Training Guide for Visiting the Sick (PDF)

Understand the basic practical aspects of pastoral care—and 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 Commandment—To 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.