The Art of Pastoral Care

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Ligon Duncan
Your suffering doesn’t just belong to you, it belongs to the whole congregation. That’s and the Lord is, you know, I the Lord’s gonna help you through this, but you’re gonna help somebody else in this congregation because of what you’ve gone through.

Matt Smethurst
The mark of a of a healthy Christian, is not that you have no struggle with sin, it’s that you have a great struggle with sin. Only one person has lived a victorious Christian life, and we name the thing after him.

Matt Smethurst
Welcome to the everyday pastor, a podcast from TGC on the nuts and bolts of ministry. My name is Matt Smethurst

Ligon Duncan
And I’m Lig Duncan.

Matt Smethurst
And Lig, this is my third outfit. What’s that for you?

Ligon Duncan
This is the only uniform I ever wear.

Matt Smethurst
You know, they told us we could dress casual. This is casual. Since what year? Since what year has this been your uniform?

Ligon Duncan
Oh, and you know, probably since I started teaching with the seminary.

Matt Smethurst
Well, you looked the part. And honestly, it captures part of what we want this podcast to communicate, which is modeling different kinds of pastors, different generations, different styles, talking with not past one another. I’ll tell

Ligon Duncan
a story on myself, Matt, I was at a church last year, and I’d been asked to do some sort of a little weekend conference, and the the pastor at that church, the founding pastor at that church, is famous for dressing very casually, and so he would be in in chinos and a golf shirt to preach on Sunday morning, so I show up like this. So Friday night to have a meal with the pastors, and he just starts relentlessly digging at me for being dressed like this. Because this is just I dress like this all the time. And so out of deference to him, the next morning, I just said, Okay, I’m

Matt Smethurst
contextualization. Come on. So

Ligon Duncan
I’m wearing this casual outfit, and of course, I go viral. Somebody’s out there with an iPhone, and they’re taking what they think is a controversial clip from something that I’m saying, and it goes and it has been repeatedly shown on multiple occasions on social media. In fact, I just had a guy send it to the clip to me last week and and say, Come on, LIG, you gotta dress better than this. So I actually, I actually told Kendra when, when we were talking about what we were gonna wear. Kendra

Matt Smethurst
is the she’s our multimedia director for TGC, she makes the magic hat. I

Ligon Duncan
said, Look, I’m just gonna wear my uniform. Because the last time I didn’t wear my uniform, I went viral in the worst sort of way. So I’m just gonna dress the way I normally. Ladies

Matt Smethurst
and gentlemen, you have it from Lake Duncan. He’s essentially just saying, Be true to yourself. You do. You follow your heart. That’s that kind of, what is that kind of, what you’re saying, all right, all things now that we’re now that we’re sharing stories, I have to, I have to just say this, he’s not going to be happy that I’m sharing this. But my associate pastor, I have a new associate pastor, Kyle, and recently, I was at lunch with LIG and Kyle and someone else. And during lunch, Kyle spilled marinara sauce all over him and at them. At the time, I didn’t think it was all that funny. You know, I was kind of scrambling to find napkins for him, but driving away after lunch, I reflected on it, and I thought that is hilarious. He spilled marinara all over him. Saw himself while sitting next to the best dressed person we’ve ever had come to our church, no doubt, in fact, and it was the first time he had met you. Not only do you have cufflinks, I don’t know if you do today, but do you have embroidered your initials? I do. I do. I have my so I noticed that over lunch, yeah, his initials, JLD, are embroidered there. And immediately to his left Kyle, there was more marinara sauce on him than there is water in a Presbyterian

Ligon Duncan
baptism. Oh, it was, it was tough. He had hit his fort, flipped the stuff onto his onto his shirt,

Matt Smethurst
and humbly, we already did our episode on the humble pastor, but yeah, sometimes, metaphorically, we have all had marinara sauce on us in ministry. And in this episode, we’re going to be talking about, speaking of mess, caring for sheep church members, pastoral care. In a previous episode, we’ve said that the ministry of the word and prayer is the primary responsibility of those the Lord sets apart to be pastors. And we’ve also said that Sunday is is the most important day of the week. It’s the Lord’s day, and everything is kind of geared toward and aiming at that. Yes, and yet, pastors are not just employed one day a week, nor are they just employed for one day a week, but we are actually not just employed. We’re called, we’re privileged to serve and shepherd sheep. And I just think that’s probably a good way to start, is by defining this category of pastoral care. So when you hear that, that category, ligand, what, what comes to mind? What would you want our listeners to think about?

