Caregiver Care
Bruce Larson
January 1, 1997
Church leaders can be viewed either as workers to fill slots or as fellow ministers who need special care commensurate with their added responsibilities.
—Bruce Larson
My first church out of Princeton Seminary was in Binghamton, New York, where I was associate pastor. My wife, Hazel, and I had been married during my last year of seminary, and ten months later our first baby arrived. Four months after that, a second baby was on the way. All the changes in our lives took a toll. Mad and frantic, and with our marriage in serious trouble, we reached out in desperation to two laycouples in the church who were also new parents. "We're going through a terrible time," we confessed.
They surprised us by saying, "So are we!"
So we decided to meet with them to pray and read the Bible. Those meetings turned us around and saved three marriages. Beyond that, genuine new life broke out in the church, and within a year, a number of groups were meeting. By the next year, there must have been a hundred such groups gathering out of that little church in downtown Binghamton. People were drawn to the kind of intimacy and caring we distressed couples had stumbled upon.
We went from Binghamton to Boston, where I studied psychology at Boston University. After earning a master's degree, I was called to pastor a church in Pana, a small town in the lush corn and soybean fields of central Illinois. I tried to impose on those dear folks what I had learned. Not knowing that the conspiracy against intimacy can be enormous in a small town, I experienced little success, and I began to feel lonely and disheartened.
I'll never forget lying in bed in our tiny, unair-conditioned bedroom late one sweltering summer night. A Rock Island train was crossing the sultry ...
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