Last month, coming up on Christmas, I was carefully planning out 2018 with the intention of making this blog a source of information and a starting point, if needed, for other pastors for discussion and research.
While working on this, I received a call from a friend, which lead to a funeral and has consumed by thoughts. The funeral was for his daughter, who was only a few years older than me. She took her own life.
There are 3 reasons this woman’s suicide has consumed my thoughts.
One, I have never once had a suicidal thought. Some trouble in life, but has driven me to anything like a suicidal thought. Likewise, I do not have any mental health issues and I have never used drugs or anything addictive that would cause suicidal thoughts or actions.
Second, from the military, through life, and in ministry, I have been pulled into, trained, and compelled to help anyone with mental health issues. Specifically, suicide seems to be the center of all this.
Third, as I sat with my friend, grieving over the loss of his daughter, I was struck with the incredible pain that many parents experience when they outlive their own children. When it is death by suicide, the pain and loss is magnified by a factor in which I can not place a number.
So, with my first blog post of 2018, I am reposting from August 2016. In this, I hope it is clear that in our efforts to help people and prevent suicide, we must also remember, love, and take care of the families and friends of suicide victims.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
August 27,2016
This is a blog post I wanted to write more than 7 years ago. Every time I began to pull my thoughts together, I could not. It became too long and was filled with pain, anger, arrogance, and frustration. Whenever the topic of suicide came up, it seemed that any conversation I might have with someone became to unbearable. If the other person stated an opinion based on misconceptions or stereotypes, my emotional response was immediately more than I can bear.
This week, a school principal in my county was found dead of a self-inflicted gun shot wound. When I heard the news, my heart sank. Yesterday, I was a substitute teacher in his school. Throughout the day, it was obvious that his death was a shock to everyone he knew. One mother I spoke with after school told me her son came home crying most of the week. The school, community, and students were amazing in their response as they reached out to and love the family and provide support wherever they could. Today, they will gather for a funeral and memorial service.
As I put my thoughts together about this, I think there are 3 things I think that help whenever anyone is directly impacted by the suicide of a friend of family member. The first is a theological point. The second and third are practical knowledge.
1. Most popular religious thoughts on suicide have no basis in the Bible.
Specifically, the religious thought here is the idea that suicide is somehow a mortal and unforgivable sin. This is an old and pervasive belief that exists in western culture. In some cases, depending on what Christian denomination a suicide victim and family belong to, a religious funeral may be denied for a person who commits suicide.
This has always been a troubling trend in Christian thought to me. In the last 10 years, I have counseled a few families and individual broken by the suicide of loved one. In my opinion, there is nothing more damaging than the idea of suicide being an unforgivable sin. In Christian thought, an unforgivable sin separates a person from God and heaven for all eternity.
The short answer I personally give to families is this. There is no mention at all in any of the 66 books that make up the Bible calling suicide a mortal or unforgivable sin. The nature of salvation is that it is 100% in God’s hands. Of the people I have known that committed suicide, some were confirmed believers in Jesus with an expressed and living faith. Out of all the people I have known, I do not truly know or understand what was going on inside their minds. But, there is nothing at all in the Bible that calls suicide “unforgivable.”
As a pastor, I will never deny a funeral request for any reason.
2. Sometimes, there are suicidal signs and symptoms, but intervention does not always work.
This is a troubling thing in the aftermath of a suicide. I know this from personal experience. It is one of the reasons I lose sleep. In some cases I have learned from families who lost a loved one, the signs and symptoms were obvious. The families I met did everything they could. They sought outside help. They asked the right questions of their loved one. Sometimes progress was made and a life was saved. In other cases, everything was done and that family member or friend still took his or her own life.
When someone is suicidal, sometimes intervention works. In fact, most of what I have been able to learn in training and from the current studies available is intervention has saved thousands of lives. But, when intervention does not work, there is nothing more devastating than this except for point number 3.
3. Sometimes, a person takes his or her own life without warning, without sign or symptom, and there is no explanation, no reason, ever.
I remember the day a friend told me about the pain she and her family endured from her husband’s suicide. There was no warning. There was no sign or symptom. There were no expressions of suicidal thoughts. There was no known depression or any history of mental illness. Unfortunately, most of the literature available says there are usually signs and symptoms without any mention of cases like this.
