What NOT to Do on a Hospital Visit!

In a smaller church where the pastor is likely to have a second job, it is unlikely that the pastor will have the time to make all the hospital visits that are needed. In such situations, the effective pastor will train lay leaders (most likely deacons) to make those visits on behalf of the church.

I thought it would be fun to give two brief scenarios of different types of hospital visits. They are both obviously oversimplified, but I am want to use these scenarios to help make some points about how to make (and how not to make) quality hospital visits. Though the two scenarios below are made up, they are based on parts of actual visits I have observed over the years. Enjoy reading it and I hope they make the points in a way that is fun to learn and easy to understand.

A deacon or lay person making an ineffective hospital visit might have a conversation like this.

Visitor: Hello, Brother Smith. I wanted to stop in and see if you were going to make it. I heard you were real bad off.

Patient: Ah, yes, it has been a rough few days.

Visitor: From what the ladies said at church, the doctors do not give you much hope.

Patient: Well, they have said that my chances are not as good as they had hoped.

Visitor: You know my cousin Tom had the same thing and he suffered for months and months before he finally died. But he was a Christian so we knew he went to heaven, so it was okay.

Patient: Well, I am a Christian; I came to know the Lord ten years ago, so I guess I will be okay if I do not make it.

Visitor: Well, I hope you are a Christian. But if you have ever doubted it, now would be the time to make it right. Can I share the Romans Road with you?

Patient: Well, I guess, but I am kind of tired; maybe you can come back later.

Visitor: Don’t you want to hear the Gospel? It’s what you need most of all, especially if you are doubting your faith.

Patient: I do not doubt my faith, but I am worried about how my wife and kids will get by if I die.

Visitor: I am sure they can get welfare; the state will not let them starve.

Patient: Ah . . . . , well . . . ., I guess that’s reassuring. Thanks so much for coming by. I think I need to rest now.

Visitor: Okay, well, it was good to see you, and I will tell everyone all about your situation so they will know just how bad it is. That way they can pray better about it.


A deacon or lay person making an effective hospital visit might have a conversation something like this.

Visitor: Hello, Brother Smith. I wanted to stop in and say hello for a minute and pray with you. Is that okay?

Patient: Yes, please do. I have been so lonely and worried while I’ve been in the hospital and I really need the prayer.

Visitor: We have been praying for you at church.

Patient: Thank you. I received the lovely flowers from the Sunday School class, which really made my day.

Visitor: Is there anything we can do at the house for you while you are in the hospital? I can send one of the teenage boys by to cut the grass and my wife can collect the mail and newspapers for you if you would like us to.

Patient: The grass was pretty high when the ambulance brought me to the hospital. If one of the boys cut the grass, it would be wonderful. My cousin is collecting the mail and papers for me, but thanks for offering.

Visitor: Would you like me to read you a scripture before I pray for you?

Patient: Yes, that would be a blessing.

Visitor: Do you have a favorite scripture you want me to read?

Patient: I always feel comforted when I hear Psalm 23; how about that one?

Visitor: Okay, and then I’ll say a prayer for you and let you rest.

Patient: Thanks so much for coming by.

For further reflection: What made the first scenario more effective than the second one? Read through the second scenario again. How many things are wrong with that visit? What could have been done differently to make the second scenario more effective?

The above is an excerpt from the book, Developing Leadership Teams in the Bivocational Church, by

Dr. Terry W. Dorsett. The book contains six easy to use lessons to teach lay people to work as a team with their pastor. Though the book is designed specifically for bivocational pastors, many fully funded pastors and many lay people are finding it equally helpful.

Keys to an Effective Hospital Visit

When people are in the hospital, they are often scared, lonely, and in need of encouragement. When they receive a well timed spiritually based visit in that time of difficulty, not only does it meet their spiritual need, but a growing body of evidence also suggests that they also recover faster physically. Therefore learning how to make a good hospital visit is important for lay people who want to help their church become more effective in caring for its members.

Many lay people hesitate to make such visits because they are not sure what to say or do. By following these simple points, a visit with a hospital patient can be joyful and encouraging.

1. Do not wear cologne. Cologne can gag even healthy people and those in the hospital may be extra sensitive to smells because of the medicines they are taking.

2. Leave the gum at home. No one likes to listen to people chew and smack gum.

3. Always check with the nurse before bringing food to a patient, even if the patient asks for it. It might be a detriment to the patient’s condition if his or her diet has been restricted for medical reasons.

