The frozen chosen
A pastor told Leadership recently, “It seems I’ve been doing a lot more counseling lately.”
We asked, “What problems are you seeing more of?”
“Troubled marriages. Many Christian couples are still together, gutting it out—I respect them for that—but the intimacy is gone. Sometimes it seems my wife and I are the only people in the congregation still enjoying sex.”
How are you recruiting?
It’s an age-old problem: not enough volunteers, especially to work with children and youth. In response, many church leaders appeal to convenience: “It won’t take much of your time.”
But one youth pastor says he sees good results doing the opposite—recruiting to commitment: “This will take a lot of your time; this is challenging, but there’s nothing more important.”
Uncomfortable seekers
A pastor explains, “I used to ask, ‘Will spiritual seekers be comfortable in our worship service and church?’ That was the wrong question. You can’t read much of the Bible in our contemporary context without being uncomfortable.
“Our question now is, ‘Will seekers be unnecessarily offended by our actions?'”
Dying 4 change
Planning to make a change in your congregation? In Mikros newsletter, Glenn C. Daman lists four ways people respond to change. People may see change as:
1. a friend to be embraced
2. a companion to be selected with care
3. a stranger to be accepted with caution
4. an enemy to resist.
Knowing which group someone is in can help you tailor your response.
Your sermon’s envelope
Narrative preaching is sometimes touted as the means of communicating with a TV generation; a deductive, content-heavy form is often considered out of date.
Eugene Lowry, preaching professor at St. Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, reduces the tension by comparing the sermon’s form to an envelope. The traditional sermon had a logical envelope with narrative inside. Today’s narrative sermon has a “a narratively shaped envelope with rhetorical ingredients inside” (Listening to the Word).
Consequently, “One should no more label a narrative sermon as mere story than one would name a traditional sermon mere logic. Both story and logic are proper. The question is: Which are the eggs; which is the basket? The changing answer to that question is the revolution of preaching in our time.”
Managed care
In Leadership‘s area on America Online (keyword: LJ), we asked, “With the rise of managed care, insurance companies are restricting the number of visits people can have with professional counselors. Are you seeing more people coming to the church for counseling, since they can receive care there for free rates?”
Two intriguing responses:
1. I am a layman. “Managed care” is synonymous with “no care.” Counseling by “professionals” with all the right credentials does not assure the best care, and it is outrageously expensive for long-term care of things like deep depression and a history of sexual abuse, such as [I have]. I got most of my care from … a well-trained pastor …
2. I’m in practice as a professional/pastoral counselor within a local church. All the insurance companies I know limit their coverage to “clinical syndromes”-disorders ranging from major depression and post-traumatic stress disorder to schizophrenia. Meanwhile, most people come for pastoral counseling for problems in relationships, marriage, subclinical depression, and grief issues.
People go to the church not because of insurance limits, but because they are more trusting of counselors with biblical values (even non-Christians often feel this way) and because of the high cost of counseling in general.
1997 by Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.
