Home visitation is an awesome opportunity and responsibility. For many people, I can be an extension of Christ, an expression, albeit imperfect, of God’s love.
— Doug Self
A typical day of pastoral visitation:
Early in the afternoon, I visited a blended family. The wife had a child from a previous live-in; the husband had children from a previous marriage. They were desperately trying to blend the families together. It didn’t take long to get down to business. They were troubled that, because of the tension in the family, one of the husband’s children had left to live with the husband’s former wife. To make matters worse, the husband had just lost his job. The family was pummeled and hurting.
Although the joblessness was new, the knotty problem with the children was not. There weren’t any easy answers. We analyzed a recent family blowup to search for better ways to handle their conflicts. Although I didn’t want to lecture them, I did try to help them trust God in the midst of their turmoil.
As I got ready to leave, the husband, the wife, and I joined hands in prayer. I asked God to put his arms around these two bewildered and exhausted Christians.
A short time later, I was visiting a young couple who had been attending our church for a few Sundays. What a joy! They had recently moved to our community and had been invited by some regular attenders. During our visit they assured me they’d found their church home with us. I love to hear new people excitedly describe what they’ve found meaningful about our church.
At the last stop of the day, I counseled a soon-to-be-wed couple. The prospective bride had a child from a previous marriage and was now six months pregnant. The prospective groom told me how disappointed he was over losing several previous children with other women. One child lived a week, and three others were miscarried because of the women’s drug use.
I thought to myself. How can the world get so messed up? The two were wandering around in life, trying to put something together. They hadn’t been significantly touched by the church, yet they called on me to perform their ceremony. So I tried to use that opportunity to build a relationship, and I hope to see them trust in Christ eventually.
Visitation: At the Heart of Ministry
Every pastor has strengths, gifts, and interests. Some may emphasize preaching, others administration, others teaching.
For me, visitation has become the joy and strength of my ministry. Some days visiting is an adventure; other days it’s drudgery. But my pastoral ministry cannot exist without it.
Not all pastors, of course, will make visitation their top priority. Nonetheless, personal care for members remains a vital part of every pastor’s ministry for three reasons.
• It’s central to our call. To some degree, the words we use to describe our calling determine the nature of that calling. We call ourselves ministers, so we serve our people. We call ourselves preachers, so we proclaim God’s Word. If we call ourselves pastors, that means we will also shepherd the church flock.
As a shepherd is responsible for the sheep, being with people is the heart of the pastor’s responsibilities. In his book. Pastoral Theology, Thomas C. Oden, professor of theology at Drew University, says, “The pastoral office is by definition a shepherding task. … Shepherding cannot be done at a sterile distance, with automated telephone answering services, computerized messages, and impersonal form letters. By definition there cannot be an absentee shepherd. There can be no mail-order or mechanized pastoral service, because pastoring is personal. It is not just public talk but interpersonal meeting where richer self-disclosures are possible.”
On one of my visits to a schoolteacher in our community, she told me of a child in her school. The child’s mother is twice divorced. While the child was visiting her father in another state, the mother moved in with a new boyfriend and his parents. One morning after the child returned, the mother and boyfriend fought, and the little girl assumed the blame for it. She was brokenhearted, feeling out of place in a strange house.
I grieved for the child and admired the teacher, with whom I then prayed. I didn’t preach or evangelize; I didn’t administrate, delegate, or plan. But I performed essential Christian ministry: I spent time with a member of my congregation, learned from her experience, and encouraged her in her faith.
• People need pastoral contact. Those who analyze our culture and business world underscore the value of personal contact for leaders. John Naisbitt in his book Megatrends says that in a high-tech society people crave high touch. Peters and Waterman in their book In Search of Excellence emphasize the importance of mbwa, Management by Walking Around. Effective management happens best through personal contact, the personal touch.
Likewise in the church, a recent survey summarized in the Ministerial Competency Report shows that lay people consistently thought pastoral calling important, even more than ministers did.
I’ve found that routine pastoral calls, during which we don’t talk about anything urgent, are the most important ones to church members. Such contacts say clearly, “Your pastor cares for you—not just about spiritual things, but about you.”
Recently, during our church’s anniversary celebration, folks noted what they appreciated about our church. One man wrote, “A pastor who takes time with his flock, to lift them up out of the stony places, to encourage, to uphold in prayer on a continuing basis.” People need pastoral contact.
• It’s a primary way to love incarnationally. As one minister put it, “Pastoral visitation is incarnational: the Word became flesh and visited among us.”