Since then, I have learned of a few other similar cases and found only one study involving 153 men and women who survived their own impulsive and completely unplanned suicide attempts. There may be more research on this, but I just haven not found much. All I could learn is that impulsive suicides do happen. Hopefully, some sociological with additional psychological research will help us learn more.
I want to be very careful with this subject. I am only a pastor who has had some crisis counseling training. With this, I and others like me have been able to intervene and prevent a suicide attempt and sometimes be there to help someone who failed in an attempt.
I also can not be more thankful for the experts in medicine and psychology who have taken the time to do the research and provide the information and training we needed. From what I observed this week, intervention and dealing with the aftermath of suicide is much better today than it was in 1991 when I started high school.
When considering these things about suicide, I think it is equally important to be a loving support to families and friends dealing with the loss that suicide brings. Suicide is the 8th leading cause of death in the United States. As such, very few people are left who do not know someone who has committed suicide. While there is no formula and each person will grieve in different ways, I think the best way to be a loving person and help during the aftermath is to grieve with them.
Preparing to Preach: My Resources
Being bi-vocational, I have in the last 3 years had a few conversations with friends and mentors alike about sermon prep and how to manage my time. What I found interesting about these conversations is my mentors and I spoke mostly about time management and the importance of making time to prepare to preach a priority. With other people, the question about resources I might use to study and write sermons came up more often.
With that, I think the best way to organize my thoughts and opinions was to present this in a Q and A format.
What do you think is the most important part of sermon preparation?
To me, the most important part of sermon preparation is scheduling time each week for it. With that said, I have to clarify the role of prayer in the life of a preacher. Many religiously minded people will insist that prayer is the most important part of sermon preparation. The truth is that prayer should be an integral part of the daily life of anyone who has a relationship with God. After all, it is how we communicate with Him.
While there is always room for growth and more time that we can and should give to prayer, the biggest stress factor that we pastors state as an obstacle in sermon preparation is lack of time needed to prepare to preach. But, the truth is there is not a lack of time, only a lack of discipline on the part of a pastor to schedule time for study.
For me, the only way to overcome this is to schedule time for study and preparation and stick to it. Being bi-vocational for now means that my sermon prep time might be from 9:00pm to midnight on a few nights during the week, but thankfully, I can catch up on sleep on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon.
What resources do you use?
I preach using the New American Standard Bible (1995 Update) which is what I use as my primary study Bible. I also use several exegetical commentaries to give me a better understanding of the linguistic and cultural context the passage I am preaching from.
The best resource I have is something I had to purchase for seminary. It is a software program called Logos. When I purchased it, I picked up the premium package, which expanded my library to over 1000 books. For sermon preparation, Logos provided several exegetical commentary series to choose from as well as language resources that allow me to look up any passage of scripture in the Hebrew Old Testament or Koine Greek New Testament. This has proven very valuable to me in that my vocabulary in both languages is very small. I know just enough of each language to look up a verse or passage and recognize certain grammar rules, but my vocabulary recall is very limited. With Logos, I can move back and forth from the text and a lexicon pretty quickly to do what I call a “rookie’s translation” to get a better understanding of how a verse or passage was rendered in the original language. Of course, I also check my “rookie’s translation” against how experts have translated a passage.
Also, using logos, I can line up several English translations like my NASB along side of the original language text and other translations like ESV, NIV, and the NET. In this way I can do a “parallel” examination of any passage without exhausting all my study time in any week.
I’ve heard other pastors say any good bible study requires looking at several translations. Why is that?
The reason for this is the Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew and the New Testament was written in Koine Greek. When translators render a word a phrase the way they do in any translation, the translator or team are going with the best choices with their knowledge of both English and the original languages. In some cases, a word has multiple meanings depending on the context in which it is used. Sometimes a phrase is actually an idiom that if translated word for word, would make no sense in any English culture. So, translators for one English translation may choose to render a verse in one way, but another translation renders it a different way because there may be a better English word or phrase to communicate the original meaning of the text.
Why not just stick with the KJV Bible? Isn’t that the most accurate English translation?
