All pastors live squarely on a fault line. The question is not if a crisis will come but when. Even though I can’t schedule them, I can, like residents of San Francisco, learn to be prepared.
—Gary Gulbranson
The day I candidated at Glen Ellyn Bible Church, following the Sunday morning service, we were having lunch at the home of the chairman of the board of elders.
Suddenly, in the middle of the meal, the phone rang, and when our host returned, his face was pale.
He quickly gave us the facts: the son of one of the church families, a college-age man who had attended church that morning, had left the service early, gone home, and apparently taken his own life.
We dropped our forks and drove together to the grieving family’s home. As others gave comfort to the family, I listened and avoided treading on their grief.
As the afternoon went on, my thoughts turned to the evening service. What I had planned to preach would now be out of place. This was a crisis not only for the immediate family but for the whole church.
After we left their home, I spent the next few hours planning how to lead that service. I chose a different sermon text, 2 Corinthians 1, and outlined a new message. Although prepared at short notice, my ministry that night, by necessity, addressed the pain and grief everyone was feeling.
It was not a typical candidating Sunday. But years later, one of the church elders observed, “When we came to vote on Gary’s candidacy the next week, it wasn’t a matter of deciding whether or not to call him as our pastor. He already was. We’d been through a crisis together, and he had already proven to be our pastor.”
The main point is this: Crises don’t come at convenient times. I certainly can’t schedule them in my calendar. But they are a critical part of my calling, as much as preaching and administration. Not only do people need care for the devastation already experienced, they need help handling the lingering effects. Crises have the potential to worsen and expand, like the fires and aftershocks that follow a major earthquake.
All pastors live squarely on a fault line. The question is not if a crisis will come but when. Even though I can’t schedule them, 1 can, like residents of San Francisco, learn to be prepared.
Separate Crises from Problems
First we must know what truly is a crisis. If we treat every problem as a crisis, we will be full-time crisis managers. Every pastor has had calls in the middle of the night from people who want immediate attention for relatively minor problems. The key is to be fully available to such people while not overresponding.
If the person calling considers his situation a crisis, then I treat it as one, at least initially. I give such people my full and immediate attention; I respect the feelings and validate the pain they feel; I show I care. And I’m available like this until I can see where things stand.
Empathy at this point is critical. I try to react not based on how I feel about others’ problems but on how I would feel if I were in their place. Their mountain may be a molehill, but if they see it as a mountain, I need to help them work through those feelings and get a better perspective.
Communicating such care while assessing the situation may take only five minutes. Then depending on the need, I can set an appointment or make other plans to attend to them. In this way, I can manage the problem without dismissing the person’s pain. And if it’s an authentic crisis, I can take more immediate action.
Manage Your Own Reaction
I once received a call at 3 a. m. to come and help the family of a man who had just killed himself with a shotgun.
Initially, all they knew was that a shot had been fired and the man was hospitalized. It was my job to drive the wife and her three children to the hospital and then, when I discovered exactly what happened, inform them that the husband/father had taken his own life.
In situations like this, my first challenge is to manage my own reactions.
I typically face two kinds of crises: those I feel confident and qualified to manage because of my experience and training, and those that intimidate me. Each has its own temptations.
When I feel comfortable, I get impatient. I know the nature of the problem before the person stops talking. I know what needs to happen. I know how people tend to respond. And I know how to fix things. I want to start giving advice prematurely.
When I’m intimidated by the situation, I want to do something, anything, because I’m the pastor. I feel like if I don’t take control, I’ll appear feckless. Under that pressure I usually blunder.
To manage my reactions, I keep two things in mind:
• I won’t be much good to people if their crises become my crises. In a situation where I can neither touch bottom or keep my head above water, I have to remain calm. If I identify too much with people’s fear, panic, and insecurity, I will be unable to minister. I want to be able to feel what they feel, to tell them those feelings are normal, but I want to keep a clear head. How?
My answer is to acquire skills and training. I must have something to offer people. Burnout hits pastors and counselors who repeatedly face situations that outstrip their competence.