Ligon Duncan
And you and I were talking off, off air before, about the fact that pastors are shepherds. That’s, that’s, that’s what the name means. We’re shepherds. As a shepherd, I am wanting to bring Christ’s lost sheep home to him. And I’m wanting to see Christ’s sheep built up in grace. And so that is a justification, sanctification kind of, kind of grid. And there are lots of good, different ways to say it like Robert Murray mcchain used to say, you know, young pastor lived in Scotland, early part of the 19th century, died really young. He said, I want my people to know and experience the love of Christ to them so that they can return that love to Christ. So His whole ministry was built around the congregation knowing the love of Christ to them, wow, so that they would return that love to Christ. You know, in all the panoply of ways that the New Testament wants, that’s

Matt Smethurst
beautiful. Because, of course, I thought, you know, we think of Second Corinthians, one comforting others with the comfort we’ve received from Christ, exactly that other angle of loving others with His love, so that they’re able to return it to him and to others.

Ligon Duncan
And it’s in that man, it hits so many pastoral points in a mutual friend of ours, Jordan stone is really the guy that brought that to my attention. He’s written three books on MC chain. In one of those books he talks about in chains philosophy ministry that greatly impacted me. Now, why am I talking about that when you’ve asked me a specific question about pastoral care? Because in pastoral care, I want to do that, Matt. I’m a shepherd in pastoral care. And so in pastoral care I want to be, if we use the language of Ephesians four, I want to be, I want to be building up the body of Christ so that they reach maturity and so that they can edify one another. They can build one another up. You know, that’s the flow of argument from sort of Ephesians 411, on down. I’m going to build up the body of Christ so that they are matured, they become more like Christ, and then they start edifying one another in pastoral care. I want to do that. Yes, I want to help people in their problems. Yes, I want to do visitation to show people that I love them, I care about them, I know them, and that I’m available to them when they’re dealing with issues. But ultimately I want to build them up so that they are conformed to the image of Christ, and that they build up one another. So one of the things I’ll say, if it is a context of pastoral care, where I’m ministering to somebody who’s suffering, if I know them well enough, and if they really know that I love them, I’m sympathetic in the situation that they’re in, and we’ve got the relationship that I can say it, sometimes I will say something like this, remember, your suffering doesn’t just belong to you. Yeah, it belongs to the whole congregation, that’s and the Lord is, you know, I the Lord’s going to help you through this, but you’re going to help somebody else in this congregation because of what you’ve gone through. God doesn’t just mean this for you, he means it for all of us. We need what you’re going to get of God’s grace through this experience as you’re going through, and that’s frankly, been some of the holiest moments of my pastoral life. Have been watching believers battle through unbelievably heartbreaking situations and trust the Lord, right? You know, and I know sometimes they probably walked out of my office thinking they’re an utter failure, and I’m going, Yes, he still believes in God, he still trusts in Jesus. That is awesome, and it’s such a witness to me. I’m going, how would I do in that situation? So in pastoral care, I want to be edifying those brothers and sisters, but I want them, I want them to be edified, so that they can edify their brothers and sisters. Yeah, and that’s part of what I’m thinking about in pastoral care. How about you? When you do pastoral care, what are you? You’re just

Matt Smethurst
you’re just getting me thinking, because we think of of course, money as a stewardship, but you’re saying suffering as a stewardship. And one of the privileges we have as pastors that is to help. Our people come to see it as such and to steward it well. And that image of of yes, they’re still believing. There’s actually a verse, the very last book of the Bible, Revelation, 22, four. This is warning, just a little bit of a tangent, but Revelation. 22, four, they will see his face. Speaking of the servants of The Lord of the redeemed in in the age to come, they will see his face, and his name shall be on their foreheads. Now we could have, of course, just talked for an hour about they shall see his face, because that’s that’s kind of the high water mark of the Bible. We we’ve Garden of Eden, age of the eye, walking with God in the cool of the day, banished from Eden. We’ve been in the age of the ear. We know him not by seeing his face, but by hearing His Word. But the day is coming when we’ll return to the age of the eye. Yeah, we’ll see his face. But the second part of that verse is one of those kind of strange, cryptic phrases that you find in Revelation, his name will be on their foreheads. When I studied that, I realized that was a kind of ancient way of talking about identity, not in the modern sense, but you would, you know, stamp your name on what belonged to you. Let me put it this way, if I’m in the grocery store with my kids and one of them starts to have a meltdown, young child throwing a temper tantrum in that moment, in so far as my name, as it were, is stamped on their forehead, I want the font to shrink like if there’s an innocent bystander, I might I have no idea who this child is. Yes, I’m going to make a statement like that. Not My Kid. God’s the opposite. Yeah, he’s the opposite. His name will be on our forehead, and I have this picture of because we know this in pastoral ministry, many of us are chronic strugglers. The mark of a of a healthy Christian is not that you have no struggle with sin. It’s that you have a great struggle with sin. Only one person has lived the victorious Christian life, and we named the thing after him. Yeah, all the rest of us are, if we’re honest, we’re not probably going to cross the finish line into heaven in a blaze of glory. We’re going to be crawling, scratching, clawing our way with the communion of saints in order to make it. And in that moment when we see his face and we’ve when we’ve crawled across the finish line, the King of Heaven is going to lift us and look us in the eye and say, Welcome home. I am not ashamed to call you brothers. My name is on your forehead, and I never regretted saving you. And so that is the heart behind pastoral ministry, to the degree we forget that a shepherd is fundamentally a sheep. So of course, we could go to John 10 Jesus is saying, I’m the Good Shepherd. So any pastor is an under Shepherd, under Jesus, and I think bad things start to happen if we forget that we are first and foremost a sheep before we’re a shepherd. And when you think like again of shepherding, what passages in the New Testament come to mind that talk about what this pastoral care might look like. Well,

