In the pastor's plan of work, how large a place should be given to
pastoral visitation?
The pulpit, without doubt, has the highest claim. The pastor is there
surrounded by his whole flock, and stands forth before the world as
God's ambassador, the accredited expositor and defender of the Gospel.
No private duty can rise to the dignity and responsibility of this
great public work, and no plea of pastoral exigencies or pastoral
usefulness can excuse an habitual neglect of thorough preparation for
the sacred desk. This is primary and essential.
But in the pastor's plan he should also aim to secure the visitation of
every family and, as far as possible, every person in his congregation.
In most churches this could be done at least as often as once a year;
in some, doubtless, more frequently than this. By employing system,
laying out the work carefully, and rigidly devoting fixed seasons for
its prosecution, a large congregation can be readily visited. Suppose
that, in addition to those made in cases of sickness and special
urgency, six visits in regular course are made every week, even this,
small as the number is, in half a year would reach more than a hundred
and fifty families--a number above the average of households in our
congregations. For this two or three afternoons each week would
ordinarily be ample, and the pastor, by thus placing himself in living
sympathy with the life of his people, would gain far more than that for
his study by the increased facility with which his sermons would be
prepared and their individual adaptation to the needs of the
congregation. Dr. John Hall says: "I think a minister in good health,
and doing his work easily and naturally, should visit some on at least
five days in the week. I have done that for months together. . . . A
few hours a day spent in visiting gives exercise, bodily, intellectual,
and moral. One studies better for it."
There are, indeed, positions in the ministry in which, from the extent
of the church and the pressure of outside duties, the pastor can do
little in this department beyond the visitation of the sick and cases
of special religious perplexity. But these instances are rare and
exceptional, and in such churches provision ought always to be made to
supply the lack of pastoral visitation either by an assistant to the
pastor, devoted to this work, or by delegating it to competent
committees charged with its accomplishment. When the Baptist Tabernacle
of New York, then worshipping in Mulberry street, numbered over a
thousand members, widely scattered over that large city, the late
venerated Deacon William Colgate organized a plan by which the
congregation was divided into convenient districts, each placed under
the care of a competent brother, and it long proved a most effective
organization for church watch-care and visitation.
There is here a further inquiry: Does the pastor's duty of visitation
extend beyond the limits of his own congregation? The answer to this
must depend on the number of his flock, his special aptitudes, and the
amount of his own strength. The Lord does not require impossibilities.
But whoever carefully considers that even in the rural districts of New
York more than one-half the population attend no evangelical church, I
think, will anxiously ask how this mass of neglecters of the Gospel
shall be reached; and the pastor who looks down Sunday after Sunday on
a half-filled church may well inquire whether it might not be crowded
if, instead of waiting for these careless souls to come to him, he
should go to them and carry the message of the Gospel, with the
urgencies of an earnest, prayerful heart, into the bosom of their
families. Or if this is not possible for him, ought he not to train and
organize Christian workers in his church to make this aggressive
movement on the mass of indifferentism around him? The inspiring and
organizing of such aggressive Christian labor as faithful visitation
from house to house are among the most important duties of the pastor,
and no form of Christian activity is more fruitful in blessed results,
both in the higher Christian development of the visitors and in the
awakening and conversion of those who are visited.