Fitting It In

I don’t respond to every squeaky hinge as if it requires a major repair job. One drop of oil can do wonders.
—Gary Gulbranson

The ring of the phone awoke me one Sunday morning at 5:30. A woman whom I had been counseling for some time tearfully asked me to drive to Billings Hospital in Chicago (some twenty-five miles away) and minister to her sister and brother-in-law. Their 2-year-old son had been in the bathtub the night before; while his mother was out of the room, his 8-year-old retarded sister had climbed into the tub and sat on him. When the mother returned, she found him in a coma.

When I received the call, it appeared the baby would die. With Sunday’s service before me I said, “I’ll definitely go see them. But I have to see when I can work that into my schedule today.…”

“Pastor,” she interrupted. “I think the little boy is going to die, and they need you right away.”

“Okay. I’ll be there shortly.”

At six o’clock I phoned an elder and asked him to teach my 9; 45 Bible class. I told him I expected to be back for the worship service at 11 a.m. Then I got into my car.

The woman was right: the boy did die, and the family desperately needed pastoral care. I spent several hours with them, drove back in time to preach the morning service, then returned to the hospital.

I could have handled this differently. When I received the phone call that morning, I could have told my counselee that I would contact a chaplain at the hospital. But from our sessions together, I knew she had been burned by authority figures in the past and thus distrusted them. I determined that her need to trust a pastor was higher than my responsibility to teach a class.

I regularly find myself in similar situations, weighing the cry for pastoral care against my other pastoral duties. Like a mother robin, standing worm in mouth before a nest full of gaping, chirping beaks, pastoral counselors often have a conflict of responsibilities. Who gets my limited supply of time and energy?

I have learned there are no neat solutions, but I can do several things to better balance the demands.

Manage Three Types of Care

When people and demands press me from every side, I sometimes feel as if I have little control over my schedule. But I do have control, and in varying degrees, depending on the type of care offered:

1. Scheduled care. I bunch my counseling toward the front of the week. After taking Monday off, I’m emotionally recharged, and with Sunday far enough away, I can devote my peak energies and concentration to the emotionally taxing work of counseling. I block off counseling hours on Tuesday and Wednesday in the morning and evening, with study sandwiched in the afternoon.

Over this type of care I can exert the most control. As long as the situation is not a crisis, I ask people to call my secretary, who schedules people into a fifty-minute session as soon as an opening is available.

At the back door after a church service, I said to one man who seemed upset, “Is there anything I can do for you?”

He answered, “I need to see you.”

I said, “My secretary is the best one to schedule that. If you call tomorrow, she can find a spot for you on Tuesday or Wednesday.”

He replied, “No, I need to see you now.”

A few minutes later, after I had finished greeting the congregation, I went to the office with him. He was under heavy stress on the job, and it had come to a head for him that morning when he and his wife fought about his work.

We talked briefly, and then I said, “Bill, I’m glad I took the time today to understand what you’re going through. I think I can be of real help to you. I am going to have a block of time available on Tuesday to deal with it. If you could call my secretary tomorrow, we’ll work this thing out.”

It turned out, he never made an appointment. Simply knowing that I was available to him and could give him focused attention if he needed it relieved some of his tension. He and his wife worked it out on their own.

2. Schmooze care. This is counseling by walking around, like the one-minute manager, and it obviates many scheduled appointments. I give schmooze care before and after church services, in the hallways during the week as activities are going on in the building, and over the phone.

Some of our older ladies meet several times monthly for a luncheon, and I sit in. This shows I consider them vip’s. Many problems of the elderly result from feeling nobody cares. We’re a young congregation, and they know I wrestle with lots of family problems. If I didn’t make myself available at a time like this luncheon, some would feel they were imposing to ask for my attention.

After a church service, schmooze care lets people know that I notice their presence. It means using or asking names, a handshake with eye-contact, and occasionally a discreet but pointed question.

If the person and I need to talk in private, I promise a phone call. Since people often want to schedule an entire counseling session to discuss what requires only five minutes, schmooze care can reduce appointments by trolling for problems that can be dealt with briefly.

Schmooze care works as effective follow-up. Without violating privacy I can say, “I haven’t forgotten your situation. Is everything working out? I want you to know I’m still praying for you.” I’m communicating that, in the midst of all these faces on Sunday morning, I remember their needs and that I still care.

3. Squeaky-hinge care. In the middle of one early morning elders meeting, the phone rang. A young woman whom I had been advising about buying a house had just learned her financing might fall through, and she was in a panic. I told her, “I can’t discuss the situation right now, but I’ll call you back later.” That satisfied her.