The answer to this is simply no. The KJV was never the most accurate English Bible. It is like the NIV, NASB, ESV, HCSB, and NET translations in that it is a reliable translation.
Are there any books or commentaries that you would not use?
I think there are some very important books in certain subjects. My second major in college was History, so my knowledge of other disciplines like psychology and medicine is very limited and generally only historical in nature. For example, I am confident in my knowledge of Louis Pasteur, the history of antibiotics, and the history of vaccines in the United States and Europe. But, any technical information in this as well as in the field of psychology, I have to rely on sound and qualified experts to inform me even if all I do with the information is use it to illustrate a point in a sermon.
With that, I do not trust the Christian publishing industry at all when it comes to my field of study. Anytime I find out that a particular historian is popular among fellow pastors, I wait until the reviews from scholars come out before I read it. Most often, I find that historians who write for the “Christian Market” are not historians at all. On the other hand, there are a few scholars and writers that are popular among pastors like Victor Davis Hansen that have a long and proven track record as historians.
Unfortunately, there is also an anti-psychology and alternative medicine market in Christian publishing. Some are written by pastors and others written by people claiming to be experts. Sadly, I have to admit that some of these were on my bookshelf about 10-15 years ago. I believed them and formed my opinions at the time on some very unscientific and wrong information. I am just thankful I discovered how horribly wrong they were before I ever gave advice or council to someone based on them.
I read an article in Christianity Today about a group called Docent Research group. This group provides research assistance for pastors. Considering everything that a pastor has to do in ministry, would you hire a research assistant or use services like Docent’s?
I will never use the services of Docent or any group like it. When a pastor uses Docent services or a research assistant, they are paying someone else to do what is fundamentally the job of a pastor. 20-30 years ago, if your church found out that you were paying someone else to study and write your sermons for you, you were removed from pastoral ministry.
You really have that low of an opinion of Docent and the pastors that use their services?
Yes, I do. When a friend asked me to check out the Docent site last year, I looked through all the testimonials. Each pastor, especially in the video testimonials, made it clear that Docent does not do their study or “write their sermons for them.” But, when you look at Docent’s website, it says their services include what it calls research briefs, theological insights, and exegetical analysis of the passage. This is doing your study for you.
What is the most difficult thing about sermon prep and preaching?
The most difficult thing that comes up is how to apply some parts of scripture to the modern world. There are some parts of the Bible that are commandments from God that should be taken literally. There are also moral values that the Bible makes very clear. Those commandments and moral values are the easy ones to teach. But there are many things found in both the Old and New Testament that simply outline principles that we are supposed to follow. The difficulty here is when I have had sharp disagreements when church people insist we can only take a literal interpretation of scripture. I actually had a conversation with one guy who held to this literal interpretation point so much that he thought slavery was OK because there is no direct commandment against it in the Bible.
I guess what I am saying is the most difficult thing about studying and preaching from the Bible is many church people listening may already have opinions about the Bible, God, and about people in general that go against where the text actually leads us. If having the right illustration on any given point of doctrine or life application were all that was needed to overcome this, then preaching would be easy.
What is the most rewarding part of sermon preparation and preaching?
The most rewarding part of sermon prep and preaching is the fact that most people in church want to seek the truth, correctly interpret scripture, and learn to apply it to their lives. This, I think is most evident in what happens when anyone approaches me after a church service and says, “Great sermon, but I don’t think I agreed with you on this point.” When this happens, the followup conversations are the most exciting, especially when the person who brought it up makes a good point or shows me where I made a mistake.
I know it sounds strange to say that I like it when someone disagrees with me. Sometimes, it’s an illustration that made sense to me even in the sermon, but turned out to be terrible and inaccurate. Other times, though, the disagreement is over a direct interpretation of a key verse or the whole passage.
When this happens, it becomes an opportunity to sit with a friend over coffee and have an “aha”moment. If I was correct, this “aha” moment is pretty cool as I watch the look of understanding take place in a friend. But, when I am proven to be mistaken, incorrect, or just wrong, the “aha” moment is mine.
It’s not that I do not want to prove my interpretation is correct. I do hope I do not make a mistake, but when a friend corrects something I missed, that “aha” moment is something like when your ears pop after a drive through the mountains. It also leaves me a little dizzy, but thrilled.