Book chapter 2

 Chapter two – Pastoral Visiting or How not to drink too much!

It was my first visit to Alwyn. She sat me down with a cup of tea and cake, and then switched on a cassette player to accompany her as she proceeded to sing hymns to me. Alwyn was to become a family friend, always interested in the girls, and often would say she was looking for a man like me. It was a very sad day when I conducted her funeral.

    Before you set out on your round of visiting you need to make up your mind. Are you going to accept a cup of tea or coffee everywhere and a biscuit or even cake? On that decision will determine how comfortable you are going to be when you arrive at your next call. It will determine if you will need to buy new clothes as the pounds go on. It may even affect your health with all that caffeine in your system. And what do you do when you can’t drink what’s offered. In  38 years I have drunk a broad spectrum of strengths of both tea and coffee. Only once did I really force half a cup of the most foul coffee down my throat before giving up. ‘You didn’t finish your coffee’ and a look of reproach was my punishment.

    There is at least one thing you discover that is insatiable about a congregation, well for Methodists at least. Something you will never be able to satisfy. That is visiting the people who make up the faith community placed under your pastoral care. You quickly discover your predecessor was a saint when it came to visiting. You can only hope that when you to move on the memory of you will be praised in fulsome terms. 

     On my arrival in St Ives, Cambridgeshire, I was told time and time again, that one of my ‘predecessors’ had in effect visited everyone, every week . Of course unless they only had a congregation of twenty, you know that was impossible. Knowing that fact does not stop you feeling guilty about how inadequate you are in visiting. You’re always too busy with too many jobs to juggle to get round everyone. I had five churches in my first appointment, so if with travelling time to the five communities, and doing nothing but visiting, and folks were in when I called, I would still have been fortunate to see everyone once a year, let alone a week.

     It will not matter how much you try to explain to people that when you take out time for evening meetings, funerals, preparation for meetings, services, fellowship groups, let alone your day of rest, they will still expect to see you. It’s the subtle ‘I know you can’t see everyone but you can see me’ syndrome.  This is one of the most guilt producing aspects of ministry. 

    I was told of one minister whose wife on a Sunday took a check list to see who was at church on Sunday. On the Monday morning she sent her husband round to drop in on those who had been absent. If in today’s pattern of worship attendance I had followed that procedure it would take more than a Monday morning to get round folk! That is of course assuming they would be in!

     There will always be someone you feel you need to visit and they get added to your list which can make you feel overwhelmed and inadequate. Time and events do not always allow for visiting and you feel guilty. It took me some time to realise that if this matter of general visiting was ever to be adequately faced then you had to have a clear approach to it. 

     Firstly, what is the purpose of the general visit to a member’s home? A general visit is when you are going when there is no crisis, request for a baptism, no death. It is really calling to see the person to develop the friendship in Christ and perceive their needs. You will of course then pray with them.

    Secondly, how are you to organise your visits?

Every minister has their own particular strengths and areas for development. Some ministers have an enormous pastoral heart and their visitation will be at the centre of their overall ministry. It will hopefully create bonds in their preaching with the congregation. Their visits will enable them to be forgiven for their failings in other areas of ministry. This emphasis on pastoral care is not true of all ministers. Others will use their time differently, perhaps working on projects and an involvement in the wider community. This is really about the emphasis of a person’s ministry as they use their gifts.

   Every minister does need to visit because they are, to use the old fashion phrase, ‘a shepherd to the flock’ and you promise at your ordination to do so. For me church is about creating community. That then is surely about relationships. If we take as read that you come into an existing situation, then you need to get to know the people, their concerns and issues. 

     I do not believe that it is possible to have deep friendships with an entire congregation of 200 people. Deep friendships come through many shared experiences of life. Even in a long ministry in one place, that will only occur with a relatively small number of people. But the need for some relationship is essential, and if you have not been into their home and begun the basics it’s not likely to happen. 

Ways of organising visiting

   Initially when arriving in your appointment and there is the time in the diary, you need to give over the bulk of your day to going into the homes of your members. This requires a methodical and disciplined approach, not ad hoc, otherwise you don’t get it completed.  

