Talking To People At Your Church You Don't Know
A Mini-Training On How To Lovingly Check In On Members Of Your Own Church
Church is a funny social space. Any place moderately sized or larger, there’s this sense that you should or could know everyone… but actually you don’t. It’s an odd intimacy with strangers.
It occurred to me this past week that churches need a training for their own members on how to visit and talk to each other. I’m reminded of visits I’ve made to Washington D.C. to talk to members of Congress. The advocacy groups who bring you up to D.C. typically take you through a half-day training. In the training they educate you on the advocacy topic and they also give you tons of advice on how to talk to congress people.
They do this for two reasons. First, they do it so that the advocacy visit is more effective. But they also do it because it lowers the nervousness many have about doing something they’ve almost never done.
Two stories: my grandpa was a congressman in Iowa. I can still remember my grandma talking about the first time they went into a neighborhood in order to go door to door asking for votes. My grandpa sat for like an hour behind the steering wheel of their car (an El Camino?) and almost decided he couldn’t run for office. But then he got out and started knocking on doors, and learned how to knock on doors by knocking on doors.
My comparable experience was in seminary, during my clinical pastoral education I had to visit rooms on the floor of a hospital as part of a chaplaincy team. I was so nervous, the first room I walked into I basically arrived and said, “Hi, I’m the chaplain on this floor, my name is Clint,” and then turned around and just walked out. Great pastoral care, right?
But over time I learned how to enter into those spaces, to meet people I didn’t know, to introduce myself, to navigate the conversation. And to sit in silence.
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So now let’s think about congregations of people mutually caring for one another. In one of the central confessional texts of Lutherans, the Smalcald Articles, Martin Luther writes that the “mutual conversation and consolation of the saints is a form of the gospel.” He sees Jesus’ statement in Matthew 18:20 as central: “Wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”
This is an amazing promise, that wherever members of the body of Christ gather intentionally, Christ is in the midst of them. And it is “activated,” if you will, by the members of the church entering into mutual conversation and consolation.
As a pastor, a concern I often have is that although some members of a church are highly networked and receive much consolation and conversation, other members of the church, those on the periphery do not. If you aren’t on social media, you are less connected. If you simply know less people, you are less likely to receive that form of the gospel.
This is why a call for the church as a whole to be more intentional about reaching out to one another is important, because it’s the way the gospel is delivered.
But, to paraphrase only slightly Paul in Romans, “And how can anyone hear the gospel without someone speaking it? And how can they speak it unless they know how and where and when? As it is written, How beautiful are the feet of those who announce the good news.”
What if we trusted this basic insight: that any member of the church who goes out of their way to speak to another member of the church with loving intentions has “beautiful feet” and is announcing the good news?
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Okay, so the practical details. This is your “training.”
Pick a medium that works for you. If you like to text, go ahead and text. If you are into hand-writing letters, do that. If you love to talk on the phone, make the phone call. If you prefer to be face-to-face, get an address and go on a visit or set up a coffee meeting.
Pick people you don’t know. To do this you’ll need a directory of some kind. Many churches print and distribute these. If you don’t have an updated one, your first step is to call up your church administrator or pastor and ask them for a copy. Perhaps ask them just for a short list so you aren’t intimidated. Tell them your plan and I’m almost certain they’ll be able to get you some useful information.
Make first contact. This part will inevitably be awkward, so own it. You might even just be super transparent. Say: “I read this blog post by [my pastor] and they suggested I reach out to new people in our church to check in on them. So I’m writing/calling you. My name is [fill in the blank,] I love this church and I’d like to find out how you’re doing. How ARE you doing?”
Now practice all the skills you’ve learned for conversation. Do some active listening. Have fun. Ask some questions. Maybe talk about what you do at the church, talk about your family or work, in general just enjoy a conversation with absolutely no ulterior motives [you’re not recruiting them for something].
Once the conversation is done, congratulate yourself. You did it! You just did the gospel.
Now choose a pace at which you’ll do more. Maybe you make one phone call per week. By the end of the year you would have called 52 people! Do whatever is manageable. Remember whatever you are doing is way more than had been happening before.
Got a friend at the church? Call them up afterwards and debrief. Share the idea with them and encourage them to try it also. Then do some more and compare notes.
Trust that there need not be any larger purpose to the mutual consolation of the saints other than reaching out to one another. Jesus doesn’t say, “Wherever two or three are gathered I’m there and then I’ll get them to do x,y,z.” No, he just promises to be present wherever two or three are gathered. Think about that, if a whole congregation were to reach out to one another like this Jesus would be showing up all over the place.
I’ll say it again, caring for one another through mutual consolation and conversation needn’t and really shouldn’t be instrumentalized for some larger purpose. When I went into those hospital rooms for chaplaincy I wasn’t going in to raise funds for the hospital. No, I was simply going in to provide presence and care.
All of this is a ministry of presence. It’s being there for one another. The reason I’ve focused on making it an active process is because many of our current passive processes, though good on some levels, give us an illusion of more active care than is actually happening. For example, yes if you’re on Facebook and you see someone express grief over a loss many people will comment on that post, and that’s wonderful. But there’s somebody else somewhere who posted and has few friends and got no responses, and there are others who simply aren’t on social media. They only way they’ll hear the good news is if their siblings in Christ make use of various means to connect to them.
Imagine a whole congregation that practiced this kind of checking in regularly. Imagine if a group of them got so excited about it they created systems for checking in on the whole church. Imagine the kind of creativity that might emerge from such conversations, not because anyone was trying exactly to make something happen, but simply because when you rub the right kinds of things together sometimes there is a spark.
Thank you for sharing, this is very helpful