Weddings, funerals and hospital visits

Lee Stephenson: 00:00:07

Welcome to the Unfiltered podcast. My name is Lee Stevenson.

Danny Parmelee: 00:00:10

I'm Danny Parmelee and I oversee church planting for Converge Mid America.

Lee Stephenson: 00:00:16

And we are here with the Unfiltered podcast. Just real conversation about church planting. Today we're going to talk about on this episode is kind of pastoral care in the church planting world.

I think it's one of those things that I know when I got into church planning, I didn't give much thought to it. And there were things that caught me off guard. There were things both on the positive and negative side of that.

And when we talk about pastoral care, we're talking about counseling, we're talking about weddings, we're talking about funerals. I would even put in there discipline issues. What, what was your, what, what was your game plan going into church plant for pastoral care? Let's start.

Danny Parmelee: 00:01:00

Yeah, my game plan didn't have one. Move on to the next question. I was, you know, same as you. I had a, you know, class on it in seminary and I still remember our pastoral care class.

We had to practice baptism. So that was like a weird thing. Like we literally went to a baptism.

Here's how you dunk somebody, which really was probably the most practical thing because if you've never baptized someone and you have someone who's larger or taller to know how to actually not make a fool of yourself and them. But I think for me, my earliest opportunities in pastoral care were actually in funerals.

Even though I was in my 20s, it was, I was like the available pastor for people who didn't have any connection to the church. And maybe a few launch team members like, hey, my grandma or great aunt, you know, died, could you do this funeral?

And as I've told church planners before, like in the beginning, you say yes to everything. Like, that's, you just say yes to anything you can. So I did say yes to that.

And what I found and, and this is going to maybe sound crazy that we're starting off this way, but I, I tend to like funerals more than weddings.

Lee Stephenson: 00:02:06

No, I'm right there with you. So I don't think it's just an openness.

Danny Parmelee: 00:02:10

There's, there's an, there's an opportunity to truly pastor people because they're open to spiritual things. You get enough and you don't have.

Lee Stephenson: 00:02:19

To deal with the bride's mom.

Danny Parmelee: 00:02:20

Either deal with that or I, I've figured out weddings, they don't care what you say. Everyone just wants to get to open bar, you know what I mean?

And so, so you can give the greatest gospel message and talk how, you know, you know, marriage is a reflection of Jesus love. They, they want open bar. So anyways, but to, to funerals. Yeah, I didn't have a lot of training on that. Was kind of just thrown into that.

There's a lot of resources, of course, that are online, but I do think that they're great opportunities to minister to your people and even to build relationships out. So I remember one of the early funerals that we did.

We ended up getting some of our key launch team members because they came from a non Christian background. And for me to get up and share about the hope of Christ, I honored. You know, I spent time to figure out who this person was.

I had people speak to that. So I not only pastored them during this time, but then was able to preach and communicate the gospels.

Like, wow, so that's what Christianity is about. We, we, you know, we want to be, we want to be part of that.

Lee Stephenson: 00:03:21

So, yeah, and I, I my word of encouragement to a church planner as well. When it comes to the funeral side of things. We didn't do a lot of funerals in the first three, four years of church plants.

And partly because you tend to attract younger families and not a lot of them are dying.

And honestly in the community, it just takes time for your name to get out there that you're a safe place when it comes to these moments in people's lives. And so I just found we just didn't do a lot.

Some of the early funerals we did were hard because they were people maybe that were, yeah, they were tragic and people that may have been really well connected and we really needed in those early years as a church plant. But I didn't see us doing a lot of funerals in those early days. Now weddings were a different story.

I felt like we had a ton of requests early on for weddings. And kind of like you said, I don't like doing weddings. And I just got to the point, I don't know what you did that, Danny.

We offered free funerals to anybody in the community, but weddings, they had to pay for. And like, my going rate was if I was called and asked to do a wedding, it was $300 for the ceremony. It was $150 to do the, the rehearsal.

And then I, I was $100 an hour to do premarital counseling. They, I required them to do at least three sessions with me before the wedding because they are time intensive.

And what I found out, you know, the hard way, was most of the couples came to us, demanded our time to pour into their wedding and into.

Danny Parmelee: 00:05:03

Their marriage, ghosted after that.

Lee Stephenson: 00:05:05

And then they gave you nothing or they gave you 50 bucks or something of that sort.

And they had no understanding of the actual time commitment that it required of you pouring into them or driving to be on location, all the, all those different things.

Danny Parmelee: 00:05:19

And then have you stay for the actual dinner so that you could say the prayer. And then you're just sitting at that table like the whole night by yourself.

Lee Stephenson: 00:05:26

And nobody wants to talk to you because you're the pastor, you know.

Danny Parmelee: 00:05:30

But yeah, so, so I think so. Same same way. And in the beginning I said yes and I think I was like, you know, so, so pro, strong, healthy marriage.

I did like, you know, seven sessions and did a whole workbook type of thing. And then you had three or four of those that can be a full time job doing premium counseling totally type of type of thing.

And, and I didn't mind pouring into people who were a part of the church. But like you, there were those that they came because you were, you were the only person that they knew of that could marry them.

They didn't even care.

Lee Stephenson: 00:06:03

My mom comes to the church and they showed up maybe on Christmas.

Danny Parmelee: 00:06:06

Exactly. And then after the wedding you never saw them ever, ever again.