Some people find that it works best using a list which they proceed to work through crossing them off as they go. It is visual, though it can be disheartening to still see how many more visits you need to make.

 One minster liked the old clocking on and clocking off at work system. He moved each member’s card from one side of the board to another, physically able to see where he was up to. It means you can’t kid yourself that you are doing it when you are not.

I have tried both these methods but in a sense they are only ways of recording what you have done.  

      In my first appointment I would set out with a list of names and attempt to visit as many as possible. Sometimes they were in, sometimes they were not. I would find it really frustrating to spend sometimes a whole day and see no one. In my early days I rode a motor bike so my wife could get to her job in a car. It was a real pain getting on an off, let alone getting soaked, only to find no one in. Taking advice from others is not always a hallmark of ministers and I am no exception. But it was the advice of another minister that started me out approaching the matter of visiting in a more systematic manner. 

      On arrival at a new appointment I would tell people that they will find at the rear of the church each week a sheet with appointment slots for morning, afternoon and evening. Evenings are the most precious slots because generally our meetings happen then. We are rarely free to visit on an evening, and this impacts on our care of young families where both parents are out at work. For this to be addressed it requires a change of working pattern for ministers so they can be around in the evenings not just conducting meetings. That will mean a change of attitude by congregations. 

     Having put the visiting sheets in church I invited people to put their names and addresses in, and that I will call at the given time. It is at this point that you need to tell them the purpose of the visit. You have come to hear their story, where they come from, job, family etc. It needs to be non-threatening. So you will have prepared the ground through your first service when you shared your story. The invitation is to share theirs so you can begin the journey of friendship and so create community. 

     You will need to allow an hour for the visit, with a gap of at least thirty minutes before the next. If you overrun you still have time to get to your next appointment. If you don’t over run, it gives you time to clear your head and be fresh for the next story. If carried out in the first few months making sure not to take on too many other commitments you can get around 16 appointments in a week. With 100 members, that’s about seven weeks visiting. Of course there will be other things which mean that not every week you can see as many people. 

   I would aim in the first six months to see everyone, I never did manage that, because not everyone signs up! The onus is with the congregation. No good church members saying they want to be visited and then turn down the opportunity which suits their diary! You will need to stress for the sake of those who think they don’t deserve a visit or don’t want to waste your time, and there are some of those usually delightful people, that you really do want to see them. 

    In a systematic way you get around your congregation and quickly pick up the flavour of church life and their lives. You will of course be able to pick up on issues where you may need to return to give support. It is important that when visiting you are focused on listening to their story not your own. You will have already shared that, and the usual nature of conversation when both talk comes on later visits.

Having completed your initial visits when do you go again? Don’t forget you will have carried out many return calls because of illness or need over the months.

Let’s look at the matter of people moaning. After a period of time you may begin to pick up the vibes that people don’t think you are visiting as much as you should. The solution to this is simple in my experience. Announce that you are putting your sheets at the back of the church as you feel it’s now time for your next round of general visiting. There is not the need for too many appointments and of course you will now have a full diary of events. This time tell the congregation that the purpose of your visiting will be to come along and discuss where they are in their Christian faith. 

     Surprisingly for some ministers, but not me, people hardly ever bother to fill the sheet in. While the demand for visiting never goes away, it does seem to dissipate following this offer. 

      If you find yourself in the fortunate position of having some real clerical help then use this as a tool for organising your visits. Get your secretary to ring up and book appointments that you know you need to make. This avoids the frustration of wasted calls. 

Keeping records

Having called what records should you keep? 

    On arrival at my first appointment I found sheets of paper giving enormous amounts of detail about people. A quick glance confirmed my decision to shred the papers. If like me you’re not good at remembering names then yes it’s useful to note names of children etc. More than this and it becomes a subjective experience and today in the light of GDPR record keeping is a minefield.   

