Challenged

I live in a unique community with LOTS of mentally disabled people. The reasons are many, but the primary one is that my city, for nearly 100 years, was the only city in the state that could house pshychiatric hospitals and prisons. The results was a huge influx of that population to the community. This became way more evident as the state shut down one of the facilities and distributed all of the residents into transitional and care homes throughout the city. The exodus of the institutionalized into residential neighborhoods caused a city to live face to face with those once held behind the fences of a “hospital”.
I don’t have time or desire to discuss whether institutionalizing the mentally i’ll is appropriate compared to placing them in ‘homes’- that’s not where I’m going. It’s simply one of the reasons why Salem Oregon has such an enormous population of the disabled.
All that being said, we- and probably all of the other churches in town- get a large number of the mentally ill attending our services.
As a pastor it is my job to direct the people of the church to serve Christ with everything they’ve got and to share the Gospel with those they come into contact with. I do that through teaching the Word of God, creating service , outreach, and growth opportunities, and one on one counseling/mentoring.
That’s what I have to focus on- the latter being the thing I can spend the lease amount of time on. If I spend the majority of my time meeting with people I would have to meet with a few selective people for long periods of time often or many people for short periods of te intermittently. This is a lose-lose. Because either way I would be neglecting my primary call of teaching and leading and would be very limited to who o could help because of the time requirements it would take to spend all m time with people- confusing I know.
The New Testament had a solution for this- deacons who could donthis kind of work so the pastor could teach and lead. Unfortunately though, many people in our culture rely on and expect the pastor to do all of the work of the church and get in a tiff when he can’t or doesn’t want to. And sadly that expectation has been brought on by prideful pastors who think the only way to get things done is for them to get it done and who think that they have to be super pastors who CAN do it all with no help. And then when someone naturally gets upset- they always do, especially the needy people that you invest all your time into- the pastor feels like they failed. When really the only thing they’ve failed is themselves overworking and becoming ineffective.
I listened to a church planter once say that for the first two years of his church, it never grew and he couldn’t figure out why. Then he realized it was because he had spent all of his time trying to save a broken marriage in he church, and none of his time on teaching and leading so that the church would grow.
So back to the mentally ill. I love them and care for them deeply. Several of them I would consider friends. And I recognize that I could easily have been born in their situation.
But my whole point of this article is that to minister to them takes lots of time. They call constantly with strange requests and to just shoot the breeze. They rely on you to do personal chores for them and help them with shopping, bills, and money management. And they always want to hang around and talk and be counsled while you are doing something else.