Pastor, this one is not an article on best practices or strategies. This one is a plea from my heart for you and your people. This week, please pivot toward pastoral care.
The last two weeks have seen the most radical shifts in North American church practice, well, perhaps ever. New church plants, old rooted churches, big churches, small churches, and young churches have all been disrupted by the urgency and severity of this moment in our history. We're currently living through a chapter in a history book.
Up to this point, though, I believe so much of our focus has been (rightly) on adjusting systems. Faced with the immediate need to cease all in-person gatherings, pastors and leaders have risen to the challenge. I've been encouraged to see the willingness to adjust, and do so radically, by so many in order to meet the needs of their congregation and still take seriously the preaching of the gospel, the corporate worship of God, and even the gathering of the saints. Churches that have never recorded a sermon are now on Facebook live. Churches are meeting in their parking lots and worshiping together drive-in style. Small groups have moved from living rooms to Zoom rooms. It's been a wonderful thing to behold, even as we feel the sacrifice of not being fully embodied with one another. But the focus has largely been on changing the systems to meet the immediate need.
This week, I believe we must make another pivot. I pray I am wrong, but I believe this is the week where the current situation becomes real for most people in the United States. This is the week where pastoral care must take absolute priority.
It is pretty easy to see and understand the lag in the numbers by now. We know the virus is more widespread than our numbers, and as testing ramps up, we're starting to see the total number of those impacted. That number is going to be very large, and it will most certainly involve people you know. I now have multiple friends who personally know someone with COVID-19. I'm sure, in short order, that one degree of separation will move to zero and I'll know friends with it, or I may become that friend with it.
Ed Stetzer said it well in an article that dropped yesterday in which he points out what we're experiencing now is not the crisis. Right now, our people have interrupted routines. Right now, we're rapidly trying to move our services and giving and small groups online. But soon, our people will be confronted with the emotional toll of the virus itself.
As people start having friends and family directly impacted, this crisis will move from abstract to concrete, and the need for pastoral care will increase tremendously.
Pastor, I am not trying to be alarmist or suggest the concerns about job loss and the economy are moot. By no means are they, they will only heighten the emotional toll that is around the corner. Now, more than any time I can personally recount, we need pastors to be shepherds. In the last several decades, we've promoted understandings of pastors as CEOs, or entrepreneurs, or thought leaders, and while all of these perspectives provide insight in different pastoral contexts, the thing we need most right now is to focus on the biblical core of pastoring: shepherding the flock of God.
Care for the Souls of Your Flock
Pastor, I encourage you to consider today how you will meet the need for care that is right around the corner. Do you know your members? Do they know you? Are relationships of accountability and encouragement in place throughout your church?
First, consider how you will connect. Just as we are working on systems for corporate worship right now, I encourage you to consider how interpersonal fellowship, accountability, and care will occur. Depending on the size of your church, you may not be able to meet directly with everyone in your congregation. However, do you have other leaders tasked with this?
We cannot merely rely on weekly sermons right now. As always, the preaching of the word is important, but recorded sermons and live-streams are even more impersonal than the regular sermon. Your members will need interpersonal care. If you have small groups, speak with the leaders about the upcoming moment and the need for them to be diligent in caring for souls. It will be all too easy for church members to hide away during this moment, so counsel that is merely reactive will be inadequate. Consider how you will actively check-in on your congregation.
Second, consider how you will counsel. As I mentioned earlier, we are fast approaching that moment when the majority of Americans will either know someone with the virus or may have it themselves. How will you shepherd people through that moment? This will create fear for some, anxiety for others, and moments of real loss if the worst occurs. Pastor, you know that the gospel speaks truth to all of these concerns. God's sovereignty is not shaken by a pandemic. We have rich treasures of counsel available to us in his Scriptures. Think now about how the gospel of grace tells a better story than our prevailing narratives of society in this moment, and turn an ear toward the actual needs of your congregation.
Care for the Souls of Your Community
By now, we have all read an article about the Christian response to the plague in the first centuries of the church. When others were casting their sick out prior to death in order to avoid being infected themselves, Christians were caring for those dying in the streets. A lot has changed since then in our understanding of medicine, disease, and how we care for the sick. We know how this virus transmits, and I pray you've been wise and encouraged your congregation that loving your neighbor right now quite possibly means staying away from them.
However, our call to love those neighbors still rings true, and those early Christians had the right idea in providing care. Today, we may do that in very different ways, but it is still the responsibility of my church and yours to do so. I'm hearing all kinds of anecdotal reports from pastors and churches that their live-streams have had many more viewers than they expected. Perhaps now is a moment of renewed openness to the message of the gospel.
Pastor, consider ways your church can provide biblical answers in a real time of cultural need. Certainly, your sermons (now recorded) are one means of providing this. Are there other ways? Teach your congregation in this moment in a way they can replicate with their neighbors. Answer questions for your flock that they can then answer for others. And, make sure you tell them to do so in these moments. We have the words of life.
This is not a moment for cliche marketing or attractional promises of therapeutic soothing. Instead, this is a moment when we turn to simple answers we've had all along and provide those to a community that may once again be searching for those answers. The simple gospel, and only the simple gospel, will do.
My Prayer for You
Pastor, I'm praying for you right now. The moment in front of our pastors and shepherds is, as so many have said, unprecedented in our time. I pray for you that God will give you grace and wisdom. I pray for increased sensitivity and heightened awareness for you to the needs of your flock. I pray for your family. I pray for your church.
Now may the God of peace, who brought up from the dead our Lord Jesus—the great Shepherd of the sheep—through the blood of the everlasting covenant, equip you with everything good to do his will, working in us what is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever, Amen. ~ Hebrews 13:20-21
Keelan Cook is the Associate Director of the Center for Great Commission Studies at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and former Associate Director of UBA. His primary areas of ministry focus include urban missiology, church planting, church revitalization, and unreached people groups.