   I know that I react well to some people more than others, and they do the same with ministers. I know that when you read about someone or are told some information it clouds your view before you meet them. I believe that as a general rule each of us has to engage with people without prior knowledge of them. It opens up the creative opportunity for making community and giving a new beginning for some. So those who have not responded well to my style of ministry may with the next minister and flourish. That is a good thing. 

      Of course there are some practical pastoral matters you may need to pass on to colleagues. It may be someone has just experienced a death, lost a job, is seriously ill or has an ongoing illness that impacts on their life and behaviour. Over and above this we have to learn afresh about people.

     You do however need to keep clear up to date records of your church community, names addresses telephone etc which you can then pass on to your successor, but in a secure format.

    When people move as they do, it is really important to ignore the request to keep their membership at your church. Instead write to the minister where they are going to live, and transfer them into their pastoral care. Transferring can make an enormous difference.

   I received a call from a minister passing on the details of a family who while members in his church hardly ever went. I visited quite quickly, and they and their children regularly came to our church. It was just the right time for them to reconnect with the church community, and when years later they moved on, I transferred them and again they went to the new church. 

     General visiting can be a life saver to a worn down and tired minster. I have found that when due to events driving me that I had not carried out a call for a week or two, oh let’s be honest, a month or so, and I was getting really fed up with everything. To go and make a few calls to share a conversation, to talk and to listen, could really refresh me as a human being. It’s a way of reconnecting with your community. 

     Of course it maybe that it just made me feel less guilty, but I don’t think so. In that unique way that God works, you find you have called at the right moment and the conversation for them and for you is life creating. So in your prayers you will have something to really say thank you for. This points of course to the fact your general visits needs to be tied into your prayers for your congregation, which will be touched on elsewhere in this book.

    Remember to record either in your diary or on a card index system that you called and if they were in or out. If on calling you feel a follow up visit is required put it in the diary there and then.

    Finally don’t forget the visiting card. No minister should be without one. This is your way of telling the person you tried to visit. It tells others that you are out and about, not tucked up at home with a good book and feet up. Just write on its back that you called, which day and at what time. Oh! and it does create guilt in your congregation as later the phone rings with an apology that they were out. Oh yes what joy. Let’s all be guilty together.

1. Hospital Visiting

This is a very specific area of ministry which we all have to deal with at times. It can be like buses. No one in hospital for weeks and weeks and then it feels like you are there every day. This throws up again the need to be reasonably organised about how you will arrange your visits. You may well be able to set aside a specific part of a day each week to go along, it’s just that when you get there and back, you get the phone call telling you of someone else in hospital. What do you do? Go back again or the next day or do they have to wait until the next week when of course they may have been discharged. Finding out their state of health will inform that choice. 

Not every minister feels comfortable in hospital and it does raise questions about what is health? Smells and sights can be off putting. You can sometimes feel like a spare part. This is the one place where wearing your dog collar is essential. You may well make your visit outside of normal visiting hours. Going at this time has a number of advantages and at least one disadvantage. The dog collar means other patients are not annoyed at another patient having a visitor outside of normal hours. You do have to watch for the fact, that if you call, the person may be being attended to by the nurses or off the ward having tests, so a call before you go can help with the latter. If you have more than one person to see it’s not a problem, you just go off and then come back and it helps to get your steps in.

Going out of hours may mean you have time for a good conversation that rises above the pleasantries of life and the details of how the patient is feeling, and what is in fact wrong. It may well be that if the person is on a ward for a while it will give opportunity to share with them the sacrament of Holy Communion. It’s good to have your own set of glasses and pattern, though buying a set can be expensive and you can easily improvise. It may help to devise a very short communion service and put it on a sheet to take in, large print, can be very useful. Here you need to be sensitive to those around you. You could draw the curtains, though I prefer to leave them open so it can act as a witness to others. There is no room for feeling conscious of what you are doing. Having written that, we all have felt a little awkward the first few times. You cannot always be ready as I well recall responding to an emergency on the intensive care unit dressed in  t shirt and shorts for I had no time to go home to change.

    You need to be aware that the person lying in the bed or even sitting in the chair can feel at a disadvantage. Though the medical profession is so much better these days in communicating with patients, it can still feel like something is being done to you. Of course lying there in your nightgown can leave you feeling vulnerable. 

