Caring for People

The Sunday morning service is the pastor’s greatest opportunity for real caring.
Richard C. Halverson

Dick Halverson served as pastor of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Washington, D. C., for almost twenty-three years. During that time, he built a ministry of being with people, and spent a large percentage of his breakfasts and lunches meeting with parishioners singly or in small groups.

Then, in 1981, he became chaplain of the United States Senate, where he continues his caring ministry. His activities go far beyond giving the invocation at the opening of sessions of the Senate. He offers counsel and guidance to members of Congress and their families, and countless other people on and off Capitol Hill.

A graduate of Wheaton College and Princeton Theological Seminary, Dick has written several books, been deeply involved in the prayer breakfast movement, and issued a devotional letter for leaders in business and government.

In this interview, he reflects primarily on his years as a pastoral leader and the unchanging pastoral task of caring for others.

What kind of church programs or structures foster people caring for others?

I can speak only from the viewpoint of my own ministry and experience. What works for me and the people I’m ministering with may not work for anyone else.

When I went to Fourth Presbyterian in 1958, I had come out of about twelve years of small-group ministry. I thought I was a small-group expert. I wasn’t. But that’s the way we operate in this culture; when you’ve done something for a few years, you become an expert. After my first pastorate from 1944 to 1947 at Coalinga, California, I never intended to be a pastor again, because I didn’t think I was very good material. So I worked with small groups as an associate minister for nine years and then joined International Christian Leadership for about three years. After God led me to Fourth, I realized I didn’t have a ready-made ministry program. In fact, I was so out of touch, I didn’t even know what programs other churches were using or even what programs were available for use. I look back on that “problem” as one of the greatest assets I took to the church.

Why?

The greatest baggage a pastor carries to a new ministry, whether going from seminary to a church or changing churches, is ready-made programs. Therefore, ministries never become indigenous. It takes time to become part of what is there, to find proper adaptation and application. You can grow a dandelion in a few hours, but it takes seven years to raise an orchid.

What did you learn as you became part of Fourth?

I used to have a regular Wednesday morning breakfast with lay leaders. If I came with a burning message I had prepared in my study, invariably the guys would say to me afterward, “Halverson, it just wasn’t the same this morning.” It took me some time to understand there is a chemistry about each group of people that generates its own agenda. I believe it comes from the Holy Spirit in our midst. That doesn’t mean I should neglect preparation, but it does mean I have to prepare with a high degree of awareness and execute with a high degree of sensitivity. When you invite a few people to your home for an evening, you don’t line them up in rows and lecture them. As a small-group leader, the objective is to get them involved in the process, to get them to participate.

So in the mild frustration I experienced in those early days, God taught me two things: First, treat the Sunday morning congregation just the way you’d treat a small-group meeting in your living room. Second, implement the commandment Christ gave: “Love one another as I have loved you, and you will demonstrate to the world that you are my disciples.”

But how does that small-group interaction and care happen on Sunday morning?

Even when a congregation or group is silent, something is still transmitted to the speaker. When I was a student at Princeton Seminary, Dr. Blackwood was the homiletics professor, and he used to say that 75 percent of a good sermon depends on the people.

So we’d begin every worship service with a little greeting that reminded the people of the importance of their contribution: “There is something to be captured in this moment that we can never give nor receive at any other time or in any other situation. Let’s be alive to what Christ wants us to do here and now.”

Then I’d try different things. I might say, “Here’s what Jesus said … now do you hear it?” If the congregation just sat there, I’d persist, “Do we hear it?” I’d begin to get response. “What did he say?” I’d wait until somebody said it out loud from the congregation. I don’t see any point in throwing words out if people are not listening and responding to them.

I believe the Sunday morning service is the pastor’s greatest opportunity for real caring. For years the back page of our bulletin was called “The Family Altar” and devoted to congregational needs: the sick, shut-ins, students, four or five “Families of the Week.” During our service we’d have a period of time called the “Praise and Prayers of the People.” This was followed by a period of silence in which people prayed for each other. Then we asked them to touch someone near them. I’d personally step down from the pulpit and walk into the congregation and touch various people. Other pastors would do the same. Then we’d pray for the people on the back page. These simple gestures and expressions of concern create and encourage an environment of caring.