I regularly call on a grandmother who lives with one of her daughters. The older woman’s husband divorced her years ago, leaving her to raise the children, including one handicapped child. Her grown sons got into drugs. Her married son and his wife neglect their children. She also dislikes her job and feels detached from her community because she and her daughter have had to move several times over the years. I always feel her anguish.
The grandmother is powerless to do anything except love and pray. Many times she is heartsick and weary. Yet I stand in awe of her, as does the community and church, because she’s also a model of strength and integrity.
Before I leave, we join hands for prayer, and I usually pray that God will embrace her with love and strength. Yet somehow I feel that, as her pastor, I’m one who can literally embrace her. Most members don’t have the time or ability to visit her. I do. It’s an awesome opportunity and responsibility, but I feel that for many people like her, I can be an extension of Christ for them, an expression, albeit imperfect, of God’s love.
Misconceptions Reconceived
We can line up the witnesses for visitation’s defense—professors, business consultants, even the Bible—yet it continues to be dreaded or neglected by many pastors. That’s partly due to bad experiences. But sometimes it’s due to misconceptions. In particular, three misconceptions need to be cleared up.
1. Visitation is an inefficient use of time. With so many to minister to, the pastor may feel that time spent with individuals is not as effective as time spent with a group. That’s not necessarily so.
I once read an article in an advertising journal that explained a hierarchy of communication effectiveness. The least effective method for influencing people’s attitudes, it said, was mass advertising—newspaper or the TV. The article progressed up a half-dozen steps to describe finally the most effective method: personal time with an individual.
A well-timed conversation with an unchurched person or a growing member, then, can be the most effective time I spend. In a personal conversation, a pastor can respond to another’s specific situation.
Mr. Kilmer was my fifth grade teacher. He was popular at Eugene Field Elementary School; all the kids wanted to be in his class. No wonder: he spent time with kids. I still remember the Saturday afternoon Mr. Kilmer invited me to his house to watch baseball on TV with him and his family. Wow, was I impressed! And I was more apt to attend to his lessons after that.
2. Visitation is too difficult to schedule. Even though I live and pastor in the mountains near Aspen, Colorado, life speeds by at a hectic pace. Some people here drive half an hour or more to work; others work late shifts at the coal mine. Who knows when they’ll be home or in bed grabbing a few winks?
In the summer people enjoy the great outdoors, hiking, driving a jeep through the mountains, or gathering wood for the winter. During winter they’re either skiing or recuperating from the icy drive home through a blizzard. People like to get cozy and relax in front of the hearth. They’re not looking to be disturbed.
So, everyone is busy these days, even laid-back country folks. It may be difficult to schedule visits in the home, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible, or unimportant. I’ve found visitation powerfully enhances ministry and our church’s health. So, I put up with some of the obstacles and try to overcome others.
Each week I schedule several afternoons and evenings for visitation. I have to pace myself, of course. Mornings, Tuesday through Saturday, are my study times. At noon I jog and shower. Especially if I’m going to go calling, I rest and relax a few hours in the afternoon, spending time with my family. Around 3 p.m., several afternoons a week, I head out to see people.
Sometimes I have appointments, but mostly I just drop by. I’ve been around long enough to know family schedules—work shifts, dinner time, bed time. Naturally, I try to work my visits around their schedules. In addition, people are used to me dropping in, especially afternoons and evenings. We all accept the awkwardness that visitation sometimes entails because we know the difference it makes.
3. Visitation is risky and scary. Facing individuals on their home turf can be unnerving. However, dreading pastoral visitation is not a 1990’s development. Early in this century, J. H. Jowett dealt with the pastor’s home calling in one of his Yale lectures on preaching:
“The difficulty of delivering a message is in inverse proportion to the size of the audience. To face the individual soul with the Word of God … is one of the heaviest commissions given to our charge. Where there are ten men who can face a crowd, there is only one who can face the individual. Gentlemen, it seemed as though I could preach a sermon and never meet a devil. But as soon as I began to take my sermon to the individual, the streets were thick with devils” (The Preacher, His Life and Work).
This anxiety is aggravated if a pastor thinks poorly of himself or fears rejection. The pastor may fear that professional credibility may be seriously jeopardized in personal conversation. People might ask tough questions about spiritual matters. Someone might have a grudge against the church or Christianity and find the visiting pastor a convenient target.
There’s another side to this experience, however. Certainly, some of my most uncomfortable moments in the pastorate have come in a family’s living room. But I’ve also had unique opportunities to minister to people directly, immediately, personally.
Once, when I visited a family who attends our church occasionally, I happened into a argument. As I was sitting in the living room, visiting with the mother and father, the teenage son came home. He walked through the living room, threw a casual greeting over his shoulder, and went to his room. Suddenly he stormed back into the living room and demanded, “What happened to my room?”