    Visiting people in hospital requires you again to be focussed. Why are you there? It is to show the concern and care of the church community. You will want to hear from the individual what is wrong, what is happening to them, and how they feel about that. Be aware you may be the tenth or even twentieth person they have told the story to. Unlike other church members and family we do not have to collude with the conspiracy of silence that can take place. We tend to have enough knowledge to know that someone is not going to get well and return home. To that end through careful listening and prompts, we can enable and free someone to say things they might not otherwise say. Do not be frightened by the silence, the pauses, simply wait for the person to speak in the way they want to or not.

     Of course the vast majority of people do come out of hospital, and your time with them will have been about encouraging them through a difficult period. Always offer to have a prayer with the person, picking up on any concerns they may have, not forgetting to include family and friends who need to be strengthened, after all its exhausting travelling back and forth each day, finding somewhere to park, sitting for hours repeating the same bits of news. Remember not to stay too long judge the time by how the person is. If they are really poorly they may feel they have to talk yet you can see its wearing them out, so don’t forget to say sometimes you don’t need to say anything! You have just popped in to see how they are doing and to let them know they are in your thoughts and prayers. Ten minutes can be plenty, and don’t forget if you have four or five people to see all over a large hospital, you can spend a whole morning getting there, seeing folk and getting back. Time needs to be used wisely and well. Give it if there is a need for it. Don’t forget you can call upon the hospital chaplain to visit after all we are a team.

         Sometimes you may have long term patients to see. I had a gentleman called Stan who was in hospital for months, and so it was appropriate to take him out into the grounds of the hospital in a wheelchair. It meant he got fresh air, and I could just chat as we went along which removed a lot of the pressure from sitting there thinking of new things to say. 

       Now unless you are a hospital chaplain, and I have served in that capacity for four years, you will not be called out that often to an emergency. When you are it’s usually at the request of the family and on arrival you will not know what you are walking into. Try to keep calm and alert to what is going on. Observe the dynamics of relationships to perceive who you may or may not be helpful to. Not everyone is pleased to see the dog collar. They may not have faith, or they may see you as a sign that something terrible is happening, a harbinger of doom. It very rarely is personal, it’s the role you are fulfilling. You need to be sensitive to the staff who may be working on the patient, and you need not to be too intrusive and get in the way. Generally, the nursing staff are very helpful, and may engage you in communicating to relatives what is happening and decisions that need to be made. On such occasions you do not know how long you will be at the hospital.

    I remember a call out to be at the hospital where a teacher, a church member, in her 40’s had suddenly got an infection. I spent the whole day with the family as she battled with the illness. The family reacted differently throughout the day and I had to just sit patiently with them. When opportunity arose we went into intensive care as they went to see wife or mum. In the end it was the nurse who informed me that she had lost her battle, and so we got the family around the bed while she was still attached to the machines to say prayers. They still thought she was alive, and then when we left for the waiting room the machines were removed, and then they returned to her still and calm body. It was a very stressful day, but I was in the right place. You can imagine then how annoyed I was on returning home to be moaned at by a men’s group at the church because I had not been at their meeting, I wasn’t even speaking at it! There are times when we need to be available and if our diaries are so full that cannot happen. 

      One of the good things about hospital visiting, unless you get there only to find they have been discharged, is that the folks are there and you can have a very fruitful time of visiting. You may well find yourself talking to more than the person you have come to see as you end up engaging with others on the ward. It really is an opportunity to create a good impression for the church community to the wider world. 

1. Hospital Chaplain

Odds and Sods. Well when you are a free church chaplain this is what it can feel like when working in the hospital setting. For a number of years I was the part time Free Church hospital chaplain at Hinchingbrooke Hospital in Cambridgeshire, part of a team led by the Anglican Priest.  The work for me fell into three parts patients, families and staff. Realistically making time to do the job well was a complete impossibility. Anyone in full time ministry taking on a chaplaincy will always be making compromises.  Arriving at the hospital I would have to first work through the lists picking out Baptists, Methodists, URC, Pentecostals, in fact anyone who was not C of E or Roman Catholic. Then you started on your rounds only to discover that the folk in the beds were shocked that you were calling. They had not realised when they had put down their denomination a minister would call. So it was lots of brief visits with the occasional quality time when someone really needed to talk.      

