Chapter III: The Advantages

The personal religious growth of the pastor is greatly aided by this direct contact with the souls of his charge. In a minister's life the danger is that he may degenerate into mere professionalism. He may come to study God's Word and its great truths, not with personal application, but with respect only to the preparation of his sermons and their application to the people. He may lose a vivid consciousness of his personal relations to God and read and think and pray with reference only to others. Many a pastor actually advancing in general knowledge of the Bible and in professional power as to the composition and delivery and mental richness of his sermons is, after all, only retrograding in his inner personal life as a Christian.

But the direct contact with individual souls in pastoral visitation brings religion before him less as a theory, more as a living, personal reality. He deals here with religion in the concrete rather than the abstract. He is the witness of its actual power to comfort in sorrow, to strengthen in temptation, to guide in perplexity, to triumph in danger, and his own soul thus enters into a more full realization of it as a living fact. How often when seeking to guide another to Christ does he himself find new access to Him, or when administering consolation to a dejected, afflicted spirit do new courage and hope spring up in his own heart! It develops within him broader, purer sympathies and makes him a truer, nobler Christian.

Visitation also affords the best means of studying the people in their actual life, their characters, opinions, temptations, afflictions and sins. The successful preacher must be a student of men, especially a student of his own congregation. Many a recluse pastor wastes the greater part of his force because his preaching lacks adaptation and practicalness. His sermon, it may be, is faultless in its rhetoric and logic and learning and orthodoxy, but it fails to move the people, because it does not come within the range of their experiences. It removes none of their perplexities; it touches none of their special sins; it discusses no questions vital in their life; it is not Ithuriel's spear, to touch and expose the masked tempter charming and deluding their ears. The preacher is not in sympathy with the actual life of the congregation, and the sermon, however abstractly true and beautiful, does not move and bless them. It is with the actual life the minister has to deal; and the study of it in all its manifold phases, as developed under the power of sin and grace, is essential to the highest power in the pulpit. An old Divine used to say: "The preacher has three books to study--the Bible, himself, and the people."

Nor should I omit to say here that pastoral visitation is a mentally enriching process. In the study of life and experience, as a pastor meets them in passing from house to house, he is ever gaining new insight into character. In these conversations, new vistas of truth open before him, and from these visits he comes back to his study with new texts and subjects for sermons and new illustrations of experience and doctrine.

These pastoral visits, moreover, establish personal religious relations between the minister and the congregation, and thus greatly add to their interest in his sermons. They alter the standpoint of the hearer in reference to the preacher. The man with whom you have wisely and tenderly conversed on vital, personal religion cannot turn a cold, critical ear toward you on the Lord's Day; nor does he--what is equally fatal to spiritual benefit--listen as a mere admirer of your pulpit performances. He has a deeper feeling. He turns to you, not merely his critical and intellectual, but his religious, nature, and the words you speak, as the utterances of one sincerely seeking his eternal welfare, come to him with a religious power. This is, without doubt, the secret of many a successful pastorate, even where there has not been the aid of brilliant pulpit eloquence. The pastor has established personal religious relations with his hearers, and to them even his least elaborate sermons are clothed with sacred power. Brilliant sermonizing may secure popularity, but only this personal religious contact between pastor and people secures confidence; and a pastor's real power in producing spiritual, eternal results is dependent on the religious confidence of the people in him.

These visits also enable him to meet many whom the pulpit could never reach. In every community there are the aged, requiring the supports of religion in their declining life; the sick and sorrowing, craving the words of Christian consolation and hope; and the careless, needing the kindly invitation and warning. The pastor is God's commissioned messenger to such, and in these personal interviews he may adapt instruction, encouragement, comfort, and admonition to each.

Finally, pastoral visitation is a chief means of blessing and cementing the pastoral relation. Of late years pastorates have become of short duration. Hardly is a minister settled and fairly at work before the question of a change begins to be agitated. May not the decline of pastoral visitation, so faithfully done by many of our fathers in the ministry, be in part an explanation of this? The pastor's personal religious life is not brought into contact with his people; as the result, their religious confidence is not won, and his ministry is not in sympathy with their needs. The only bond between them is the pulpit; and when the novelty of his voice and manner and modes of thought has passed away, they are tired of him and seek a change.

Besides, when the pastor is not faithful to the souls of his people in private, they instinctively feel that he is not sincere--at least, not thoroughly in earnest--in his public preaching. On the Lord's Day he comes before them proclaiming the most solemn truths and pressing these truths with the strongest urgency, but in the week, he meets them and has no words of kindly invitation and warning. He solemnly warns the impenitent from the pulpit of their imminent peril of everlasting burnings but meets them in their homes or on the street, perhaps year after year, without one word expressive of his interest for their eternal welfare. Such inconsistency makes religious confidence impossible, and there is no adequate bond to bind pastor and people together.

But the relation of pastor and people, as God ordained it, is most sacred and enduring. Charged with the care of souls, he is to move among his flock as their spiritual guide and friend. The confessional, terrible as its power for evil is, was after all in its origin only a perversion of the pastoral institution, based on a real and universal need--the longing of troubled souls for guidance, help in getting back to God. This need the pastor must meet as the confidential counsellor and helper of the individual members of his flock; and if true to this sacred trust, his resources of power are ever increasing, and new bonds of sympathy hold him more firmly year by year in the hearts of his church.