When I was in seminary, I also worked as a real estate agent. One day my partner put me in an uneasy situation. A woman who had worked as a waitress with his daughter was dying of cancer. The doctors had told her she had only a few weeks to live. She didn’t know Christ.
He said, “You have seminary training. Would you call on her?”
“Yes, I’ll gladly see her,” I replied. Inside, however, I felt queasy, dubious of my ability to say anything that would help her.
Later I sat in the parking lot of the hospital, marshaling my strength, thinking. Nothing I have done to this point has prepared me for this. I prayed and decided the one thing I could do was listen. If nothing else, I could give an attentive ear and pray with her. With that in mind, I walked into the hospital and took the elevator to her room.
It didn’t take much small talk to get down to her real need. I said, “I don’t know what you’re going through, and I really want to hear.”
“It started as ovarian cancer,” she said. “Then it spread throughout my lower tract. The pain is like the harshest pain a woman goes through in labor, but this one never stops. At first I fought against taking pain medication because I wanted to be clear-minded when I visit with my 13-year-old daughter. But then the pain got to be too much.”
By the time we finished talking several hours later, she had prayed to receive Christ. When I walked out of the hospital, I was totally spent. I got in my car and slumped in the seat with my eyes closed. I knew the Lord had helped me minister to this woman, but I also knew I lacked the competence to handle all the issues involved in helping people in crisis. Then and there I decided to learn all the crisis skills I could.
Though I have followed through, I don’t always have total control of my emotions, and at times I feel uneasy and at a loss. That’s good. It keeps me depending on the Holy Spirit for effectiveness. I never enter a crisis with the idea I’m going to solve it. I use the skills I’ve learned, yet only as the Holy Spirit applies them to the person in need can they take hold.
• A crisis is an opportunity. In a sense I’ve learned to look forward to crises—not to the harm they cause, but to the good that God brings as a result:
1. People grow. One night a member, Sara, called to tell me her 39-year-old husband was dead. While they were on vacation together, he had suffered a massive heart attack.
She had no one to help her. My wife and I stepped in, and over the next few days became extremely close with her. Up until then, she had been only marginally involved in the church. As she experienced Christ’s love through us and the church, she began wanting to share it with others. Now Sara has become heavily involved caring for others in need. Her crisis was a tragedy, but she emerged a stronger person and a more committed believer.
2. Relationships deepen. Most people never forget that the pastor was there in their hour of deepest need. Our family is now as close to Sara as to anyone in the church, although before her crisis I knew her only as the red-headed woman who sat in worship in the third row. After pastors leave a congregation, the people who keep contact with them are often those whom they helped in crisis.
3. A sense of satisfaction fills me. Since crises are part of my calling, and since I have invested considerably in crisis training, I get fireman-like satisfaction from entering the burning houses of people’s lives and walking out with them on my shoulder. This isn’t the messiah complex at work but a legitimate sense that I am doing something significant—doing what God called me to do.
I can’t immediately see the fruits of other pastoral labor, but when counseling in crisis, I often see tangible results very quickly.
Handling a Crisis
I may not be able to plan for a specific crisis, but I can decide ahead of time what steps I will take once a crisis presents itself. Here is what I try to do:
• Offer presence. In the midst of the suicide tragedy on candidating Sunday, one woman from the congregation came to the family home and just sat on the couch with her arm around the shoulder of the grieving mother. For the entire afternoon, I don’t think she said ten words. But the mother later told me, “I drew more comfort from her than from anything.” Presence is powerful.
Pain and trauma isolate a person, particularly in medical crises. A patient is in alien surroundings, treated by some personnel more like a problem than a person. People in pain want to withdraw, like a turtle into its shell. But isolation intensifies the pain.
So those in crisis first need others to be with them. Meaningful touch, as the woman above showed, helps pull crisis victims out of isolation. Sufferers can dismiss our words. But touch—the language of crisis—has innate authority.
• Listen attentively. One of the biggest mistakes a pastor can make is to prescribe answers and solutions in the initial stages of a crisis. At this stage, crisis victims need description, not prescription. So I let them fully describe what has happened, what they’re feeling, what they’re going through. Few things communicate compassion and concern more than unhurried listening.