So I do think that for planters listening to Just think through and it'll probably adjust over time that in the beginning maybe you do take some risk and you do have a little bit of margin so you, it, you are able to pour into others for all those things. But then to know and to know it's okay. So the. I didn't know that I, I could not go to the reception. You know what I mean?

That it would, that I could say, you know what, I'm going to do your, you know, your premarital counseling. Yes. I'm going to do the rehearsal and I'll do the ceremony.

But just so you know, like, I have limited weekends with my family and if I'm doing weddings every weekend, that's time away from them. So I don't, I don't need to be there. And to be honest, I think some of them were totally okay with that. They felt obligated.

Lee Stephenson: 00:06:54

Oh yeah. They, they didn't want to have to pay for you to pay the extra.

Danny Parmelee: 00:06:58

$45 for you to have filet mignon or whatever, you know, so they were, they were totally okay. And I didn't want to go to it either.

And so just coming to that and having this is where having an assistant helps, where you can have them be like, just so you know, yeah, here's, here's how this goes down. Here's your, your sessions that you need to do. And so that he can honor his family, he can't give up his whole Saturday, you know, for that.

And this is what the, this is what the charges are. So we didn't do an exact charge, but we had a recommended so that it was still considered like a gift, so to speak with things.

Lee Stephenson: 00:07:32

When it came to. As the church grew and you got bigger in size, Danny, did you do that many weddings and funerals again?

Danny Parmelee: 00:07:41

I probably did more funerals and then weddings. Now we had a larger pastoral staff. So we literally had this, we had wedding meetings where we would get the wedding request.

They would, they were allowed to say, I want this pastor. But the church then said, this is who you got. And we would basically have to go, okay, who's got this? And we would have three weddings on a weekend.

So I was like, okay, who's got, you know, this person who's going to do this one, who's going to do this one type of thing? And here's where, here's a, here's a great thing.

You may have one of those pastoral type people in your church, they're not even an elder of the church, but you can commission other people to do weddings and they're just great at it. They could literally walk them through. And we, we definitely switched to doing pre marriage counseling.

Not done by the pastor, but done by a team of people who are passionate about healthy marriages and they did a better job.

I'm not a good counselor, so I tell couples, you're getting better stuff and I'll meet with you and we'll just get to talk about what you already learned out in the class for one session, plan your wedding and be done with it. But yeah, I limited weddings to probably four or five a year only then at that point.

Lee Stephenson: 00:08:49

Yeah, the other pieces of pastoral care, hospital visitations. Again, didn't see a lot of those early on in the life of the church occasionally.

And to me, that was a great moment of we need to raise up teams of people that can do this so it doesn't become a cultural thing that the pastor shows up every single time somebody is in, in the hospital. And, and that's, again, that becomes a point of interest where this is what a small group does. This is why you need to be in a small group.

And I, I even got to a point where I talked about hospital visitations you know, kind of tongue in cheek, like, you don't want me coming to the hospital to visit you because if it does, it means it's really, really bad. And, and, and challenge your people to be those type of people that care for people in the midst of, of their hardship.

And you'll find that there are people that just rise up, they really are passionate and desire to be, you know, a place of mercy in the life of somebody that's, that's hurting. And honestly, I'm not merciful, so I'm not probably the best bet as well to be that type of person.

Danny Parmelee: 00:09:56

Yeah, I think here's one other one that for my seminary training that actually was helpful was the pastoral class or the residency or internship or whatever in pastoral care is just understanding that a hospital visit, 15 minutes, that's all you need, 15, 20 minutes that, you know, I had this thought that you had to go in and read this perfect scripture and that be there for two hours and you know what, massage their feet or I don't know, you know, but just to literally show up, hey, how are you doing? And a lot of times shorter is better.

And the other thing is if you can bring someone else with you, you've got three people in the room that are talking. And it also is leadership development during that time.

So whether that's an intern, a friend, someone from their small group to be able to do that, it can go so much easier than this like huge thing.

You are the pastor and you come and you've got to like deliver this message of healing, hope and say all the perfect word, Just be there, listen, hey, how are you doing? You know, what's on tv? How's the food here? You know, get your like six questions and it means the world to those people that you do that.

You are able to do that.

Lee Stephenson: 00:11:03

So Absolutely. And even when you're in time crunch season, a phone call goes a long ways. And so don't be afraid of doing that.

I know even for us in life of the church, there were two moments where we had one girl that was four at the time, she had a heart transplant. We had another girl that was two that got diagnosed with childhood leukemia.

Having as a pastor, stepping into knowing what's going on in their lives, getting a small group to surround them. But even leveraging the church body became a real rally cry in the life of our church around these two families.

And honestly, even in the midst of the hardship of walking with this family through the heart transplant ended up being successful. The two year old that had cancer ended up dying a year later. It was tragedy. Both of those situations God used in the life of our church for good.

And and so don't be afraid of even those hard moments. Let your church know this is going on in our community. This is going on here with a family in our church. We need to pray for them.

We need to rally around them.

Your church will rise to the occasion and so leverage that moment when it comes to the pastoral care to be implemented throughout the life of the Congress.

Danny Parmelee: 00:12:20

That's awesome. Very cool.

Lee Stephenson: 00:12:24

Well, I this has been the unfiltered podcast, y'all, and I hope you enjoyed the conversation as we talked through kind of some of those pastoral care moments in life of a church plant. Until next time, keep it real.