The Last Thing Pastors Need is One More Guilt Trip

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This post is a follow up on a recent one entitled, “Are Seminaries the Reason why Churches Ignore their Widowed and Single Parents?” I was going to title this one, “Are Pastors the Reason why Churches Ignore their Widowed and Single Parents?” But most pastors are already overburdened and stressed out. According to one poll, the median time pastors spend in ministry per week is 50 hours.¹ The last thing any pastor needs is someone reminding them that’s it’s been over a year since they made a house call to any widows in their congregation.

I know. As a pastor for twenty years, I often visited Guilt Land because I knew I was under-serving our widows and single moms. Other, more prominent, ministry demands crowded out their hidden needs. Preaching the perfect sermon, organizing the next church initiative, hiring the appropriate staff member, working with the church board, and many other demands made serving widows and single moms seem like the front bar of a treadmill that was going so fast I could never possibly reach it.

Of course, the problem was that I saw myself as primarily responsible for ministry to widows and single moms. I tried assigning deacons to do the ministry: “Call these five widows once every six months and see how they’re doing” was the basic plan for each deacon. It fell flat, of course. There was no relationship in it, no love. So I once again picked up the slack and did the contact work myself, or at least tried to. And that just reinforced the old inside joke pastors have: “We pastors are paid to be good. Deacons are good for nothing.”

All of this contrasted with what I kept seeing in my Bible: ministry to widows (and orphans and single moms) as one of the highest priorities of the early church. Somehow, first century Christians managed to do this ministry very well. And I? Well, I was completely failing at it. It wasn’t until God brought me to my knees by showing me a close-up example of the grief and pain a widow goes through that I finally cried out to Him for help.

And help He did. God lead me directly to a men’s team ministry model that is exceptionally well adapted to our culture. Men’s team ministry created intentional community among teams of men in our church who could then focus that camaraderie on the needs of their care receiver. It enabled us to meet every pressing need in our congregation and, best of all for me personally, it lifted the burden of ministry to their widowed and single parents from off my shoulders.

And men’s team ministry lifted something else from off my shoulders as well: guilt. And that, my dear pastor friend, is what I hope to lift from your shoulders too.

This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.

Learn how 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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1. Thom S. Rainer, “How Many Hours Does a Pastor Work Each Week?”