The mother’s anger overrode her desire to keep up appearances. “I told you this morning to clean up your room, but you just sat around and listened to your music and then rushed off to school,” she stormed.
“But you didn’t have to pile all my clothes in the middle of the room!”
“You haven’t washed your clothes for a month, so I just put them where you could see them!”
The son stomped off to his room and slammed the door to punctuate his exit. As the father and I looked at each other, he shifted uncomfortably. We began to talk about family conflict. Needless to say, they were eager to hear some biblical insight into family living.
I’ve been put on the spot to explain why a good God can allow evil to exist. I’ve been that convenient target for people fed up with the church. Sometimes after a difficult experience, I’ve crawled home feeling whipped, a failure.
But I’ve also matured through those experiences, and I’ve been able to turn many of those awkward moments into growing experiences for others. In sports they say, “No pain, no gain.” In the pastorate, I’d put it more positively: with pain comes much gain.
Visitation Builds Better Ministry
Haddon Robinson talks about the “halo effect” in ministry, the extraordinary regard church members sometimes accord their preacher, and the positive effect it has on ministry. One factor that contributes to the halo effect is the deepening relationship between pastor and people, especially as the pastor visits people through the years.
Let me show specifically how pastoral visitation has enhanced my ministry.
• Preaching is enriched. Many pastors put in long hours to study the Word. But I’ve found my preaching is better still if I also invest myself in a thorough study of my people. Pastoral visitation gives me a handle on the questions people are asking and the issues they are facing.
Bob wanted to get together because he was in a quandary about a new job opportunity. I’d known Bob and his wife for a couple of years. He was likable, enthusiastic and well-meaning. But he was obviously agitated as we began our talk.
“He avoids talking and thinking about it,” said his wife. Peg. “He’ll work on a thousand-piece puzzle and rent an armload of videos before talking about it.”
“I’m scared,” Bob added. “I’m afraid of making a wrong decision. I see things as either right or wrong, black or white. But I don’t know which is the right choice. Why can’t God let me know unmistakably?”
“So, how do you usually make decisions?” I asked.
“I’m usually ready to do it when an idea first comes up. I often volunteer for things. But later I begin to have doubts: Should I do it or should I back out? I hate that, so I put off decisions as long as I can.”
Bob and I then talked about a subject we had discussed before: his boyhood relationship with his father. His father had been quick to hand out orders but not to give praise. His father always found something wrong with the work Bob had done. Instead of saying, “Nice job” after Bob shoveled the walk, for example, his father would say, “Come on, Bob. The shovel hangs on the wall. Can’t you do anything right?”
As we talked, slowly he made some breakthroughs. He was finally able to see that God loves him in spite of decisions.
Many people struggle with decisions as does Bob, and many times the root of their struggle lies in childhood. With Bob’s permission, I preached a message that surfaced such issues. It touched a cord; many were in tears by the end.
“One of the most palpable benefits that most pastors will realize from visitation,” writes Thomas Oden, “is the kindling of the homiletical mind. Let us assume that due confidentiality will be maintained. Pastoral conversation will furnish the mind of the preacher with a pregnant train of ideas and kernels of insight. Biblical subjects will be animated by rich experiential vitality” (Pastoral Theology).
• Administration is made easier. If the pastor develops a feel for people’s spiritual states, the church’s ministry program can be more accurately and sensitively planned.
Several weeks ago I counseled with a young couple, Martin and Connie. Their problems were many: they hadn’t spent time alone together in months, their preschool children were demanding more attention, money was tight, and each was ready to walk out on the other.
We talked for a while, and then I left. My heart went out to them, but I recognized they were not alone. Indeed it was the problem of many young families. How could our church help?
As I thought and prayed, I finally came up with an idea: What if we matched up a younger family with a family whose children were older or gone from the home?
During the next Sunday’s morning service, I left the pulpit and walked down the center aisle. I began talking about the pressures that families with young children face day in and day out. I suggested the idea of a family with older children adopting the younger family for support, encouragement, and childcare a couple of times a month. Applause broke out.
I continued walking toward the back of the auditorium where Martin and Connie were sitting. Having gotten their permission ahead of time, I introduced them to our congregation (they were newcomers) and asked for a volunteer family to be “grandparents,” “aunts,” or “uncles.”
For a moment no one moved. Then Tom Hammond raised his hand. Tom and his wife. Dee, are middle-aged with several children, almost all grown.
The congregation was buzzing after the service about the idea. Martin told me several people approached them after the service and offered assistance. Visitation, then, led to a church program targeted to meet genuine needs.