Ligon Duncan
again, that shepherding isn’t for and that’s one of the rare places where Paul uses that kind of shepherding language in the Acts 20 passage is the other one that you mentioned.

Matt Smethurst
Let me just read that. Yeah. Couple verses, yeah. Acts 20. I’ll just pick up in in verse 26 so this is Paul’s farewell address to the Ephesian elders. Therefore I testify to you this day that I am innocent of the blood of all for I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God, pay attention to yourselves and to all the flock in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers to care for the Church of God, which he obtained with his own blood. And

Ligon Duncan
there, Paul mixes his Overseer and shepherding language. He usually it’s Jesus and Peter that use the shepherding language. And so that’s a really important passage, because Paul there and in Ephesians makes it clear, yeah, this is a shepherding job, not just watch, care, overseer, Guardian, guide, Bishop,

Matt Smethurst
much less executive board, right, board

Ligon Duncan
of directors. That’s the other dynamic. That’s That’s another, that’s probably another conversation to talk about, for sure, but let me tell you another philosophy of ministry story. I’m doing a theological exam of Sinclair Ferguson for him to become a Chancellor’s professor at RTS. Bob Cara and I, Bob is the provost of RTS, and and he and I together interview every prospective faculty member, and we do a three hour the. Logical exam. So I’m, I’m getting to interview Sinclair Ferguson, who knows a million times more than I do about God in the Bible. It was like a worship service, Matt. I mean, it was a three hour worship service, and at one point we, we say to him, you know, we’re talking philosophy of ministry with him, and he says, I have really always had in my heart, John 1027, at the heart of what I’m trying to do in pastoral ministry. My sheep hear my voice and I know them, and they follow Me. And he said, in everything that I do in ministry, whether it’s in the pulpit or whether it’s in pastoral care, I want Christ’s sheep to hear His voice and know Him and follow Him. And I’m, I’m overwhelmed thinking about it right now. And he just and then I more single Tell me more, more about this and that John 10 passage is all about the Good Shepherd. My sheep. Hear my voice. They they know the true shepherd. And in pastoral care, we’re wanting our people to know the shepherd and to follow Him and and sometimes they need some encouragement in that, because they’re in places that make them distrustful, and so we want to help them. Trust the Good Shepherd. Listen to him, hear Him and follow Him. And sometimes we can share. Even you just said we need to remember we’re sheep. You’re right. Sometimes we can say, you know, when, when I was having a hard time hearing the good shepherd. This is what the good shepherd did for me, and here’s how it helped difficult for me to follow him correct, you know, and you help the sheep along, but you’re wanting to help them follow him. You want them to hear his voice. You want them to follow him. And you know that can, that can be visitation. I mean, I think that’s an undersold thing in our day and time. I think all of us are attuned to different things. Some of us are introverts, and if we’re that way, we really need to double down on reaching out to the people of God and going to them and visiting them. I think that’s undersold in our day and time, that kind of pastoral visitation and and that kind of pastoral contact, that’s a huge part of pastoral care and, and I’m one of those people where, you know, the the rhythms of life were busy enough at first pres where it would have been very easy for me not to be in those settings. But my wife is really oriented to that kind of personal pastoral and she’d be, if I got to call it 2am in orange, she’d be kicking me out of the bed to go go to the hospital or go to the family home where there’s been a crisis, or whatever. And because she had really good examples, the pastors that she worked with at first president Columbia were really good at personal care and pastoral ministry. And I’ve just seen that over the years. I had really good pastors growing up, and I know how it impacted me for them to know me, care about me, visit me, check on me, write notes. And my boyhood pastor, Gordon Reed, I got to work for him when I was in Jackson in the early 1990s he was the Pastor of Trinity Presbyterian Church. And the first day I stepped on campus at RTS Jackson, he says to me, boy, you’re going to be my assistant. And what is every good southern boy whose boyhood pastor tells him that you’re going to be his assistant? Say, Yes, sir, yes, sir. And so, and then I said, Well, I mean, don’t you think you need to check with the elders? He said, I had them vote on it last night. So he had just done before he’d even talked to me, so I got to watch him pastor and and he was, he was amazing. So he goes away for a week to do a Bible conference, and he leaves me at the church as his assistant to do all the pastoral care and to do the preaching that week. And so I’m, I’m visiting a guy who’s just done heart surgery, and I don’t know him at all. He’s never met me. I’ve never met him. As far as I know. I’ve been in the church for six months or so, and so I don’t know what to talk about with him. I mean, he’s just, he’s waked up from heart surgery, and the room this guy, you know. Okay, so I figured we’ll talk about Gordon Reed. And so I say, you know, Mr. Reed asked me to come visit you, and I know that you and I both think highly of Gordon Reed. Well, when I said Gordon Reed’s name, the man’s face just said, Gordon Reed’s the best pastor I’ve ever had. And he just goes on and on talking about Gordon Reed. And then he says, But, you know, we just hired this young man at the church, and I can’t understand a word that he says, and I’m standing there, okay? He’s talking about me. Me. And I said, you know, sir, I think I know who you’re talking about, and I agree with you, but he loved Gordon because Gordon was so good in pastoral care. Gordon didn’t just preach. He was personally connected to the congregation. There are lots of different ways you can do that. Visitation is one way write notes, one way phone calls is one way. Mr. Reid couldn’t be at my wedding, but I’m standing in the vestry. 30 minutes before I get married, I get a phone call, and it’s Gordon Reed calling me up to pray with me on my phone, on the phone, just like 90 seconds pray with me before I got married. That kind of personal connection to people, it’s invaluable they’ll receive when your people know you love them,