4. If a gift of food is taken, it is extremely rude for the person bringing the gift to eat it. Remember, it was brought for the patient and he and she cannot get any more of it once it is gone. Never eat the patient’s food from his or her tray, as the nurse may be monitoring how much has been eaten.

5. When greeting the patient, if it is physically feasible, take his or her hand gently. When people do not feel well, they often do not want to be hugged, especially if they have had surgery.

6. Be polite and stand if there are not enough chairs. Remember, the visit will only last a short time.

7. Never sit on the bed; it cramps the patient. If there is a second bed in the room, do not sit on it, even if it is not being used. The staff may have it ready for a new patient and may not have time to freshen it up before a new patient needs it.

8. Talk audibly, not too softly or too loudly. Increase volume if the patient does not seem to be able to hear while remaining mindful of other patients in the room. Sometimes, when people are sick, their minds are a bit fuzzy from pills and pain, so their hearing may be less sharp than normal.

9. Only stay a few minutes. The point of the visit is to wish the patient well, not to spend a long period of time with him or her. Extended visits often tire a patient more than he or she realizes.

10. If a gift is taken, make sure the gift is appropriate for the situation. For example, if the patient has just had eye surgery, then he or she will not be able to read a book.

11. Only talk about happy situations, not about bad news. Never talk about one’s own past illnesses or operations.

12. If there are relatives present, say a quick hello, leave your gift, wish the patient a speedy recovery, and then leave. The relatives will want quality time and privacy with the patient. Sometimes they come from quite a distance and may not be able to come back soon, but a local person from church can always return at a later time.

13. If either the nurse or doctor enters the room to do something for the patient, be polite and leave the room while they are attending the patient. Do this even if the patient says it is okay for you stay.

14. If the patient wants to go for a walk, check with the nurse first. The same would be true if the patient asks for assistance in getting out of bed or in using the bathroom.

15. If the visitor does not know how to respond to something the patient says, sometimes it is better to say nothing at all. Just express concern, offer a prayer, and graciously make a polite departure.

16. Remember that patients are in the hospital because they are sick. Use common sense, smile, and be positive during the visit. If the visitor becomes upset, they should excuse themselves until they can regain control of their own emotions. Be aware that conversations in the hall can be overheard. The whole point of visiting patients in the hospital is to cheer them up. So do not do anything to make the situation tenser than it already is.

17. Every hospital has guidelines they ask visitors to follow. Those guidelines have been put in place for safety reasons. Please be respectful of them.

18. Remember to maintain the confidentiality of those who have been visited. Do not share details of their situation without permission. Do not speculate about their future with others at church.

By following these simply guidelines, lay people can make a positive spiritually based visit to someone in the church. Such a visit can be a great encouragement to a person in the hospital.
____________________________
These ideas have been adapted from a chapter in the book, Developing Leadership Teams in the

Bivocational Church. Though it was written to help bivocational pastors train leaders to work with them, many fully funded pastors and many lay people are finding it equally helpful to their own ministries.

Teaching Lay People How to Make Pastoral Visits

Many pastors who are fully-funded take time each day to make rounds to the hospital or to the homes of church members to provide pastoral care. Pastors who are bivocational, which means they work a job in addition to serving the church, have much less time to devote to pastoral care. This does not mean that bivocational pastors care less than fully-funded pastors, it is simply a reality of the amount of time bivocational pastors have available due to their other jobs. When a church has a bivocational pastor, it is vital that lay people assume some of the responsibilities for pastoral care; otherwise this important ministry may be unintentionally neglected.

Lay people may feel intimidated about providing pastoral care to their fellow church members. But pastoral care is not as complicated as it may seem. Lay people can be trained to offer pastoral care effectively. There is a difference between a friendly visit and real pastoral care. In order to make effective pastoral care visits, lay people should follow these simple tips:

1. Focus on the person being visited, not our own stories or history of similar situations.

2. Keep the visit short. The visit should be a maximum of ten minutes unless it is a life threatening situation or the person clearly does not want you to leave.

3. Read a short scripture that is appropriate to the situation. Consider purchasing a Minister’s Manual or the Bible Promise Book that has appropriate scriptures organized in categories for easy use.

4. Ask if there is anything the person needs done. It is important to follow up on this need. If the person asks for something that is not feasible, it is better to tell them so and ask if there is anything else that can be done instead. Otherwise it might create a false sense of hope, which can cause greater problems later.

