Pastoral Visitation
Churches over the nation are being filled up all too often with people who are untaught and unconverted. The "Dale Carnegie" approach (i.e. never, never, NEVER tell a man he is wrong about anything) from the pulpit, coupled with the emphasis on "good salesmanship" from the members in their efforts to win others and the general appeal to worldly interests have 'brought a huge number of "converts" into the congregations. The question is, to what are they "converted"? They have not been convicted of sin, convinced that they were ever in error, nor converted to the gospel of Christ. They have simply joined a popular church, whose preacher has a pleasing and dynamic personality, and whose members are enthusiastic, friendly, and congenial.
When a church is built up by any such means it is only a question of time till such will cease to be a church of Christ. Its interest and attendance can be maintained only by a constant emphasis on things other than the gospel of Christ. People who are won without the gospel must needs be kept without the gospel. The gospel did not win them; the gospel will not keep them. The preacher and elders of such a congregation must be constantly on the search for new things, new ideas, new plans, projects, enterprises to keep enthusiasm stirred up. There will be emphasis on social and recreational phases, ambitious schemes to promote youth camps, benevolent programs, educational rallies, sensational missionary undertakings — always something big and exciting and glamorous. The simple gospel with its quiet and unostentatious emphasis on Christ like living is not enough.
Many years ago T. W. Caskey sat in a preacher's meeting in which a certain young brother spoke at length on the subject of "Pastoral Visitation." He stressed the need of frequent calls into the homes of the members, friendly interest in their social activities, and participation in all those innumerable activities which preempt the time of the average "pastor." Caskey was an old man at the time he had had long experience with churches and with individuals in preaching the gospel of Christ. He had seen churches built up to become flourishing and popular congregations by the very methods the young brother was proposing; and he had also seen those churches die and wither away when the "pastor" left.
We think Caskey's words ought to be read and taken to heart by every preacher in the land. Here they are:
"I beg to differ from the brother who has preceded me on this question. There are certain kinds of people in the church who have been brought into it by certain kinds of schemes, who cannot be kept in it without some men eternally trotting at their heels. When I find such stock as that in the church which I am preaching for, I give them plainly to understand that, if they haven't enough religion to come out to the Lord's house and worship their God without being driven up every Sunday like a parcel of stray cattle, they may jump over the fence and starve to death in the wilderness. Brethren, I'm not coming down from intellectual work in the pulpit to make a common herd-boy out of myself. If I must do such work as that, I will quit preaching and hire out to some man to herd sheep or cows. Church members who cannot be brought out to the house of the Lord except by pastoral visitations, are not worth standing room in a potter's field anyhow. I have recently had some valuable experience myself in pastoral visiting. I tried it in a sickly little church in a fashionable town. I tramped the streets through dust and heat for three miserable days. I found only one old wanderer on the mountains of sin, wild and bare, and he had grazed on the devil's commons till he couldn't tell clover from sneeze weed. He had lost his bell, shed his fleece and herded with the goats till he wasn't worth driving home.
Brethren, let me speak freely about this professional pastoral visiting, as a means of building up a church. The sick and the poor, the troubled and the distressed, the fatherless, and widows in their affliction, ought to be visited... by all the saints. No one is readier than I to encourage and practice such visiting.
Pastoral visiting and clerical claptrap may popularize a church and fill it with the irreligious and worldly minded, but such things will neither convert sinners nor add to the spirituality of the worship. If you can convert sinners and build up churches by humoring spiritual weakling-a and flattering simpering sentimentalists, in pastoral visiting, without preaching the gospel, you may as well throw away the Bible, get a fashionable preacher and rent hell out for a calf pasture. People who attend the meetings of the saints from the love of the "pastor," and who neglect their religious duties unless coddled by the "pastor" have neither faith nor piety, and their pretended worship is but a hollow mockery that will militate against the piety of any church and prove a stench in the nostrils of our God.
The best way to build up a church, therefore, is to return to the apostolic order of preaching and worship." (From "Seventy Years in Dixie" by F. D. Srygley.) — F.Y.T.