Paul Beasley-Murray’s editorial in Edition 42 on the theme of pastoral visiting clearly touched either a chord or a raw nerve! We received this endorsement of Paul’s views from Methodist minister, the Revd John Rowland.
Dear Paul,
Many thanks for your editorial in the Spring 2008 edition of Ministry Today. I couldn't agree more on several counts - and several of my (similarly retired) colleagues to whom I have shown (or copied) the article also say "Amen to that."
I trained for the Methodist ministry in the late 50's and our Principal, Frederic Greaves, not only made it clear that pastoral visiting was essential but spent Saturday mornings for 3 terms helping us to see the importance of it and also how to do it. I have never found him wrong.
And you are right: it is also those with pastoral care of smaller or medium churches who no longer visit. Comments from lay friends about Pastors/Ministers: "We don't see much of......" or "........doesn't seem to get out much and doesn't believe in home visits." Even worse, a long-time friend and Steward in a small Methodist Chapel asked the Minister to visit a church member in hospital. Reply: "That's your job, not mine."
Apart from all other factors the lack of consistent, time consuming but utterly necessary pastoral visiting is doing much damage to the Church. But it is doing damage to the Pastors/Ministers themselves and thus to their ministry. Anyway - thanks again.
All good wishes,
John Rowland.
And we have also received the following reflection on Paul’s editorial and John’s comment that it is the ministers of smaller or medium-sized churches who no longer visit. The writer is John Davidson-Jones, an Anglican parish priest.
In a recent editorial, Paul Beasley-Murray reaffirmed his commitment to pastoral visiting.
Particularly intriguing was Paul’s comment that “it is not just pastors of many larger churches which have given up on pastoral visiting, but pastors of smaller churches too.”
Those who lead small to medium-sized congregations would do well to reflect on that comment. And, while being entirely supportive of pastoral visiting in principle, there is another other side to the argument. Many clergy of all denominations have taken the hard decision not to do what might be termed ‘routine’ pastoral visiting of people who are already in the congregations. It is not that they neglect pastoral visiting, but have taken a cool-headed decision that one-to-one visiting of people in their homes is not usually the best use of their limited time. We will explore that further in a moment.
First, a question to Paul (and indeed) John: what exactly do you mean when you talk about ‘visiting’? Do you mean:
Most clergy and Christian leaders do most of the above, although never as much as we would like and never as much as the congregation would like.
Perhaps things are different for Free Church ministers as opposed to Anglicans. A Free Church pastor is, in many cases and perhaps primarily, responsible and accountable to his or her congregation. Often, the congregation is paying all or part of his or her salary and expect a return on their investment.
Anglicans take a different view. They cannot allow themselves the luxury (if luxury it be!), of becoming little more than a chaplain to the congregation. Anglican clergy are parish priests - that is, they have a priestly role to the whole population of the parish, and that may be anything up to perhaps 25,000 people. That equates, in terms of workload, to approximately five funerals per week, 25 weddings per year, and perhaps 100 christenings. Clearly it’s impossible to pastorally visit all 25,000 every time they sneeze, so hard choices have to be made.
Let us try to put this into a not untypical context. Imagine, if you will, the vicar of a large parish of mostly working class or artisan parishioners. Let us imagine that the congregation (adding her four churches together) numbers an average of about 40, but with a total of about 60 regular worshippers, which includes no children. Of those 60 people, one is under 20 years old, and her fiancé is in his twenties; another two are in their thirties and three are aged 40-49; another four are in their fifties; and all the rest are 60+ (that’s over 80%), many of them considerably older. So, if nothing changes, this parish congregation will probably reach a point of non-viability within a single generation.
The Vicar knows them all by name, as she does several hundred others of the total parish population of 10,000. This is a tight-knit, working-class estate, where most of the local people have lived there all their lives. News travels fast - especially bad news, so the vicar knows what’s happening within a few hours of the event. It is likely that all but the most reclusive of the population know who she is, not least because, after a number of years in the parish, they’ve probably all attended several of the 100 funerals per year that she conducts.
The vicar has worked out that, if she were to call on and spend quality time with ten households per week, it would take her at least 10 years to visit every home in the parish just once. Would that have been a good use of her time, she has to ask herself?