5. Close the visit with a short prayer for the person and the situation.

Adapted from the book, Developing Leadership Teams in the Bivocational Church. The book

contains six easy to use lessons to teach lay people to work as a team with their pastor. Though the book is designed specifically for bivocational pastors, many fully-funded pastors are finding it equally helpful for training their lay people.

Steps to Create a Leadership Team in the Local Church

I have written frequently about the need for churches to be led by teams instead of just one person. Though it is easy to say “use a team,” it is much harder to actually use a team. I suggest the following steps as a practical guideline for how a pastor or lay leader might gather a leadership team in his church.

1. Pray and seek the will of God to determine if this is the right style of leadership to pursue for your specific church at this specific time. Though healthy churches should be led by teams, sometimes the timing is not right and pastors have to put off creating a leadership team for a short period while they deal with others issues. Ask the Holy Spirit to show you if this is the right time to move forward with this idea.

2. Spend three to six months teaching the congregation why this leadership style would be right for your church at this particular time. Do not just make an announcement on a Sunday morning and expect people to adopt a new leadership style without time to think it through. Preach from a number of scripture passages that demonstrate team leadership. Do not assume that everyone in the church will get on board after one sermon. Preach about it several times before moving forward with changes to the church leadership structure. In addition to preaching from the scripture, consider teaching chapters 1-3 of the book Developing Leadership Teams in the Bivocational Church to the entire congregation over a period of time. Though that book was written specifically for bivocational churches, the material has been used effectively in churches that are not led by a bivocational pastor.

3. Ask the congregation to test out this leadership style for one year before actually making any changes to the church constitution or bylaws. People tend to resist structural change when asked to do something they have never done before. Therefore, remove that barrier by asking the congregation to simply experiment with the idea for a while. If the concept does not work, the old way will still be there to go back too. The structure may have to be tweaked a few times anyway, so do not set it in stone until it is worked out. Once the new leadership structure is working effectively, then make the structure official in whatever ways are appropriate.

4. Ask the congregation to set aside those individuals who will be a part of the leadership team. Pray over the group and ask God to give them wisdom as they move forward. Ask God to give them flexibility as they try a new way of leading. Ask God to help them be willing to change mid-stream if the system adopted is not working as well as it should. Elect the individuals to this leadership team if that is what your congregational polity calls for.

5. Create a pastoral care schedule that includes each person on the team. The goal is to spread out the visitation and ministry duties so that the pastor is not doing it all. This not only makes the congregation healthier, but it gives the pastor a break in order to avoid burn-out. Any system that meets that goal will be a success but these options might be considered: splitting the entire congregation up into groups with each team member assigned a group, giving each team member one week a month to do whatever visitation needs to be done, having the team members make any visits that arise on the pastor’s day off or when out of town, or having one week a month when the pastor makes no visits and the rest of the team makes all the visits.

6. Create a preaching schedule that includes each person on the team. The schedule can be any system that works for the team, but a suggestion would be that the pastor preaches three Sundays a month and one of the other people from the team preaches one Sunday a month. In a month that has five Sundays, a second person from the team would preach one time. Or, if the congregation prefers that the pastor do most of the preaching on Sunday mornings, then assign mid-week Bible studies and other teaching times to the other members of the team so the pastor can focus on making his Sunday morning sermon the best it can be. This is particularly important if the pastor has to work a second job and has limited time to devote to sermon preparation.

7. The leadership team should meet at least once a month to plan sermon topics and update each other on whom in the congregation received a visit and who still needs one. Spend a day together once a year to plan the major annual focuses of the church.

Adapted from the book, Developing Leadership Teams in the Bivocational Church, published by

CrossBooks, a division of Lifeway. The book contains six easy to use lessons to train lay people to assist their pastor in ministry.

Duane Crossman - SBC Missionary of the Week

This article was originally published in the Winter 2014 issue of Mission Mosaic magazine.

Both Formal and Informal Theological Training Have Value

As a person who holds two advanced degrees from two different seminaries, I place a high value on theological education. But I have learned that while a formal theological education is helpful, it is not necessary for a person to accomplish effective ministry. I have met numerous pastors who were self-taught and were extremely effective in their ministries. I have also met a significant number of lay people who could discuss deep theological issues even though they had no formal theological education.

I have invested quite a bit of effort in training lay people to help their pastors accomplish effective ministry in their churches. Over the course of the last two years I have taught over seventy laypeople from how to preach and make pastoral quality visits. Some church and/or denominational leaders may feel that teaching lay people to preach and giving them significant pastoral duties will weaken the church. My point of view is that if laymen are given adequate training, then there would be no reason to expect inadequate preaching and pastoral care from them.

