Followers of Jesus have a lot to think about right now. Chief among those thoughts ought to be a question about the future. How will the church manage to be fruitful in the time in which God has called us to be His witness to the world?
The answer to that question may be the reality discovered in the vine and the branches story Jesus tells in the Upper Room in John 15. Whatever else that story might point us toward, we can’t escape the reality that it points toward fruitfulness.
Just stop and think for a moment of some of what is going on around us right now. The U.S. just passed the one million mark when it comes to COVID deaths. While we are trying to act as though the pandemic is over, in many parts of the U.S. – and much more in other parts of the world – the virus is spreading again at a rapid pace. Then there is the war in Ukraine and the evil behavior of Putin, not to mention the tension that seems greater today than it has in many years between the U.S. and China. If what I’m reading about human rights violations and the persecution of believers deep inside China is true, that adds a whole new dimension to our concern. Inside our own borders, we keep randomly killing people – a grocery store in Buffalo, New York; a church in California; an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. What would you have said to your congregation last Sunday if you were pastor of First Church in Uvalde? Or what if you were a faithful, godly Southern Baptist preacher last Sunday in light of the news about that group’s challenges?
Paul might answer that question with, “Bear one another’s burdens, and thereby fulfill the law of Christ.” (Galatians 6:2) It is a bit ironic that, in a letter where Paul has pointed out that Torah observance is not required of those who follow Jesus, he is now ending this letter with the idea of “filling right up the law of Christ,” as the Greek might be translated. We do that – at least, this seems to be what Paul thinks – by bearing one another’s burdens. If you glance down the page in Galatians 6 to verse five, you see Paul saying, “each one will bear his or her own load.” He seems to think that in the ideal Christian community, we learn the balance between being mutually helpful to one another and being individually responsible.
He is challenging us with what might be called pastoral care as opposed to solutions made up of empty platitudes.
Whose heart isn’t broken by these recent events? If you are on social media, it seems unanimous – killing 19 innocent elementary aged children in Texas and two of their teachers is simply horrendous. But what about solutions? While I am all about “thoughts and prayers” – I’ve regularly prayed for each of the issues mentioned above – without action, thoughts and prayers are viewed more as platitudes than as pastoral care. It costs me nothing to think and pray.
Pastoral care is a lot bigger than a hospital visit to a sick person or a meal to a bereaved family. All of those kinds of things are good – and needed! But pastoral care is bigger. It may involve working with teachers on better solutions for protecting students and teachers and staff in local schools. It may be working with our state and federal elected officials to insist on solutions rather than stand-offs born of politics, money and power-mongering. Who knows, it might even mean “restoring one another in a spirit of gentleness,” to borrow language from Galatians 6:1.
Our American “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” mentality seems to have invaded the church long before the pandemic came. And we have lost ground and influence in our culture, perhaps because of that. Lots of kingdom leaders seem to have seen pastoral care as “their job, not mine.” The earliest church (Acts 2:42-4:30) was so communal when it came to pastoral care that Luke could say “there were no needy people among them.” How could that spirit change our world?
The voices of our culture, which is more desperate for the real Jesus than it realizes, are crying out for someone to help bear the burdens of what life looks like right now. If the church can’t find a way to answer that call, then we’ve forfeited our right to see ourselves as the body of Christ.
Could pastoral care be one of the clear paths to fruitfulness?
Wye Huxford 