what I had to do. . . . [A]s I watched him, I knew that I should be a pastor.
My wife and I spent the summer of 1976 with Bob in Salem as a summer intern. That summer he gave me some books: Helmut Thielicke’s Our Heavenly Father, Geerhardus Vos’s Biblical Theology, Charles Spurgeon’s Lectures to My Students, and a little book edited by Charles Spurgeon, Smooth Stones Taken from Ancient Brooks, a book of quotes by the English Puritan Thomas Brooks. I spluttered, “I’ll read them and then I’ll tell you what I learned from them,” thinking that reporting on them was a way to show I deserved them. He replied with a wry smile, “You don’t need to do that; you’ll read them when the time comes.
Those four were the first of hundreds of books he gave me over twenty years
My best book
As Bob lay dying, never awake for long, barely able to speak, he asked to hear the section on the “Shepherds” from John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. I took the first turn
Christian and Hopeful continued on their way till they came to the Delectable Mountains, which belong to the Lord of that hill of which we have spoken before. . . . Now there were on the tops of these mountains Shepherds feeding their flocks, and they stood by the side of the highway. The Pilgrims went to them, and leaning on their staves (as is common with weary pilgrims when they stand to talk with anyone on the road), they asked, “Whose Delectable Mountains are these? And whose are the sheep that feed on them?”
“These mountains are Immanuel’s Land,” replied the Shepherds. “And they are within sight of His city. The sheep are His too, and He laid down His life for them.”
That’s all the farther I could read. My voice just didn’t work anymore. I handed the book to one of his sons, also a pastor, who continued. We trembled when the following section was read, it was so typical of Bob, and we knew it was his last charge to us
The names of the Shepherds are Knowledge, Experience, Watchful, and Sincere. They took the Pilgrims by the hand and led them to their tents, making them partake of that which was ready for them to eat. They said to them, “We would that you should stay here awhile, to be acquainted with us, and even more, to solace yourselves with the good of these Delectable Mountains.”
All through the years, through all the tough times, Bob’s cup was never empty. He never dried up. He never despaired of the task of preaching the gospel. But of all the books he gave me, the best one I ever read on the ministry was his life
Dave Hansen is pastor of Belgrade Community Church in Belgrade, Montana. In this column, he explores how church leaders from earlier generations can mentor us today.
1997 by Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.