This wasn’t an emergency that merited calling me out of an elders’ meeting, but it did merit some response. I have learned that all of us see our own needs as serious, never minor. We naturally want prompt attention.

So I have instructed my secretary to put callers through to me if they appear to be in a crisis, but I don’t respond to every squeaky hinge as if it requires a major repair job. One drop of oil can do wonders.

Handling Trust Tests

Trust tests aggravate the problem of balancing counseling with my other responsibilities. In a society with few commitments, people establish trust slowly. Even in a church, people are not sure they can trust the pastor, and consciously or unconsciously, they sometimes test us.

The most common test happens in the counseling session. Counselees generally don’t reveal their deepest needs in initial sessions; instead they excavate less threatening sinkholes to see how I respond. If I pass those tests, they dig a little deeper.

Usually tests are stated obliquely. I was counseling one woman about various problems in her marriage. One day she said, “Someone needs to confront my husband about what he’s doing.”

I knew her well enough to know what she was really saying: “Pastor, I think you need to go and confront my husband. I want to know if you care enough about what’s happening in my marriage and family to go and intervene yourself rather than sending elders or staff.”

I’ve learned to be sensitive to subtle cues. Sometimes a trust test comes as a call to my home, ostensibly seeking information, actually checking if I’m available: Can I reach him if 1 really need him? People won’t usually tell us if we fail a test. They just don’t entrust themselves to us. They keep a safe distance, hide their problems, or go to another church.

To pass a trust test, I don’t necessarily need to do the thing that’s being requested of me. But in any event, I want to be aware when I’m being tested, so that even if I decide not to respond as requested, I’ll be able to clearly communicate that I’m trustworthy: “I’m concerned about your husband’s behavior too. But I’ve found that if I intervene in marriages as you’re suggesting, I cause more harm than good. Is there another way we can deal with your husband?”

Some tests I don’t want to pass. After a while, pastors can sense when someone is just trying to manipulate his or her attention. With such people, it is, in fact, better to fail the trust test—although with manipulators it’s less a trust test than it is a test to see who’s in charge. With such people, I do more harm than good by responding to their every plea.

Trust tests are so important that I’ve learned to deal with even perceived failures of trust. If someone is disappointed in my performance or out of line in their expectations, I address it as quickly as possible, preventing it from festering.

Three minutes before a Sunday morning worship service, a church member approached me in the hall. She was broken up. “I just found out,” she said, “that my oldest son has aids.” He was in the hospital, and she assumed he was going to stay there. She didn’t ask me to go see him, but she told me where the hospital was, tipping me off that she wanted me to do more than pray.

After the service I talked to her again and promised to visit him. On Monday I phoned him at the hospital, not wanting to trigger defensiveness with a surprise visit. I reached him, but he was just checking out.

On Tuesday night his mother, quite angry, went to a home Bible study and said to the group, “Pastor promised he would visit my son, but he didn’t. This church hasn’t helped me when I needed it.”

When word reached me, I immediately called her at work. I told her that I understood she was disappointed in me, and I asked, “Has there ever been a time when I’ve told you I would do something that I didn’t?”

“No,” she replied.

“I may not have met your expectations, but I did call your son. And I arranged to meet him later in the week at his work.”

She apologized. “I was upset and anxious over the whole situation. What I said wasn’t fair, and I’m sorry.”

After recognizing the issue of trust, there are several ways we can begin to balance our counseling load with our other responsibilities.

Get Counselees to Help

Counseling can feel like a lonely job, especially if I’m the one who alone has to rein in my schedule. However, over the years I’ve found some help: I’ve learned that the majority of callers will help me manage my schedule if I recruit them as allies.

With people unfamiliar with counseling, I offer a little orientation. After their problems are on the table, I say, for example, “We meet for fifty minutes each week. We will need four sessions to get a handle on this issue. If we haven’t begun to resolve things by then, we’ll decide together whether we should refer you to someone else who can help you.”

Then they understand that such boundaries are not arbitrary rules but boundaries within which we can work effectively. Once they understand that, they get down to business more quickly.

I often ask people to plan ahead for our session. They write an agenda and keep a record of areas in which they’ve been seeking improvement. Thus they arrive focused, mentally prepared, able to address problems more thoroughly. This increases the comfort quotient on both sides, since I know they won’t waste time, and they know what to expect.

When another responsibility intrudes, I sometimes enlist the help of counselees by telling them what’s happened. Sometimes this changes the whole dynamic of the relationship.

