Giving proper pastoral care to people means helping them become independent in faith in a healthy way.
—Paul Anderson
Our youngest child had his first birthday a week after our oldest turned 14. Naturally, our expectations for young Israel differ from those we have for adolescent Andrew. Andrew has moved from total dependence to relative independence. Since he has shown he handles freedom well, he is on his own a fair amount of the time.
Likewise in the church, we have newborn Christians, who are dependent upon the spiritual parents in the church, and mature Christians, who don’t require as much regular pastoral direction.
Not that people ever get to the point where they don’t need the personal attention of pastor and church. I know of one Texas pastor who didn’t believe his people needed to be visited in the hospital or counseled in times of crisis. All they required was doctrine, he thought, and that alone would enable them to function on their own. That approach fosters an unhealthy independence that only saps a congregation’s ability to love and support one another.
Giving proper pastoral care to people means helping them become independent in faith in a healthy way. In a crisis, we are there for them. When they simply want to share what’s going on in their lives, we’re there. But maturity means they will increasingly take responsibility for their own spiritual growth.
I’ve found teaching my people spiritual disciplines is one way I can perform this vital form of pastoral care. When people learn to pray, study the Scriptures, tithe, and nurture their own relationship with the Lord, they become increasingly mature. Here, then, are some things we are doing to give this form of pastoral care.
Initial Obstacles
Even though practicing the spiritual disciplines has been for centuries the means of Christian maturity, people often balk when we mention the subject. Before much progress can be made, then, I have to deal, in my preaching and teaching, with a number of objections and obstacles to practicing spiritual disciplines.
1. Disciplines are only for the spiritually elite. In my experience, most Christians wish they were more disciplined. They know they should pray more consistently, read their Bibles more regularly, exercise more faithfully, and spend their time more wisely.
Yet when they don’t, and when they also see people they admire who do, seemingly with ease, they become discouraged: “I’m just not a disciplined person,” they sigh. After a while they become tired of feeling guilty over what they think they can’t accomplish, so they learn to turn off sermon admonitions they believe apply not to them but only to a few choice Christians.
To counter that temptation, we talk about the disciplines as a normal part of the believer’s life, not an add-on for the spiritually elite. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus spoke about prayer, fasting, and giving as if he expected all people to practice them. So do we.
So, besides mentioning them regularly in the sermons, we introduce spiritual disciplines in the new members class, as part of what it means to be a regular member of the church. We let people know we don’t have one set of principles for normal folk and another for all-stars.
2. Disciplines are a help for ages past but not for years to come. Unfortunately, many people associate spiritual disciplines with medieval monasteries, monks, and spiritual giants of the past. Perhaps they’ve heard too many sermon illustrations about Martin Luther and John Wesley getting up early each day for an hour of prayer. As a woman who responded to an article I wrote on fasting put it, “You don’t really believe we’re supposed to do that in the twentieth century, do you?”
Convincing people of the continued timeliness of spiritual disciplines begins with using illustrations of twentieth century men and women, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Corrie ten Boom, who practiced them. But especially important is letting people hear, in worship or small groups, the testimonies of fellow church members who find the disciplines a very present help.
3. What, me worry? Then there are those who fear the rise of legalism, which, at first glance, the disciplines can resemble. These people don’t want to pervert the grace of God with a “works righteousness,” so they are content to relax, put their faith on cruise control, and, in the freedom of the Spirit, let God nurture them as he will.
Such people have a point worth considering. We must not give the impression that practicing the disciplines rests upon human effort. It’s not as if once saved by grace, we are required to roll up our sleeves and get to work. We who promote the disciplines can give the false notion that salvation is God’s work but sanctification ours. Unfortunately, nowhere is legalism more a temptation than here.
Yet, sloth or dependence on cheap grace also tempt us. The key, then, is to strike the balance of Saint Paul. “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling,” he begins, but he then adds, “for God is at work within you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Phil. 2:12).
I often use Paul’s analogy of putting on clothes to explain this creative paradox. God provides us with the clothes of Christ’s righteousness. We are saved as we put on Christ. And we grow in Christ the same way we receive Christ, by putting on what is provided for us.
Growing in prayer, for example, is not a matter of perfecting a new practice as much as it is of receiving prayer as a gift of Jesus.
Our part in the process is vital but small compared to God’s. He manufactures the clothes; we wear them (although admittedly that often isn’t easy). To wear them means to believe they are provided by God and to take and use them as Christ intends.
I’ve found such teaching avoids the extremes of being “nervous in the service” and practicing “fatalism faith.”
4. Dull, dull, dull. Some people imagine that practicing the disciplines regularly will bind them to a dull routine. They think such routine will make their Christian lives stale and thwart their spontaneity and creativity.
I like the way the principal of our Christian school, a woman who models in her family and church the value of the disciplines, responds to this attitude. She says her spiritual routine makes her “stable, not stale.” She also points out that ritual need not become “rutual.”
As a mother and teacher, she has long observed the power of routine in people’s lives. It takes pressure off the mind. Such order, in fact, allows us to be creative. Just as a world that followed natural laws arbitrarily would be impossible to live in, so is an arbitrary life.
Furthermore, successful people establish disciplines that become routine. Magic Johnson of the Los Angeles Lakers threads passes to teammates with precision and beauty. It looks automatic and appears easy. It is, in fact, disciplined brilliance.
My 1-year-old’s eating is spontaneous; it is also messy. What has become routine for an adult is, in fact, more enjoyable, since more food lands in the mouth!
