More effective pastoring

3rd July 2013

A day of pastoral situations which I can’t mention here. But as always as a minister it is an enormous privilege when people confide in me or seek advice or just need me to listen. More so when folks here have only known me for about a couple of weeks.

What is noticeable is how people have to respond to some of these situations. In the UK some of the things I’ve been hearing about would mean the involvement of Community Psychiatric Nurses. But nothing like that seems to exist here. So it is down to people to support those in need as it were themselves. It says a lot for the church here that it has people willing to offer the support. Though I can’t help but wonder whether it is asking a lot of ordinary people to provide support to families coping with someone recently discharged from a psychiatric unit after attempting suicide.

Yet if there are no alternatives church people step up to the plate. And at Fairview they do.

Fairview UMC has a good number of people who are trained Stephen Ministers. I need to spend some time with these people and find out more. But here is a link to a web site that explains the ministry
http://www.stephenministries.org/



From what I’ve seen so far, this seems an excellent model. Equipping God’s people to pastor to members of the church.

On the web site of Stephen Ministries Dr. Kenneth C. Haugk, founder and Executive Director of Stephen Ministries, describes the beginnings of Stephen Ministry and the Stephen Ministries organisation:

“It was 1974. Fresh out of seminary and graduate school in clinical psychology, I had high hopes for providing pastoral care to people in my congregation and community. That’s where my gifts were. That’s why I felt called to the pastoral ministry—to bring Christ’s love to hurting people.
But reality quickly set in. There were so many needs and only one of me. And only so many available hours in a day. I had a church full of needs, but also a church full of people. So the solution was obvious: “equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ” (Ephesians 4:12 NRSV). Stephen Ministry was born.”

I’m sure many of my minister friends reading this will relate to it. We have a heart for our people but only so many hours in the day and a whole lot of other responsibilities. And, let’s face it, not all ministers do have the right gifts or a feel a calling to be, first and foremost, pastors. Many of us recognise that there plenty of non-ordained people who are better at this than we are. Yet there is still an expectation that only the minister will do.

The reality is of course than many ministers have had no formal training in listening skills, pastoral care, Christian counselling etc. etc. So as a starting point wouldn’t it be great if all ministers were expected to complete something like the Stephen ministry course? And better still wouldn’t it be good for churches to have some trained Stephen ministers? Or at least a team at Circuit level?

One of the best pieces of training I had to equip me for ministry was undertaking the Certificate in Christian Counselling course with Willows Counselling in Swindon http://www.willowscounselling.org.uk/.

I don’t feel that God has called me first and foremost to be a pastor (though this is part of who I am) yet all minsters, whatever their calling, have to be pastors. If I hadn’t undertaken that course during probation I know I would have been far less effective as a pastor.