I have a story to tell about how, when I realized as a pastor that my congregational care was lacking, God led me to better address our long term pressing needs.
It had been a few months since “Gary’s” funeral when I made a follow up visit to “Ann,” his young widowed wife.
Gary and Ann were happily married for only one year when Gary was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
Needless to say, Gary’s death was extremely traumatic for Ann. Like most churches, we held a funeral and followed it with a family meal. We sent cards and flowers. And we offered our condolences when Ann was at church.
But when I stepped through Ann’s front door to see how she was doing during that follow up call, it didn’t take long to realize that our church hadn’t done nearly enough for her. Ann was in deep mourning. She told me she cried herself to sleep on her living room floor every night and just slept there.
That encounter with Ann was a turning point in my ministry. After I prayed with her, I walked out to my car and cried out to God to show me how to better minister to her.
In answer to that prayer, the Lord led me to form teams of men for Ann and others with long term needs in our church. The teams were permanently assigned to their care receiver and donated two hours of service to them at their homes on a regular basis.
The result was not just projects being done for Ann and the other care receivers, but effective and meaningful relationships among the men on their teams and between the teams and their care receivers.
Out of that experience grew New Commandment Men’s Ministries.
That was twenty-five years ago and what I didn’t know then was that the Lord was raising up, not only NCMM, but other ministries to help churches better address these types of “long term pressing needs” (Titus 3:14) with their congregational care ministries.
Two of the best known ministries that train laity to do congregational care are GriefShare and Steven Ministries. A lesser known, but very effective, ministry is Widow Connection.
What is unique about New Commandment Men’s Ministries (NCMM) is that while Grief Share, Steven Ministries and Widow Connection address long term pressing needs by providing primarily emotional and spiritual support, New Commandment Men’s Ministries addresses these types of needs by providing teams of men for practical and relational support over years and sometimes even decades.
NCMM defines the love of Christ as identifying with, committing to, and sacrificing for someone. As applied to widows and widowers (and others with long term needs), NCMM utilizes teams of men to donate two hours of service one Saturday morning a month to widows and widowers, returning each month to the same person.
By returning each month to the same person, the teams of men build relationships with each other and with their care receiver as a team, and act as her or his advocates.
New Commandment mobilizes men to get involved in their church’s congregational care with it’s membership training site, Meeting to Meet Needs.
Back to Ann, after her team served around her home for a few months, for the first time she had a smile on her face when she showed up at church.
It was when I saw that smile that I knew we were onto something.
This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.
Since 2003 New Commandment Men’s Ministries has helped hundreds of churches throughout North American and around the world recruit teams of men who permanently adopt their widowed and single parents in their congregations for the purpose of donating two hours of service to them one Saturday morning each month. We accomplish this with a free training site called New Commandment Men’s Ministry
Learn how to mobilize your men’s ministry to meet every pressing need in your church here.
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Learn how to form teams of men for every widow, single mom
and fatherless child in your church at NewCommandment.org.
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