This means resisting the temptation to offer even good advice. We all know that clichés usually cause more pain than comfort. When crisis victims hear pat answers, they feel we don’t understand the depth of their traumas.
But even truth, given prematurely, can do more harm than good. Although this may be the fiftieth person we’ve counseled about grief, to the person going through the grief, it feels like a unique experience. So telling a widow “You are not the only one who has experienced this; others in our church have gotten through this, and so will you” only belittles her loss. Later, the person may want to get in touch with others who have gone through the same thing, but in the beginning, the person needs to simply express how this experience is like nothing else.
Sometimes I don’t listen well because I prejudge the situation or the person. I did this once with a couple in a marital crisis. They were not a part of the church, so I didn’t know anything about them when they came to see me. But the wife, a seething volcano of anger and bitterness, made it difficult to like her from the start. She even made fun of the church, calling our worship a “dog and pony show.”
I felt she was a lost cause, and frankly I wanted to get rid of them gracefully. As counseling continued, however, I discovered some of the roots of her anger. She had suffered sexual abuse as a child. The more I learned, the less I wanted to write her off.
Rarely are counseling situations clear from the first session. The longer I counsel, the more I know about human nature, and ironically, the less I feel I can prejudge people. More than ever, I listen for the factors that make this person and problem unique.
• Clarify the situation. Medical crises require quick decisions about procedures to be done, organs to be donated, life support systems to be used.
A death forces kin into dozens of decisions about funeral arrangements, the distribution of possessions, living arrangements, financial planning, and legal matters.
Unemployment requires a person to reassess retirement, education, self-identity, and where to live.
Crisis victims have to make many major, life-changing decisions, and usually in a compressed period of time. One such decision alone is stressful. Add many together, and it’s bewildering. Tack on emotional shock, and it’s crushing.
Not surprisingly, decision-making can cause people in crisis to freeze. They desperately need someone who can objectively identify the issues, sort the priorities, and clarify values.
When a person in church loses a loved one, I drop everything and go to the family. I also accompany the family at the funeral home and inform them, “I want to help you understand what the funeral director is doing.” We go into the casket room, and I help them clarify what it means to buy a casket, that their feelings for their loved one don’t have to be expressed in a lavish casket. I help them assemble documents.
I’ve learned a key principle about how assertive I can be in helping a family deal with doctors, funeral directors, and lawyers: If these professionals are not making sense to me, they are almost certainly not making sense to the crisis victim, who is normally too intimidated to ask many questions. So I ask on his or her behalf. And because I’ve gone through these things before, I can help interpret the technical language and procedures and decisions.
These aren’t the only things I clarify. People need help interpreting their feelings. Is anger the fountainhead of this man’s marriage problems, or is anger masking guilt over some failing? Is the broken woman at a funeral simply grieving her loss or resenting her increased responsibilities? The job of clarification and interpretation is one of our most important.
• Do damage control. Crises can easily get out of control. Most people can deal with only one crisis at a time, but every crisis has the ability to spawn other emotional, financial, occupational, family, and identity crises. Victims can quickly lose hope. When a person is vulnerable, when everything is already shaky, crises’ “offspring” can do incredible damage.
Take marital arguments. One couple came to me right after the wife learned of her husband’s adulterous relationship. He had been involved for three years with his secretary. I knew I wasn’t going to save their marriage in one session, but I did need to contain the forest fire.
First, I wanted to keep them from tearing each other apart. In addition, they had three kids. I knew she probably wanted to march home and say, “Look what your father has done.” She probably wanted to call up the other woman, whom she knew well, and tell her off. She could have kindled an inferno. She could have moved out of the house and cut herself off from everyone. Each of these could have created additional crises, and that was the last thing they needed right then.
So in that first visit, we addressed the bare minimum. I needed to hear their story, trace how the adultery developed, and let her initial anger and his defensiveness blaze in a place where they couldn’t incinerate each other. She needed to hear me say, “It’s right for you to be angry at him.” He needed to hear, “What you’ve done has not irreparably harmed your marriage or your life. There’s still hope for you.” And we tried to contain the flames to the smallest possible area.
