Year 2 – Day 96 – Tue 5 Dec – I had a meeting with the headteacher of the kids school about some issues regarding basically taking Jesus out of Christmas, it was fascinating and has got me pumped to preach at the carol services. I caught up with Chuck and then went into Ealing to work. Gethin was back on at ELT and one of local characters who turns up in church every couple of years was there. Thankfully he behaved himself during the talk. Team meeting after was a good time. It was our session meeting so I did a bit of prep for that. There were 11 of us from Ealing plus James Buchanan and Simon Arscott. We talked about various things and I have out 3 papers on Pastoral Visiting – Joey Pipa wrote a 2 parter for Ref 21 –
Pastoral Visitation – The God given responsibility to Shepherd
The Lost Work of Pastoral Visitation
and then David Murray has a nice piece on ‘A normal Pastoral Visit’.
Our shepherding lists now have about 8 or 9 households which is more manageable and I think the men will be really good at it. We’ve tried it before but then there have just been too many people to go round. I also think it allows to think seriously about what church membership entails which is something we’ve not done before.
Afterwards James and I went for a Kebab to chat more about Liss, sadly I think Expresso kebabs has been taken over by new owners.
Paul Levy 
We await the Levy definitive guide to Ealing kebabs, curry and coffee shops.
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How do you do pastoral visitation during the workday? At least in an American context that is not tenable (kids away at school, one or both parents away at work, often an hour away), and therefore the window for visitation is much more narrow than Baxter’s. Connected to that, how do you ‘divvy’ up the congregation among the session and determine the conditions for a pastoral visit within that smaller window (e.g., does something need to be going on, or just scheduled because that family is next on the list)? Do your congregants freak out if it’s a normally scheduled, but uncommon, visit? (“If the pastor’s coming over, he must have ulterior motives or think that there’s something wrong with me!”).
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Hi Cameron, We’d have quite a number of folk who are retired in the congregation so I try to visit them in the daytime and with guys in work sometimes it’s easier to schedule meetings at lunchtime, I can travel in to their workplace and use the time for reading on the tube. On the Session front we have just done the dividing up of the congregation and I’m not sure there was much rhyme or reason to it. The commitment we’re looking for from elders is that they will pray for those on their list every day, communicate with them that htey are doing so and so encourage their ‘flock’ to give them prayer points regularly. We’re aiming to get families into our homes over a meal, then visit them in their homes couple of times a year. It’s slightly different with some of our single folk. On the congregants freaking out we’ve not had that, but people realise this is different to what they’ve experienced in other congregations and this is new. We’ve not always done it as well as we could have and this is a bit of a fresh start. I’m hopeful it will be a great thing for the church family, it also means that elders are actively involved in shepherding. Do come back to me on this
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Thanks, that’s helpful. I’ll certainly come back to you on this!
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