       Being a chaplain means you may be called upon by colleagues to visit when they cannot because of distance or literally time. Leading monthly services on the wards and Sunday in the hospital chapel was on a rota basis heavily attended by elderly folk. In one sense this is very much like your normal day to day ministry. The added dimension is if you are able to cultivate a relationship with staff who in many ways need more support than patients. This is a process of gaining trust which can lead to very challenging conversations about use of resources that impact on ethical issues. One hospital manager wanted to discuss should a younger person or an older person receive a hip operation first. He based his decision on the fact the younger person would be working and contributing to society and maybe supporting a young family. So time over a coffee with staff in the canteen can be a very useful use of your time as you serve as a listening ear and safe place to let off steam.

Conversations with visiting families can be a wonderful way of putting them at their ease as they seek to understand what is happening to their loved ones. They don’t always take on board what the doctors have been saying, and so you again can help to clarify and even with permission find out the information they are looking for.

1. Specific Needs

Over and above the general day to day visiting, the bread and butter of pastoral care, ministers are called upon at specific moments in people’s lives.  This can bring you closer to people and means you are being drawn in to the situation. It will require an awareness of confidentiality and recognition of your own limitations. Of course you will make mistakes because you will want to help and ‘fix’ things, but are you really a marriage counsellor, bereavement counsellor, social worker, family advice worker, etc?  No! You fulfil a completely different role that means you will be all of those things but none of them. You will be called upon for lots of reasons that make a visit unique and difficult. The one thing you must remember is you cannot fix anything. You can only offer to help someone else work out what they are going to do. If you take over you are most likely going to get the blame when it goes wrong. We are not in the business of disempowering others. 

      A husband rang me to ask if I would call. I had not so long ago married the couple both church members. On meeting him I was informed he suspected that his wife was having an affair with another man. It turned out to be true. The husband didn’t know whether she was, but had a suspicion where she was. He was also genuinely concerned about her whereabouts. I did call on the farm where she was so I could reassure him she was safe. I could not fix their marriage. 

        I regularly went to visit a woman and her family. She was a church member whose husband had abused her and the children. In turn the son had abused his sister. The husband was now in prison. Again I couldn’t fix anything. I could offer support and care by my presence and affirm her worth. This latter experience was my first real introduction to abuse. It is far more widespread than people imagine or are prepared even today to admit, and certainly not in the church. Yet I know from experience that in every congregation there are survivors of abuse, women receiving violence from husbands, affairs, divorce, children and young people struggling with growing up, and to a greater or lesser extent as the pastor of the congregation we become involved if allowed and invited in. 

     The one danger which comes from ourselves is that we fall into the trap of believing we can fix things. The danger from congregations is they too think we should be able to fix things, and when we don’t we get the blame. See the chapter on being the scapegoat. 

As with anything in ministry you have to be clear about what you are doing and why.  So answer the key question honestly. Why am I visiting this person?

These two prayers were  written for worship the first goes with a picture of Jesus stilling the storm from the series The Christ we share. The second was written to go with an act of worship exploring the fiery furnace and again I attached a picture.

Creator God,

who brought order out of chaos.

Bring your order to my life.

Jesus Christ,

with whom we voyage,

and who stilled the storm.

Bring calm into those parts of my living

when sorrow and anxiety would

overwhelm me.

Holy Spirit,

Dwell within me,

And be the still small voice of calm.

Amen.

Creator God,

who stands by people in time of stress,

be faithful to me in my need.

Jesus Christ,

who knows what it’s like to stand alone,

to be laughed at and abused.

Help me at times

when I am ignored or sidelined,

to remain true to your Love.

Holy Spirit,

who empowers God’s people,

give me courage and strength

to speak and live and do your will.

Amen.

Mark Goodhand July 2012