I had been counseling one young woman for several weeks. Just before she came in for her appointment, I received a call from a family who had just had a death. While I didn’t have to rush off at that moment, it was heavy on my mind. When the young woman walked in, she said, “You look troubled today, pastor.”

“I have to say that I am,” I replied. “I just heard from a family who lost a loved one. I’m going to spend time with them this afternoon. I’m concerned about them.”

She replied immediately, “My situation can wait. Why don’t you go see that family. Is there anything I can do to help?” Before leaving, she prayed for the family and for my ministry to them.

Teach the Church How to Counsel

A bracing fact of counseling life: the better we are at it, the more that needy people will crowd our small doorstep. The more people sense we are trustworthy and caring, the more clanking skeletons they will pull out of the closet.

I regard hurting people who call on me as my responsibility. But as Moses learned from Jethro, my responsibility isn’t to counsel everyone but to ensure that counseling gets done. Since my church understands this principle, we seek ways to spread the load.

For instance, we offer a Tuesday night Circle of Concern, in which people gather each week for a month to learn about a particular problem (child abuse, eating disorders, alcoholism, and the like). We also teach systematic helping skills at these meetings.

We have developed a list of proven helping agencies and counselors in the community to which we regularly refer people.

In addition, we train lay counselors and invest in staff members with counseling gifts. Recently we paid for our youth pastor and his wife to receive some formal training to augment their ministry with high school age, college age, and many single members.

Preaching is a key time to equip people for counseling ministry. I prepare my sermons to be useful not only to people in trouble but also to those who will be helping such people. My sermons often include point-by-point application: “Here are five things to do when you are depressed.” “Here are six steps for getting out of financial troubles.” I encourage listeners to take notes and to share the sermon ideas with others.

At holidays, for example, I will say from the pulpit, “During special holidays, people expect more than ever that they will find some happiness. Instead of taking away some of their depression, though, holidays often make matters worse. During holidays, in fact, I often have an increased counseling load. But there are some things that you can do to encourage others at this time of year.” Then I list some ways to help.

Maintain Healthy Attitudes

Planning and scheduling and delegating will not help me handle the pressure if I’m harboring bad attitudes about my hectic ministry. To counter that regular temptation, I’ve learned to nurture three traits.

• Forgiveness. A young man whom I had helped recover from a divorce was grateful. Unfortunately he was so grateful that he wanted to deepen our friendship socially beyond what was possible for me. Without my knowledge, he even made me a beneficiary of his life insurance policy. When he finally realized such a friendship wasn’t possible, he was deeply disappointed and stopped attending the church. All this I found out from a mutual friend.

The news triggered some anger in me; I don’t like to let people down. I was angry at myself for not picking up the signals and heading off this problem, angry at my overloaded schedule, and angry at him for his expectations.

Even though people’s expectations are sometimes unreasonable, I’m still troubled when I can’t meet them. I’ve had to learn to forgive myself for not being superhuman. Even then, sometimes I still end up carrying some resentment against the people who’ve expected the unreasonable, and I’ve had to learn to forgive them.

One couple whom I counseled gave me a marble stone etched with the words “A happy marriage is the union of two good forgivers.” Forgiveness is equally important for happily balanced pastors.

• Flexibility. A pastor is a general practitioner. I move from sermon preparation, to premarriage counseling, to board meetings, to the funeral home. If I cannot shift gears easily, I’ll have trouble.

Sometimes, in order to do counseling at night, I leave the office early, pick up my daughter at school, and spend time with her and the rest of my family. I schedule most of our elder meetings for early mornings so that evenings are available for family or other work.

• Creativity. Rather than counseling engaged couples two by two, I organize them into a premarriage counseling group that meets on Saturday morning. That’s what I mean by creativity—trying to approach an old problem in a new way.

Another example: I wanted to give singles a model of family life to consider, and I wanted to meet some of their many counseling needs. So my wife and I sponsored a weekly evening Bible study in our home for nearly a year. Twenty single-parents, some with children, met in our house over that period, enabling me to minister while being with my family.

When it comes to balance, counseling pastors resemble a halfback in football. Sometimes as the back runs up the sideline, a tackier shoves him hard enough to force him out of bounds, but the leaning halfback is able to tightrope a few more steps inside the field of play before his imbalance causes him to step over the line.

Likewise, I may be able to dash for a while with my ministry out of balance, but eventually I’ll hit the turf unless I can regain my center of gravity.

My goal is to remain balanced so I can maintain my ministry of counseling to those in need. I don’t want so to overextend myself that I fall out of bounds. A balanced ministry will be an ongoing ministry.