Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Congregational Care Ministers serve as lay leaders working alongside pastors to provide quality care for the church family. The Caring Congregation serves as a manual with all the necessary resources to help pastors organize their congregations for care and equip people to listen, visit, comfort, and encourage congregants. The book includes a timeline and organized flow for Congregational Care Ministers focusing on prayer, the theology of care, creating a practical care plan, establishing boundaries, learning to listen, visitation etiquette, and support through the final days of life. Also included are reproducible handouts and ready-to-use worksheets, forms, templates, and customizable information to better serve particular geographical locations and other differences between congregations. Karen Lampe shepherds this ministry and training at The United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas. Older congregational care training programs can be expensive and lengthy. This up-to-date product allows any church seeking effective ways to care for the congregation. For more, readers can visit the Church of the Resurrection website for training videos and additional -how-to- leader information.
Synopsis
Pastors and church leaders genuinely want to care for people in their congregations and communities. But pastors cannot care for an entire church, and most laypersons don't have the training to do it. The Caring Congregation Ministry is a model for person-to-person care that's been proven to work in small and large churches across the U.S. It is a laity-centered ministry, where laypersons receive rigorous training and then are commissioned to serve as Congregational Care Ministers, caring for others in their own congregation and their extended community.
This remarkable approach to congregational care was first developed by author Karen Lampe and her team at The United Methodist Church of the Resurrection, in Kansas City. It has been tested, refined, and strengthened, and is now being adapted in all sorts of congregational settings. One early adapter was co-author Melissa Gepford, who launched a Caring Congregation Ministry in her own rural church. Together, Lampe and Gepford have created an immensely practical set of resources for any pastor or leader seeking to create a congregational care ministry.
This book, The Care Minister's Manual is the personal training workbook and reference guide for Congregational Care Ministers (CCM's), who serve a central role in the Caring Congregation Ministry. CCM's receive in-depth training, where they learn the theological foundations of congregational care, plus the behaviors, habits, and practices they will need to follow in order to serve others well. Each CCM-in-training should have a copy of this Manual. It serves as their training workbook, which then becomes the CCM's personal reference guide.
The main book for starting a Caring Congregation Ministry is The Caring Congregation Ministry: Implementation Guide, available from your favorite bookseller. It introduces the ministry model and explains the Five Essentials which form the ministry's foundation. It is extremely practical, full of checklists and other tools to help pastors and other leaders understand (and explain) this way of providing congregational care.