After your Sunday morning responsibilities, what did you see as your next pastoral priority?

My associates. Our weekly staff meeting was oriented toward their personal needs. Although we conducted a great deal of business in these meetings, the atmosphere was one of a family visiting together.

Next on my list of priorities was my relationship to the officers of the church. I worked at those relationships and tried to spend as much time as I could with each individual.

I was captured by a simple little statement in Mark: Jesus chose twelve and ordained them to be with him. Suddenly the word with became a big word, one of the biggest in the New Testament, because implicit in it is koinonia prayer and support. That word convinced me to have a ministry of being with people. I didn’t worry about what I was going to do with them; I didn’t need an agenda. Jesus began a movement that would be universal and last forever, and yet he spent most of his time with twelve men.

I intend my ministry to be an unstructured one — being with people at their convenience, on the job, or at breakfast or lunch. A true Christian community is not something you organize. Now I’m not saying you shouldn’t have some kind of specific program, but the more spontaneous the caring is, the better.

But aren’t there some specific, organized things you do?

Obviously I’ve long encouraged small groups, but I don’t try to organize them. It’s common for people to come to me and say, “We’d like to start a small group. Will you meet with us?” I usually do, and in the first session I show them how to study the Bible inductively and encourage them to make the group experience more than just a straight Bible study. Every small group has that potential to become a support church.

Have you tried any pastoral care methodologies that didn’t work?

Early on, we started the “flock system,” whereby each lay leader was responsible for a certain number of members. That responsibility was clearly defined. For example, they were to meet with each member at least once a year, maintain contact at least twice a year, and so forth. It never worked. One reason was the nature of community life in metropolitan Washington. The sense of regimentation didn’t seem to set very well. Some of the members said, “We don’t like to be thought of as sheep.” That was the final blow that killed the flock idea.

So we tried other programs. We tried fellowship committees and set up a Ministry of Concern office. If a family was being evicted or couldn’t pay a hospital bill, they’d call the ministry. The ministry organized volunteers to be available to help when needed.

No program is a once-for-all solution. In all of these things we are less than perfect; we come back tomorrow and try harder.

Is home visitation effective?

When I first came to Fourth, I did a lot of conventional visitation nearly every afternoon in the week. Little by little I discovered that suburban culture doesn’t allow for effective pastoral calls.

In the first place, it’s almost impossible to find the family together. Second, the suburban housewife tends to be busy, and she usually doesn’t see any particular value in sitting down with the pastor and visiting for thirty minutes. Third, when children are present, a pastoral call can be looked upon as family intrusion. I’ve had the experience of calling on families where they tried to accommodate me with one eye while watching television with the other.

In place of home visitation, we assigned each pastor the responsibility of contacting a certain number of members by phone four times a year. I’d take a couple of hours on a regular basis, sit at the phone, call a family and say, “Hi, this is Dick Halverson. I’m just calling to find out if you have any special needs I ought to be praying about today.”

As a high-profile leader, how do you face the inevitable criticism that comes as a part of caring for people?

One family’s fifteen-year-old boy was in trouble with the law. The father called me by telephone and leveled me about my personal failures and the failure of our church. It wasn’t all true, but there was enough truth in it to make it hurt.

Even more devastating was a letter I received from one of our former elders who is now separated from his wife — two pages of nasty notes about the church’s failure.

I had to face the criticism head on. In the case of the former elder, I called him. He didn’t want to talk, but I persevered. I let him say everything on the telephone he had already said in the letter. Then I apologized: “I’m sorry. I’ll accept this criticism for myself personally, and I’ll apologize for the church.” I tried to give him some explanations while bracing myself against defensiveness.

In the case of the father and son, I went first to our director of youth ministry. The night after I talked to the father, the director went to their home and spent a couple of hours talking with them.

The best way to handle criticism is to respond quickly, directly, and sensitively.

But how do you deal with the emotional trauma deep in your soul?

That’s hard to answer. I suppose the most honest response would be to tell you the story about a frog who fell into a pothole. Regardless of what his frog friends tried to do, they couldn’t help him out of his dilemma. Finally in desperation they left him to his destiny. The next day they found him bouncing around town as lively as ever. So one frog went up to him and said, “What happened? We thought you couldn’t get out of that hole.”