Matt Smethurst
they are elaborate things, no, but it’s those touch points, yeah, yeah. They

Ligon Duncan
just, they’ll receive the Word of God. Wow. And so I just, I want to testify to the people that I’ve been able to watch who were good in pastoral care. And let me say I was the the Lilliputian on my church staff in terms of pastoral care. Brister ware, the longtime pastoral care minister at the church. He was amazing. And going on a visit with him was like going with a it was watching a Jedi Master. I mean, he was incredible. He would do things like this, Matt, he’d go to a go to hospital room. He would stand on one leg for the visit so as not to stay over long, because what people in the hospital are recovering, preachers need to stand on you know they don’t need you around for 30 minutes. They need you to be there and know that, know that, know that you know what’s going on with you, and pray with you, and then get out of there. And he just watching him was incredible. So I’ve been the beneficiary of watching people do pastoral care, very theologically, intentionally. They’re not just trying to be buddy buddy with people in the congregation. They’re not just trying to get, you know, employment insurance. They really care about their congregation members, and whether it’s writing notes, making phone calls, doing a visit, they show that they care about people, and it helps those people hear the shepherd’s voice and follow Him. And

Matt Smethurst
it’s an interesting theme there, because you referenced Sinclair Ferguson in John 1027, so as we are proclaiming the word of Christ to people on Sundays and throughout the week, we are praying in faith that they would be hearing someone else’s accent, the accent of a Galilean Day Laborer coming through us Amen. And then you said the guy on the hospital bed. When you mentioned Gordon Reed’s name, who did he immediately think of Jesus Christ? He did. Hearing the name of Gordon Reed made him think. Hearing the name of of his shepherd, yeah, made him think of the chief Shepherd. Yeah, that that’s really helpful and but it’s worth saying on this there, while there is a sense in which we really are mediating the presence and love and promises of Christ as people, we have to remember we are not Jesus Christ, exactly right. And that’s not just something we ought to remember in order to stay humble. That’s something we ought to say from time to time, one thing I say to prospective members of our churches is, you know, I will disappoint you. We will disappoint you as a church. We are not a perfect church. I am not the Lord Jesus Christ. I’m under qualified for that role. I don’t have all the answers, but I know the one who does that’s good, and my job is to lead you to him. And I actually think pastoral care really begins in that membership interview in a lot of ways, at least, I found experientially, because that’s where a person that is likely you know going to be joining your church, they’re gonna be entrusted to your care. That’s where they start to crack open their lives a little bit. In fact, we’ve added a question at the end of our membership interview, which is a grab bag. It’s, it’s just, is there anything in your life? And I try to say it so it doesn’t sound ominous. So I’ll say, I’ll say, is there anything in your life? It could be a big thing or a small thing past present, just that you want your pastors to be aware of, or that you think your pastor should be aware of. And I’ll tell you, like in so much fruit has come from that wow, as people open up about the thing in their life, or a struggle going on, or a wayward child, and that helps give us a bit of a running start and caring for them pastorally. So good. How do you see pastoral so we, we’ve, we’ve kind of focused on pastoral care, I would say, throughout the week. But I we’ve also, in previous episodes, said that, hey, your most important job during the week is, is preparing excellent sermons. Yes, in addition to being a man of prayer and holiness, preparing excellent sermons, and I do want to kind of go on record and say that spending time in your study, preparing sermons is a form of pastoral care. I don’t want to create a false dichotomy there and and preaching a sermon is a form of discipleship. How should pastors think about the role of pastoral care from the pulpit?