Two years later, they are holding their own. They’re still clearing away some of the charred timber, but they’re making it.
• Show the next step. A woman called me and, sobbing, said, “I have to see you today.” I agreed to see her immediately. When she came in, I learned she was suffering intolerable guilt over two abortions received before committing her life to Christ. In a single day, due to a conversation she’d had with a friend who didn’t know her situation, it became a crippling issue.
In that first meeting, I assured her of Christ’s forgiveness and began to walk her through the grieving process. As we finished that session, I assured her, “Let’s talk again next week.” Her emotions were so tender, I knew she would require consistent support to keep her from tumbling back into debilitating guilt.
People in crisis tremble before a dark future; they need light shed on the next step. They need to look forward to care and attention in the immediate future. So I always conclude my initial care with “I’ll call you tonight,” or “We’ll meet at my office on Tuesday at three o’clock.” I specify what I’m going to do next, and I don’t put that too far in the future. How far depends on how they have responded to my initial attention.
I don’t overwhelm them with a detailed plan for solving the crisis. I tell them, “We’re going to take this one step at a time.” Most can’t see much beyond the next step anyway.
Recognize the Uniqueness of Various Crises
As much as all crises require a similar approach, not all crises are alike. Each type of crisis requires unique skills, attention, and focus:
• Death. In addition to listening and empathy, I find people are helped by knowing the stages of grief. That way their mercurial emotions aren’t so baffling to them.
• Domestic violence. Over the years, many abused wives have called me saying they’ve been beaten, and they’re afraid it could happen again. We don’t waste time scheduling an appointment for this afternoon at three. Instead, I tell her to call the police and get to a shelter, where I will make contact with her.
I give immediate and specific direction with domestic violence because the victim has a confused, skewed understanding of her situation. Women often feel responsible. In addition, after being hit, they assume. Well, this was an isolated thing. It won’t happen again. Things will get better. But things usually get worse.
• Child abuse. The law requires I report any abuse I have witnessed or heard about. But when it comes to relaying secondhand information, I only report what I have witnessed or heard: “A woman reported to me today that her child is regularly beaten by the woman’s husband” not “I know a child who is being beaten by his father.” It’s the legal system’s job to figure out exactly what’s going on. It’s my legal responsibility to report what I’ve heard.
• Marriage conflict. Anger is often the biggest roadblock to progress. After letting a husband and wife vent anger at one another, I try to get them to take a step back to see a long-term solution to their crisis. Only then can we can begin working constructively.
• Loss of job. For the unemployed, a large part of the crisis is self-identity. A man, especially, assumes all the family’s financial responsibility is his, and he’s dropped the ball. Since society says, “A man is what a man does,” he feels like a loser. He may even be hearing that from his wife or kids.
I have two immediate objectives in these cases. First, I help the person feel worth outside of his or her ability to provide financially. Second, I find the immediate financial pressure point—a mortgage payment, a tax penalty—and help the person figure out how to deal with it.
• Threatened suicide. Most people who threaten suicide feel they’ve lost control of everything—except death. So the last thing I do is try to wrest control from them by saying, “Don’t do it. It’s wrong. Think of all the people you would hurt.” That just reinforces their despair.
I let them take control, even in the conversation. “Tell me what’s going on in your life.” I affirm the one positive action they’ve just taken: calling me— “It was great of you to reach out to someone. It’s important for you to do that.” I let them feel they’ve taken some control of their lives already, that calling was a good thing.
Since the early days of my ministry, I have intentionally sought opportunities to help people in crisis. I have volunteered as chaplain of hospitals and with the police and fire departments. I have gone out of my way to build a network of relationships outside of the church, in organizations such as Rotary Club, so that people in the community with a crisis but without a pastor can call me. I emphasize to the congregation that despite the size of our church, I am available in a crisis.
Why bring more problems upon myself? Crises are life-defining, path-setting moments for people. If someone stands at their side, representing Christ and offering compassionate help, they often will draw closer to God. And that, finally, is what my ministry is about.
Copyright © 1992 by Christianity Today
