Ordinarily, the visit should be short. Circumstances will necessarily to some extent control this, but long visits almost inevitably lead to the introduction of secular topics and weaken or destroy the religious impression. Thoughtless persons will often importune the pastor for a half-day visit, to be followed by a festal dinner or supper. But let him beware of yielding to such importunities; it is fatal to his work in the study, and fatal to the religious force of the visit. No earnest minister will waste his time and powers in the gossip of such a visit. As a rule, a brief visit—genial, but to the point—followed, when practicable, by a brief prayer specifically bearing the individual needs of the household before the Throne, is the most effective, and it leaves time to visit the whole congregation without distracting from thorough pulpit preparation.
A pastoral visit should be confidential. No minister has the right to invite disclosures of the religious state of his people in the privacy of their families, and then go forth to retail these conversations through the community. It is the violation of a sacred trust. Many a pastor has thus destroyed his influence and barred against himself access to the confidence of his people. If he would be trusted as the confidential adviser and friend of his charge, let him be true to the trusts reposed in him in these visits.
Above all, the pastor must remember the injunction, “Instant in season, out of season.” He should make the most of opportunities. In the store, the office, and the shop, on the farm, the roadside, and the car—everywhere—he is to seek to lead men to Christ. Wisely, indeed, he will observe the proprieties of time and place, but he should neglect no real opportunity of conversing on vital personal religion. The care of souls is his life-work, his solemn charge, and concern for their salvation ought continually to reveal itself in his conversation. Especially must he seize on opportunities to speak the earnest, kindly word to the unconverted. Ordinarily, this is better done when alone with them, as they are then more accessible, and the appeal comes with greater power. The lack of this personal dealing with souls is one of the saddest defects than can mar the life of a minister.
III. The Advantages.
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.