While there may be some voices of concern regarding the quality of lay preachers, a rising chorus of voices is also calling for increased training for lay ministers so they can be as effective as possible. Steve Nerger writes in his book, Bivocational Church Planters: Uniquely Wired for Kingdom Growth, “God has a unique calling for pastors. We are not trying to diminish that. However, this calling is not just for seminary-trained men. That is a North American mistake created by the arrogance of humankind with the prestige of a human-made education.” Nerger recognizes the role of formal theological education in training ministry leaders; he just believes that people have gotten so focused on formal education that they may have missed the bigger implications of God’s calling on a person’s life to serve in ministry.

Formal education has great value. Men who want to minister should avail themselves of such education when possible. But people should not let their lack of formal theological training keep them from serving the Lord. The bottom line is that when God calls people to serve Him, God will help those people answer that calling regardless of the level of their formal theological education.



Dr. Terry Dorsett is church planter and author in New England. He has a passion for helping small churches be effective in ministry. He is the author of Developing Leadership Teams in the Bivocational Church, which is being used by over 4,000 churches across North America.

Training Lay People for Ministry in the Local Church

In the New Testament, the local church was the primary training experience for ministry. In order to build effective leadership teams, the church must once again become the preeminent place for ministry training. That is not to say that formal theological training has no value and should not be pursued. It simply means that when such training occurs in isolation from the local church, it has significantly less value than church-based training.


2 Timothy 2:1-2 speaks about this issue. In that passage Paul writes, “Timothy, my dear son, be strong through the grace that God gives you in Christ Jesus. You have heard me teach things that have been confirmed by many reliable witnesses. Now teach these truths to other trustworthy people who will be able to pass them on to others (NLT).” This passage specifically instructs Timothy to educate leaders so they can train others. This is not just preaching to the congregation; this is training new leaders who will teach the congregation. This training occurred in the context of the local church.

Current thinking about leadership training in churches often follows this scenario; people express a call to vocational ministry, they are encouraged to go away to various seminaries to learn how to fulfill their calling, they graduate from seminary, then churches hire them to serve as pastoral leaders. Though there is nothing inherently wrong this system, it is very different from how people were trained in the New Testament. Most of the leaders of the New Testament church were trained on the job as they served alongside other leaders. The local church was the primary training experience for ministry.

Churches need to regain their understanding of Titus 1:5-9, “The reason I left you in Crete was to set right what was left undone and, as I directed you, to appoint elders in every town: someone who is blameless, the husband of one wife, having faithful children not accused of wildness or rebellion. For an overseer, as God's manager, must be blameless, not arrogant, not quick tempered, not addicted to wine, not a bully, not greedy for money, but hospitable, loving what is good, sensible, righteous, holy, self-controlled, holding to the faithful message as taught, so that he will be able both to encourage with sound teaching and to refute those who contradict it (HCSB).”

This passage indicates that Paul left Titus on Crete to finish what was left undone, which was the appointment and training of leaders for the churches. Notice that Titus was not instructed to accomplish this by gathering the leaders together and sending them off to some formal seminary in a distant place. The indication is that he was to train them in place.

These leaders were not just secondary helpers charged with menial tasks that Titus did not want to do. They were to be overseers of the church with significant responsibilities. These leaders were given the charge to teach the scriptures to the congregations they led. They were also given the charge to refute those who were teaching false doctrine. It is one thing to be able to give a proper lesson to those who agree with you. It is quite another to rebuke a person who is teaching a false theology. The fact that the overseers were expected to do this speaks to the highly developed level of their training and abilities, all of which was formed in the context of the local church.

Many people who sense God calling them to a deeper level of service will be unable to attend a formal seminary. Though many will be able to take advantage of on-line programs and distance learning, the reality is that the needs of small churches across America are so great that we need people to be training in place and in context so they can help lead while they train. Some schools have figured this out and have started adding this component to their formal education programs. But ultimately, it is not the schools’ jobs to solve this problem. It is the church’s job to train leaders. Though we may use some formal courses or partner with Bible colleges in the process, ultimately each church must accept responsibility for training their own leaders. When that begins to happen on a regular basis, churches will be healthier and more people will come to faith in Christ.

These ideas are adapted from the book, Developing Leadership Teams in the Bivocational Church,

which is being used by over 4,000 pastors to train leaders in their own churches.