Pastoral Care of Pastors and Their Families > Counseling/Urgent & Crisis Management

There will come a time when a pastor or a member of a pastor's family will need some serious crisis help or intervention. These can range from a personal health crisis to an issue of poor judgment in a pastoral situation, or even a moral or legal issue that must be faced.

Since it's not a question of "if" but "when", it would be wise for you to have some things in place before these unfortunate situations arise. Here are some ideas:

•Know what sorts of professional help is covered under the health care plan. Sometimes pastors don't even know that they have some resources available to them that can be covered by our health insurance plan

•Gather a list of counselors, therapists, physicians, lawyers, etc, that covers all the major areas of your conference so that you can make immediate referrals when appropriate

•Keep a list of retreat-type settings where you can send pastoral couples when there's a crisis in their marriage

•Develop and plan and policy for dealing with crisis situations, including financial resources, and take it to your Executive Committee for approval so that you can handle crisis situations confidentially and quickly

•Become well acquainted with the employment policies in your conference for pastors so that you will know how to help guide a pastor through what may turn out to be some very hard decisions

•Be available to help coach your administrative team to be as compassionate as possible and to do everything possible to salvage a pastor, their family, and their ministry

•Do all you can to really know your pastoral team so that perhaps you can become involved with a developing issue earlier rather than when it blows up into public knowledge, which might well be a significant factor in seeing true resolution come about