He replied, “I couldn’t, but a truck came along and I had to.”

I don’t know any other answer than “you just have to.” Many times I would love to run away, ignore the situation, or try to justify it, but Christ has given us specific instructions in Matthew 5:24. If you know you have offended a brother, you must go to him; if he has offended you, you must go to him. We have to do it!

In both the church and the Senate, you minister to people of all types of convictions. Yet you seem to have developed an unusual ability to love and work alongside people with whom you disagree. How have you cultivated this ability?

If I am taking my call seriously as a servant of Jesus Christ, that’s my agenda, and I must be about unity, not conformity. Diversity is essential to unity. I can’t imagine a painting that is all one color.

The issue is Jesus Christ, and if a person honors Christ, then that person is a brother or a sister, and we can have fellowship regardless of other differences.

Abraham Vereide, founder of what was then called International Christian Leadership, used to recite a little poem that went something like this: “He drew a circle that shut me out — heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But love and I had the wit to win: we drew a circle that took him in.”

Often the toughest place for a leader to show caring is at home. Have you found ways to overcome that?

The first element is commitment, despite the differences. I have an arrangement with Doris that God witnessed as an unconditional covenant for life. No matter how difficult it is to live together, we’re going to stay married. Every struggle we have that could be used as an excuse to separate or divorce is the very material God wants us to use to create intimacy in our marriage. We can’t get it any other way; it comes by hammer and heat. Good marriages are always forged.

I’ll be the first to admit I’ve made some mistakes in my marriage and my family. During the early days of my ministry, I’d say the first eight or ten years, I equated the work of the church with God himself. I justified neglecting my wife and my children on the grounds that I was serving the Lord through the work of the church. I had to correct that. Now I believe my family is more important than the work of the church. God expects me to give priority to my wife and my children. Doris and I realize that we made some serious mistakes with our children when they were growing up. But they love us, and they are all in Christ.

I’m always amazed by the grace of God. Paul Tournier, the Swiss physician, wrote a chapter in one of his books in which he pointed out that some parents are extremely authoritarian and others are extremely permissive, but most parents are somewhere in the middle. Then he went on to say regardless of the parental style, if one’s children turn out all right, it’s by the grace of God. I like that — a grace that allows me to fail.

I think one of the greatest freedoms any pastor has is the freedom to fail. Again and again, in my private life and in my public ministry, I’ve had the pressures build until I think I can’t stand it any more. When I stop long enough to take a spiritual inventory, I discover I’ve failed many times in the past, and it’s likely that I will fail again. How liberating!

This past Tuesday morning I awakened about four o’clock after some kind of a dream about which I couldn’t remember a thing except that I had failed. I tried to go back to sleep, but I couldn’t relax. I finally slipped out of bed onto my knees and began to pray. As I talked to my Father, I again eventually realized that my failure does not constitute God’s failure. It was so liberating to say, “Lord, when I fail, I know your grace will be there to cover the bases.”

How do you deal with the many problems people bring to you?

I try to listen. It’s been said many times before — which doesn’t make it any less true — listening is hard work.

When I began my ministry, I had taken a required course in counseling at Princeton and had read the one or two books that were available on this subject. I wasn’t well prepared to face the problems that came my way. So I had to learn counseling by listening to people. Let’s face it, there is no substitute for being with people and trying to understand them and empathize with their needs.

For example, I was counseling a church member who was a closet homosexual. In our sessions I could sense he was getting close to admitting his problem. Instinctively I knew that if there was anything in my facial expression, anything at all that would indicate shock or change in attitude when he admitted his problem, I’d lose him. I so well remember how I prepared myself for the moment he shared who he was.

Have you made mistakes in counseling?

Yes, but only when I failed to spiritually prepare for my task or allowed outside pressure and personal frustrations to desensitize me to the situation.

I’m embarrassed to admit this, but early in my ministry at Fourth, a couple — she was Japanese, he was Jewish — came to me for help. Their marriage was in terrible shape; I spent hours with them. It seemed at some point in every session the young man would rise and start pacing back and forth across my office. Then he would start talking, getting louder and louder until he worked into a frenzy.

One Sunday morning they asked to see me, and he began his little act, thoroughly embarrassing and intimidating his wife. He ended his performance by saying, “If it weren’t for my wife’s sake, I’d take my life.”

