Last night following our members’ meeting, I sat with two people from the church discussing the importance of our caring for everyone in the church. The verses that best capture this biblical vision of what the church ought to be are 1 Cor. 12:24b-25, “But God has combined the members of the body and has given greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other.”
Every time I read that I go, “Wow.” And it’s instructive, too. The apostle Paul is writing to a church that knows its share of divisions (1 Cor. 1:10-12). So he tells them that the opposite of division isn’t simply a lack of strife or a vague unity, it is each part having “equal concern for each other.” That’s a massive vision for the local church and for pastoral ministry, and clear direction as to how we are to learn to live together.
My brother Brian Croft takes up this issue from a pastoral ministry perspective. He opens a very practical and helpful post called “How Can I Be Sure I Am Regularly Shepherding Everyone in the Church?” with these words:
Though we are shepherds who will give an account for each soul in our care (Heb. 13:17), we all still have this tendency to gravitate to those we either love to be with the most or who make the most racket, thus demanding our attention. Because of this, there are church members who unintentionally slip through the cracks. In seeing this in the early years of my ministry, I came up with this system that has become a very effective way to care for our folks and to cut down on unnecessary and unintentional neglect.
What pastor hasn’t at some time felt that nauseating guilt about missing some member or another? Brian unpacks his own practice as one approach for watching over the 99 and the 1:
I created a prayer guide with each member of the church broken into a 28 day chart in alphabetical order. This is to represent the first 28 days of each month. On day 1, I pray for those 5-6 people or families. Then, I try to make some kind of personal contact with them that day in the form of a home visit, email, hand written card, phone call, facebook note, or text message to let them know I prayed for them on that day. Lastly, I ask in that moment of personal contact if there is anything I can do to serve them. For those I haven’t seen recently, I will usually call or go see them to get an update on how they are doing in general.
Read the brief but helpful post in its entirety. Next time Brian promises us some suggestions for doing this in larger churches.
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