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.