• Crises are averted. By continual circulation, dropping in from time to time, I often can detect a crisis in the making. It might be that seeds of conflict, explosive anger, or despair lie just below the surface. Often, through an extended time of personal ministry, I can help a person can get a grip on the problem.
Once when I visited Sally, a woman I had counseled often over the years, she told me about the latest troubles of her daughter and son-in-law. Mac and Ginny’s several years of marriage had been marked by fights, drinking, and misery, although for some reason they stayed together.
They weren’t interested in coming to church, and they wouldn’t listen to anyone. They weighed heavily on Sally’s heart. Often she was drawn into their lives, getting caught between fighting parents and feeling she had to rescue their baby during a night of drinking and arguing.
When she was through explaining the latest episodes, she said, “I know there’s nothing anyone can do, but it’s frustrating. I feel so alone with this problem.”
“No, there’s no one who can actually solve the problem,” I responded. “But there are some friends who could help you bear the problem, some friends who could listen, understand, and pray with you about it.”
She appeared puzzled momentarily. “That would help. But I just hate to keep talking about it. Year after year, there’s no improvement. My friends would get tired of me moaning about it and desert me.”
“Maybe there are a few special friends, some friends whom you’ve walked with in their difficulties. There’s Sherry, and Molly. I know they think the world of you.”
“I guess you’re right, Doug,” she replied. “They do know some of what’s going on with Mac and Ginny. But I don’t think they really know how it’s affecting me. But I don’t want to be a burden to anyone.”
“As far as I’m concerned, you’re not a burden; you’re a friend. Believe me, I know that there are a lot of people in the church who would feel as I do.”
That conversation was pivotal for Sally. She had been discouraged about Mac and Ginny, feeling increasingly isolated. Aside from providing the suggestion that she talk with friends, the pastoral visit alone averted a crisis of deepening depression.
• Ministry is affirmed. An effective pastoral visitation ministry can give the pastor a sense of accomplishment. Pastors work with a lot of intangibles. Often success or failure is measured by an ill-timed comment mumbled by a disgruntled member on his way out of the Sunday service. Let’s face it: pastors could do with a regular dose of satisfaction and achievement.
I’d known George and Maggie for nearly ten years. I’d sat with them in my study and in their living room on numerous occasions.
However, George, while warm, had always held me at arm’s length. While Maggie had attended church regularly with the kids for eight years, George found something else to do on Sundays. He acknowledged his intention to develop his relationship with Christ, but he did little about it.
Then he began been facing some business problems that weren’t yielding to his usual efficiency. And business stress was adversely affecting his family life. Although I knew about his problems, on this night I had just happened to stop by on a routine pastoral call, intending no more than a friendly visit.
After greeting me warmly, George quickly plunged into describing his frustrations. I empathized with him about his pain and confusion.
When it seemed appropriate, I mentioned that at certain crisis points it’s helpful to step back and consider the whole of life. Once in a while a man must ask hard questions such as, “What am I living for?” “What am I accomplishing?” “Am I investing my energies in what will bring a deep sense of accomplishment?”
George had been asking himself just those questions, so he was eager for wisdom. I suggested some ways he might effectively analyze his problems—spiritual, vocational, and marital. My words fell like rain on parched earth. Sometimes his face brightened; other himes his brow furrowed, indicating deep thought. He commented several times that he wished he had his tape recorder running so he could save the conversation.
He then talked about his wife. He acknowledged that her life of constancy had been an inspiration to him. Her deeper relationship with the Lord had impressed and attracted him. As a result, he felt he could now more readily give himself to Christ. His wife was beaming and crying. Her prayers of many years were being answered.
We prayed together; we wept together. As I left, George squared his shoulders, gave me a firm handshake, and said, “Doug, you’ll never know how much you’ve meant to us. Your coming by tonight was perfect timing. I needed what you had to say. I’m ready to get serious with God. It’s time. Thanks.”
One by One, Day In and Day Out
Pastoral visiting offers great variety, as the examples from this chapter illustrate. In fact, the pastor must be able to read family situations as quickly as an nfl quarterback reads defenses.
Yet for all the skill required, visitation isn’t nearly as glamorous as professional sports. Directors don’t make movies or TV shows about routine pastoral visitation. There are no songs immortalizing it.
But maybe there ought to be, because pastors across the world put in five to twenty hours a week visiting the people in their churches and communities. They gently teach. They give assurance. They offer prayers. They keep families together. They comfort the grieving. They rejoice with the joyful. In their words and especially with their presence, they communicate to an increasingly impersonal world of mass media and teleconferencing that God cares for individuals, one by one, day in and day out.
Copyright © 1990 by Christianity Today