Once upon a time (within living memory), it would have been possible to visit every home on a regular basis because there were four full-time clergy, plus the occasional curate, in what is now a single parish. Clergy time has been reduced to a fraction of what it was. So the vicar has to work to a strategy which will rescue this parish from the oblivion which will inevitably befall it in less than a single generation unless the congregations grow larger and significantly younger. And she has to do it without burning herself out.
So how does she spend her time? She obviously can’t do everything, so she has to make some tough decisions about what is most likely to grow a church in this neighbourhood. Her churchgoing parishioners are not, for the most part, professionals, so most of the administration of the parish falls on her and her husband (who, fortunately for everyone concerned, has taken early retirement from his job as a teacher).
Here’s how an average, four week (24 working days) month might be taken up (please note that an average working day is rarely less than 10 hours, often considerably more).
She is now running on unpaid overtime, because the above adds up to 26 working days - that's over 6 days per week. And she still has to fit in a Chapter meeting (perhaps half a day), fundraising activities, dealing with parish disputes, doing assemblies in local schools, PCC and other committee meetings, weddings, baptisms, meetings with architects, and a host of other responsibilities. All that gets fitted in around the major responsibilities above. She is deeply thankful that she has no churchyards to manage!
So, Paul and John (and anyone else who might wish to join this discussion), when does she have time to visit? Which of the above activities should she stop doing in order to free up, say, one day each week for pastoral visiting? Yes, she could spend less time with non-churchgoers, but how would that help build up the congregation in the long term? And yes, she could close down the enquirers' group and the youth group, but again, how would that help what she believes to be her primary objective, namely to secure the future of the congregation?
One might suggest that she delegate these responsibilities. Fine in principle, but to whom should she delegate them, in a congregation largely lacking the kind of professional skills needed?
The reality, we suggest, might be that ministers of small churches don’t do as much visiting as their colleagues leading larger congregations because they’re too busy running the church. Why? Because they don’t have enough people with the appropriate expertise, experience and people skills to whom to delegate the responsibilities. However deeply embedded is the principle of delegation in your leadership style, you still need to have the right people to whom to delegate.
And a truth not universally understood (especially by Bishops and other denominational leaders) is that the quantity of administration is not proportional to the size of the congregation. A congregation of 40 probably requires more input from the minister (in terms of administration and group leadership) than a congregation of 400, where there will be more people who can share the load.
However, all of the above does not mean that our imaginary vicar can’t visit. In fact, she could (and does!) do a lot of visiting, but not what might be termed ‘routine’ visiting.
For example, she could train a team of pastoral visitors to visit on her behalf, and to tell her when only she will do, because it’s a priest who’s needed. But that would require an additional input from her in time and energy.
She could use the excellent chaplaincy services in most hospitals to visit on her behalf, with Holy Communion if appropriate, then to call her with news and, again, to tell her whether she needs to visit. This she does, and finds it to be a life-saver!
The many Home Communions she does in an average month is hugely important visiting and should never be underestimated in its impact. She knows this and will only delegate it to Lay Eucharistic Assistants if the number of Home Communions becomes too great.
And she could focus her visiting on inviting people to join Enquirers’ Groups, or spending time with existing or budding leaders. This is in fact exactly what she does, because it fits in with her primary objectives.
This is what might be called ‘nuanced’ visiting. Although the traditional model of visiting has had to give way under the weight of other responsibilities, the whole process has become much more nuanced, due to the reduction in clergy numbers and the consequent increase in the population of an average parish. It’s not that pastoral (whatever that may mean) visiting has disappeared - it’s just that it’s more focussed and selective than it used to be.
No, it’s not comfortable, and not everyone will agree with the choices she makes, but it’s unavoidable, given the ever thinner spread of ministers.
Of course, if someone really, really wants to see the Vicar, all they have to do is pick up the phone or send an email. The odd thing is that they don’t. It seems that they would rather criticise the Vicar for not visiting than ask her round for coffee and biscuits.
And anyway, most people know where the minister lives. If they’re so desperate to spend time with her, what’s preventing them from knocking on the front door?
What indeed? If we could answer that, we’d all have a full church every Sunday, enough people to whom to delegate many of our responsibilities, and then we’d be able to do a lot more visiting!
You are reading Further Thoughts on Pastoral Visiting by Various, part of Issue 43 of Ministry Today, published in August 2008.
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