The old saying applies to the spiritual life: Freedom without form is chaos.
5. Only bad people are disciplined. The word discipline reminds some of the unpleasant duty of parents and army sergeants of keeping the unruly in line. Nobody likes to be disciplined. In a country founded and nurtured on the word freedom, discipline sounds like a dirty word.
Consequently, one needs an attractive carrot to convince this generation, even the Christian sector, that its priorities should include spiritual disciplines. For us the attraction is changed lives.
A woman who has been walking with the Lord for over twenty-five years says that daily time with the Lord has helped her become more willing to pray for extended periods when she seeks God’s leading for some special need.
A man enslaved to sexual appetites found that the routine of Bible reading began healing his mind, transformed his self-image from that of a dirty man to a Christian disciple, and released him from the prison of lustful thoughts.
Those who move from the duty to the beauty of discipline are our best advertisements for the value of that seemingly unpleasant word.
Add Training to Teaching
There is a difference between teaching and training. Teaching communicates the material, but training makes sure that it gets into the heart and the hand. Teaching alone will not build disciples. Add training, and you’ve got a potent combination.
A young man in our church asked if I would perform his wedding ceremony. When I met with him and his fiancée, I had reservations about his readiness for marriage. But I also told him that I would do whatever I could to help him be ready. So I lined him up with two mature men in our congregation. Four months later, we are seeing signs of growth in him. For example, he was more supportive and understanding of his fiancée when she went through struggles. We are more confident now that he will be ready for marriage.
A class alone would not have helped this young man. In fact, he had gone through my Foundations of Faith class and was attending an excellent Sunday school class on communication in marriage. But he needed one-on-one attention. He needed the training as much as the teaching.
Training usually requires one-on-one attention. I was encouraged as an assistant pastor to have such a relationship with the senior pastor. We met regularly for prayer and personal counseling. That attention not only shaped my ministry, it also shaped my life.
Training also can happen in small groups. So, the leaders in our church each meet regularly in small groups with members of the congregation. I, for example, meet with a group of four men. We leaders don’t want our groups to become more dependent upon us, but upon the Lord. We meet with these people because we and they desire the kind of accountability that can help them walk with the Lord. The agenda for the meetings, in fact, is usually set more by those wanting to be discipled than those doing the discipling.
Naturally, such ministry could more than fill a pastor’s schedule. So we’ve tried to encourage lay people, especially the mature in Christ, to develop their gifts for training people in this way.
About forty of our members are involved in regular one-on-one relationships. They’ve been trained to speak graciously and regularly with another about specific challenges of the Christian life. They ask such questions as: “How is your devotional time?” “How are things with you and your spouse?” “Where do you struggle to obey the Lord?” In an encouraging way, they prod the person toward greater faithfulness.
One woman was wrestling with a weight problem and wondered how I could help her. After meeting with her once to deal with her bitterness, which lay underneath her weight problem, I asked her to pray for a spiritual counselor from the congregation who could help her. After she recommended someone, I called that person to see if she was willing. She received it as if she had been waiting for the assignment. That was six months ago. They still meet regularly, and the encouragement is flowing in both directions.
Where Two or Three Are Gathered
We also encourage people to meet in home groups to learn and practice the spiritual disciplines corporately.
In a disciplined and orderly way, people go through books of the Bible together in these home groups. Many people have been drawn into consistent Bible reading through this practice. Last year, for example, we read through the Bible together as a congregation.
Following the study, members pray for one another. It is here that some learn to pray with others for the first time. Members have told me, “I never prayed out loud until I got into a home group. Then it seemed more natural.”
So, participation in small groups, discussed more thoroughly elsewhere in this book, is an important dimension to teaching the spiritual disciplines.
The Importance of Modeling
Last year, George, a teacher in our congregation, and I roomed together at a leadership conference. As I normally do, each day I rose early for Bible study and prayer.
Later, at one of our congregational retreats, George said this: “When I saw the pastor sneak out early each morning, even after a late evening, I began thinking. Maybe the Lord would have me do that. I’ve regularly spent time in prayer for some time, but seeing his example challenged me to do more. I now give my first hour of the day to the Lord.”
George had heard dozens of sermons on prayer, in which I had invited people to get up early to pray. But it was my example that gave impact to the teachings.
Jesus modeled prayer before he taught it. After the disciples observed his life of prayer, they asked, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” When a leader walks in Christ, it will be easier for his or her people to do so as well.
Consequently, we’ve encouraged the leaders of our congregation to set a standard in their Christian life for others to follow. It makes a difference. A former member of our congregation, now a pastor, said that when he was a member, knowing the leaders were giving quality and quantity time to prayer made him want to do the same. One of our young fathers recently said, “As I saw the leadership applying various disciplines to their lives, I wanted to grow in Christ along with them.”
Wings to Fly
The oldest of my five children, Andrew, is a big help around the house. He is more mechanically minded than I am and is learning to be a good fix-it man. He is also a good running partner. We’d like to do a marathon together some day.
When it’s time for Andrew to leave the nest, there is one papa bird that will have mixed emotions. But seeing how the Lord is causing him to mature, I am confident that God has exciting things in store for him—even if I can’t watch at close range.
As a pastor, I sometimes struggle to release my people into their God-ordained callings. My messiah complex is one of the things that drove me into the ministry in the first place! Yet part of pastoral care, I’ve discovered, is to overcome the temptation to keep people in my nest eternally, to let God, by means of the spiritual disciplines, give them wings to fly on their own.
Copyright © 1990 by Christianity Today