Ligon Duncan
You know? I think you modeled in the pastoral prayer a knowledge of what was going on in the congregation. You don’t want a pastoral prayer to sound like an announcement, you know. And we want to pray for Aunt Sally, who’s in room 310 of Baptist Hospital, and she’ll be there till Thursday. And you know, but you do want to know. You want your people to know that you and the elders know about the concerns of the conversation congregation, and that’s expressed in in public prayer. And so the pastoral prayer can be a way that you Pastor the congregation. You do make the congregation aware of those concerns, but you also make the congregation aware of the fact that you’re aware of those concerns and that you’re praying and ministering to people in need, and hopefully you’re encouraging them to think about praying for and ministering to people in need, it can come out in sermons too like and I’ve I’ve told you before, people in my congregation that have gone through significant suffering, one of the greatest joys is to see them ministering to other people in the congregation. At a godly woman in the congregation whose husband left her many years ago, I cannot tell you how many women she has ministered to since those days. And it took her two years to recover from the betrayal, and she worked really, really hard at it. But then when there were other women in troubled marriage situations, every time I turned around, she was there, wow. And it just and, you know, there’s some things you can’t even say from the pulpit, but sometimes there are things that you can say even in the midst of sermon and application of how you’ve seen the congregation minister to itself in ways that they’ve got certain credibility, that that even we as pastors would not have. I mean, they’re not doing it because it’s their they’re not salaried for doing that. They’re just Christians loving one another and taking care of one another. They just another, and it’s beautiful to see, and there may be appropriate times to mention that in the course of a sermon, when you’re talking about the one anothering commands in the New Testament or something like that. So I do think there are public ways in the way certain announcements are made, whether you’re talking about the birth of of children to a congregation member, maybe, maybe in your pre service announcement, you’re saying, Oh, we’re just so thankful the Smith hears have had twin boys. And you know you’re you’re letting the congregation know about significant things that have happened in the life of the congregation and that you know about them. You care about them. We’re praying for them. We’re visiting them and checking on them. You’re encouraging the congregation to think about itself that way and to check on them. So I do think there are things that you can do up front to encourage a culture of mutual care. Yeah,

Matt Smethurst
we’ll talk about here. We’ll talk about another episode, and I think I’ll just say this one last thing you made a reference earlier to the sense of responsibility that God’s sheep ought to feel for one another. And I think one of the best ways from the pulpit, we can show how church membership isn’t just kind of having your name on a roll in a file drawer, but it’s a living, breathing web of relationships. Church membership is where it’s none of your business goes to die church membership. Church membership is where you say, I am my brother’s keeper. I am my sister’s keeper, and we’re helping each other toward heaven. And the more from the pulpit, we can cast a vision for the fact that, hey, we’re all getting there together. Yeah, let’s just, let’s, let’s do it again, and we’ll reconvene next Lord’s day. Yeah, that’s, that’s a vision that one week after another, before we know it will be in the presence of the chief Shepherd himself. That’s good hope this episode of the everyday pastor has been encouraging to you, please take a moment if you don’t mind and like and subscribe and do all the other verbs that I am not great at saying there’s not I have to do multiple takes of these closings. I’m not very good at them, but do the things that will help us get traction, to help give pastors fresh joy in ministry.