24. Pastoral visitation
24
Pastoral visitation
Pastoral visitation, combined with personal dealing, is by far the best way of watching for souls. I well remember when I first began my ministry in this congregation, how much I was impressed with what one of the ablest and best of our then ministers was reported to have testified on his deathbed. Calling back to his bedside a young minister who had come to see him, the dying man said: “Prepare for the pulpit; above everything else you do, prepare for the pulpit. Let me again repeat it, should it at any time stand with you between visiting a death-bed and preparing for the pulpit, prepare for the pulpit.”
I was immensely impressed with that dying injunction when it was repeated to me. But I have lived, I do not say to put my preparation for the pulpit, such as it is, second to my more pastoral work in my week’s thoughts, but to put my visiting in the very front rank and beside my pulpit. “We never were accustomed to much visiting,” said my elders to me in their solicitude for their young minister when he was first left alone with this whole charge; “only appear in your own pulpit twice on Sabbath: keep as much at home as possible: we were never used to much visiting, and we do not look for it.”
Well, that was most kindly intended; but it was much more kind than wise. For I have lived to learn that no congregation will continue to prosper…without constant pastoral attention. And remember, I do not complain of that. Far, far from that. For I am as sure as I am of anything connected with a minister’s life, that a minister’s own soul will prosper largely in the measure that the souls of his people prosper through his pastoral work. No preaching, even if it were as good preaching as the Apostle’s itself, can be left to make up for the neglect of pastoral visitation and personal intercourse. “I taught you from house to house,”1 says Paul himself, when he was resigning the charge of the church of Ephesus into the hands of the elders of Ephesus.
What would we ministers not give for a descriptive report of an afternoon’s house-to-house visitation by the Apostle Paul! Now in a work-shop, now at a sickbed, now with a Greek, now with a Jew, and, in every case, not discussing politics and cursing the weather, not living his holidays over again and hearing of all the approaching marriages, but testifying to all men in his own incomparably winning and commanding way repentance toward God and faith toward the Lord Jesus Christ. We city ministers call out and complain that we have no time to visit our people in their own houses; but that is all subterfuge. If the whole truth were told about the busiest of us, it is not so much want of time as want of intention. It is want of set and indomitable purpose to do it. It is want of method and of regularity such as all business men must have; and it is want, above all, of laying out every hour of every day under the Great Taskmaster’s eye.
Many country ministers again,—we miserable men that we are, are never happy or well placed,—complain continually that their people are so few, and so scattered, and so ignorant, and so uninteresting, and so unresponsive, that it is not worth their toil to go up and down in remote places seeking after them. It takes a whole day among bad roads and wet bogs to visit a shepherd’s wife and children, and two or three bothies2 and paupers’ hovels on the way home.
“On the morrow,” so runs many an entry in Thomas Boston’s Memoirs,3
I visited the sick, and spent the afternoon in visiting others, and found gross ignorance prevailing. Nothing but stupidity prevailed; till I saw that I had enough to do among my handful. I had another diet of catechizing on Wednesday afternoon, and the discovery I made of the ignorance of God and of themselves made me the more satisfied with the smallness of my charge.… Twice a year I catechized the parish, and once a year I visited their families. My method of visitation was this. I made a particular application of my doctrine in the pulpit to the family, exhorted them all to lay all these things to heart, exhorted them also to secret prayer, supposing they kept family worship, [and] urged their relative duties upon them.
And then at his leaving Ettrick, he writes: “Thus I parted with a people whose hearts were knit to me and mine to them. The last three or four years had been much blessed, and had been made very comfortable to me, not in respect of my own handful only, but others of the countryside also.”
Jonathan Edwards called Thomas Boston “that truly great divine.” I am not such a judge of divinity as Jonathan Edwards was, but I always call Boston to myself that truly great pastor. But my lazy and deceitful heart says to me: No praise to Boston, for he lived and did his work in the quiet Forest of Ettrick. True, so he did. Well, then, look at the populous and busy town of Kidderminster. And let me keep continually before my abashed conscience that hard-working corpse Richard Baxter.4 Absolutely on the same page on which that dying man enters diseases and medicines enough to fill a doctor’s diary after a whole day in an incurable hospital, that noble soul goes on to say:
I preached before the wars twice each Lord’s Day, but after the wars [i.e. the English Civil War] but once, and once every Thursday, besides occasional sermons. Every Thursday evening my neighbours that were most desirous, and had opportunity, met at my house. Two days every week my assistant and I myself took fourteen families between us for private catechizing and conference; he going through the parish, and the town coming to me. I first heard them recite the words of the Catechism, and then examined them about the sense, and lastly urged them, with all possible engaging reason and vehemency, to answerable affection and practice. If any of them were stalled through ignorance or bashfulness, I forbore to press them, but made them hearers, and turned all into instruction and exhortation. I spent about an hour with a family, and admitted no others to be present, lest bashfulness should make it burdensome, or any should talk of the weakness of others.
And then he tells how his people’s necessity made him practise physic5 among them, till he would have twenty at his door at once. “All these my employments were but my recreations, and, as it were, the work of my spare hours. For my writings were my chiefest daily labour. And blessed be the God of mercies that brought me from the grave and gave me, after wars and sickness, fourteen years’ liberty in such sweet employment!”
Let all ministers who would sit at home over a pipe and a newspaper with a quiet conscience keep Boston’s Memoirs and Baxter’s Reliquiae at arm’s length.
*From Bunyan Characters, First Series (2nd ed.; Edinburgh/London: Oliphant Anderson and Ferrier, 1895), 262-66.
1. Cp. Acts 20:20.
2. A “bothy” is a Scottish English term for a small hut or cottage, particularly one for laborers.
3. Thomas Boston (1676-1732) was a Church of Scotland pastor whose ministry was entirely conducted in the Scottish Borders, chiefly in the town of Ettrick. He was the author of a number of important works, including his classic Memoirs. When an edition of this work was published in 1899, Whyte described it as “an event of national importance.” As Whyte went on to explain: “His sound and commanding commonsense, his immense industry, his great learning attained to amid unparallelled difficulties, his sometimes Shakespearean style, his life of faith and prayer, and his pulpit and pastoral efficiency and success, all combine to make Boston’s Memoirs of his Life, Time, and Writings a book to be always at hand in every Scottish Manse, as well as in every well-read, patriotic, and pious Scottish home.” [“Recommendatory Note” in Memoirs of his Life, Time, and Writings of the Reverend and Learned Thomas Boston, A.M., ed., George H. Morrison (Edinburgh/London: Oliphant Anderson & Ferrier, 1899), v].
4. Richard Baxter (1615-1691) was a prolific Puritan divine who was largely self-educated. He had an amazing ministry in the town of Kidderminster from 1641 to 1660. His Reformed Pastor (1656) is a classic study of pastoral ministry. His autobiography, Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696), was published posthumously. He suffered from ill health most of his life.
5. I.e. medicine.