Understand the basic practical aspects of pastoral careand make your visit to the sick meaningful for both of you! Training Guide for Visiting the Sick: More Than a Social Call is a useful handbook from a Christian perspective that provides the common sense and not-so-common answers to your questions on how best to minister to the sick. Drawing on his three decades of experience as a bedside hospital chaplain, the author explains appropriate and inappropriate behaviors and suggests things to say (or not to say) to truly make your next visit fruitful for you and the patient. More than simply an educational tool, this guidebook provides clergy and Christian laypeople with spiritual explanations and straightforward strategies to not only comfort the patient but also foster the sense of joy and accomplishment in oneself. Training Guide for Visiting the Sick: More Than a Social Call teaches you to glean a positive experience from a difficult task, the visit to the sick. The author shares his insights learned in his lengthy and distinguished career in this instructional guidebook. Honest and compassionate in its portrayal of the sick and dying, the book prepares the reader spiritually, emotionally, and even physically for the challenge of the visit while focusing on the distress and the needs of the patient. At times stating practical common sense, other times shining an insightful light on the less physical aspects of the visit, this educational handbook is invaluable for all who minister, or wish to minister, to the sick. Training Guide for Visiting the Sick: More Than a Social Call discusses: Jesus' Eleventh CommandmentTo Love One Another how to prepare yourself spiritually and emotionally for the visit the hospital patient's world explanations of patients' possible emotional, financial, family, and spiritual distress do's and don'ts to note before and during a visit to the patient's room the special needs of shut-ins ministering to the dying ministering to difficult patients ministering to Alzheimer's or comatose patients Training Guide for Visiting the Sick: More Than a Social Call is a practical educational guide for pastors, supervisors in clinical pastoral education programs, CPE students, college and seminary students in courses in ministry to the sick, police and fire department chaplains, and family and friends of hospitalized, nursing home, and assisted living patients/residents.

Understand the basic practical aspects of pastoral careand make your visit to the sick meaningful for both of you! Training Guide for Visiting the Sick: More Than a Social Call is a useful handbook from a Christian perspective that provides the common sense and not-so-common answers to your questions on how best to minister to the sick. Drawing on his three decades of experience as a bedside hospital chaplain, the author explains appropriate and inappropriate behaviors and suggests things to say (or not to say) to truly make your next visit fruitful for you and the patient. More than simply an educational tool, this guidebook provides clergy and Christian laypeople with spiritual explanations and straightforward strategies to not only comfort the patient but also foster the sense of joy and accomplishment in oneself. Training Guide for Visiting the Sick: More Than a Social Call teaches you to glean a positive experience from a difficult task, the visit to the sick. The author shares his insights learned in his lengthy and distinguished career in this instructional guidebook. Honest and compassionate in its portrayal of the sick and dying, the book prepares the reader spiritually, emotionally, and even physically for the challenge of the visit while focusing on the distress and the needs of the patient. At times stating practical common sense, other times shining an insightful light on the less physical aspects of the visit, this educational handbook is invaluable for all who minister, or wish to minister, to the sick. Training Guide for Visiting the Sick: More Than a Social Call discusses: Jesus' Eleventh CommandmentTo Love One Another how to prepare yourself spiritually and emotionally for the visit the hospital patient's world explanations of patients' possible emotional, financial, family, and spiritual distress do's and don'ts to note before and during a visit to the patient's room the special needs of shut-ins ministering to the dying ministering to difficult patients ministering to Alzheimer's or comatose patients Training Guide for Visiting the Sick: More Than a Social Call is a practical educational guide for pastors, supervisors in clinical pastoral education programs, CPE students, college and seminary students in courses in ministry to the sick, police and fire department chaplains, and family and friends of hospitalized, nursing home, and assisted living patients/residents.

A big question of history "What if Jesus remained in the Tomb?" is answered. This book describes more that fifty specific social and political improvements brought about by the influence of Christianity. Through the years, Christianity has not only pointed society to the meaning of Life, it has influenced every aspect of living; from education and democracy to the very themes written into the Constitution of the United States. The followers of Jesus were transformed before the crucifixion, but real change began after He emerged from the tomb.

The church insists that Christians are people who have been "converted," "regenerated," "born anew," and set free from the habitual practice of sin. Whereas the church should be expected to positively influence society, the degenerating North American society is clearly influencing the church. Since Christians have been taught to love one another, we want to believe that we live by a higher moral-ethical code than non-Christians. But something's wrong. Among the pieces of evidence: the divorce rate of 50% among the general population in the U.S. is even higher in the church. Seventy-five percent of all family sexual abuse occurs in "religious" homes. Ninety-seven percent of all persons confined to our prisons claim to be religious on the day they are first confined. Some of the major Christian bodies in the USA are already dying. While the population grows, church attendance declines. The author attempts to reduce the "reasons" that many churches have lost their life-transforming influence on their members to seven deadly sins. The author believes that churches must repent from these sins if it is to do more than merely survive, and if it is to conduct Christ's redemptive ministry to the world.

From both a theological and a psychological perspective, this book examines the destructive, damning nature of sin-whether against God's law or in violation of one's own adopted moral code. It examines three dozen destructive "defense mechanisms" commonly used to avoid feeling guilty. Then it examines common barriers to forgiveness and the healthiest way of coping with guilt feelings. You will come away from this book with better understanding how to help others and/or yourself.

Pain rips your body. Narcotics stupefy, but relieve no pain. Sleep comes only from exhaustion and the most powerful sleeping pills. You pray for relief. But you get no relief. You aren't really living any more. You pray to die. But you can't even die. Or perhaps you watch the suffering of someone you love. Trouble can wear any of a thousand grim faces. The Bible tells you that God cares when we suffer, but does He? After having prayed and concluded that God is not helping, you may become disappointed in Him, lose faith, become angry at Him, or conclude that He does not even exist.

The Scriptures tell us that in ages gone by, God was active in human affairs. But is He now? The author, a retired professional hospital chaplain who has ministered to thousands during times of trouble, reexamines his faith during his wife's eleven years of suffering amid declining health. Often feeling abandoned by God, the author describes his and his wife's slowly emerging conclusions that God is not silent, nor is He as inactive as He sometimes seems to be. Perhaps He has simply changed many of His ways of getting things done.