By then I was fed up with him, and in anger I said, “Well, you sure aren’t much use to her now.”

Monday morning I found he had attempted to take his life. I went to the hospital, and the first thing he said was, “Mr. Halverson, you told me to do it.”

I had failed him — both of them — because I stopped listening and allowed myself to become insensitive to the real problem. Even to this day I rarely give what might be considered direct advice.

Some pastors might find it difficult to identify with your warm, vulnerable personality. How do they develop a caring ministry?

I think of Louis Evans, Jr., pastor of National Presbyterian Church. All of the vocational and aptitude tests he took disqualified him for the pastorate. Louis thinks mechanically. He’s orderly. The tests say he should be an engineer. He’d rather take an engine apart and put it together again than almost anything in the world. But God called him to be a pastor, and he persevered in spite of the tests and has developed a tremendous ministry.

Some of the most successful pastors I know have been poor preachers but tremendous with people. Others have been poor with people and tremendous in the pulpit. If God is calling you to be a pastor, he’s going to put you in a ministry situation that needs your skills. A person cannot foreclose on God’s plans because of self-perceived weaknesses. It usually doesn’t occur to us that we might not have liked the apostle Paul. Several Scripture passages indicate he might have been an abrasive person, and everyone agrees that Peter was a hard person to get along with.

How would you describe Dick Halverson?

In some ways I’m a very private person. I’ve always struggled with low self-image. Because of that image I’m easily intimidated. To this day, if I have to walk into a room of strangers, I must brace myself for the experience. Although I think I have accepted my low self-image, I compensate for it with a gregarious air. But if I’m not careful, I find myself resenting the intrusions of people into my life. Thus, I must keep working with myself; for in my own eyes, a pastor or chaplain must be a people person, a servant of the servants of the Servant.

What process did you go through to move your self-image from the liability to the asset column?

Part of it goes back to the origins of my low self-image. Mother married my father against the will of her parents. My father was an itinerant worker. He’d ride railroad freight cars to the Midwest where he worked as a harvest laborer. Then he would return to his home in St. Paul and live on his wages. He was a kind person, soft-spoken, gentle, a good dancer, and handsome; but my mother soon discovered he was irresponsible. He never did support the family. When I was ten years old my parents divorced — in a little North Dakota town where nobody got divorced — and we moved into a flat where we shared a bathroom with twenty families. I can still hear the cockroaches crush in the doorjamb when I closed the door.

I’ve been afraid of my father’s traits all of my life. To this day, I feel there is something in me that wants to run as far away from responsibility as I can get.

As a youth I compensated for my circumstances with arrogance. Apparently I was born with a gift for singing, for people seemed to enjoy my efforts at entertainment and encouraged me to seek a career in the theater. That became my burning ambition until I met the Lord at twenty years of age, and he made it clear that he had another plan for my life.

How did the Lord make that plan clear to you?

A pastor began to deal with me. He helped me see my arrogance — that there was no substance to it, and that I was covering up those awful fears I had about my inadequacy.

He showed me how to study the Scriptures. The verse that helped me turn the corner was Paul’s marvelous testimony that in weakness he became strong. In 2 Corinthians 12 he says, “Lest I be exalted above measure, a thorn in the flesh was given to me.” And in another incredible passage, 1 Corinthians 15, he says, “Last of all, Christ appeared to me also as one born out of due time and not worthy to be called an apostle because I persecuted the church of God. Nevertheless, by the grace of God, I am what I am.”

I grabbed that truth with both hands as my valid place of self-acceptance; by the grace of God, I am what I am.

How do you keep this spiritual truth at the heart of your ministry in a highly visible setting?

During the nine years I ministered in Hollywood, California, I observed that the one thing that destroyed more prominent people than anything else was the temptation to believe in their own publicity.

Do you recall the Old Testament story in which three of David’s soldiers overheard him say, “Oh, if I could only have some water from the well in Jerusalem”? At the risk of their lives, they sneaked through the enemy lines to bring him a drink of water.

But he refused to drink it; he knew they had risked their lives for it. So he poured it out as a libation to God.

That has become a symbol for me when I receive any praise or credit. I’m thankful for it. I know I have an ego that loves to hear it, but I refuse to accept it. I pour it out to Christ.