Pastor to Pastor

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Shaunti Feldhahn: Average everyday believers who care for one another can walk alongside someone in need with some real distress by learning how to listen and be there for one another. Then, of course, part of the training is how do you know when to refer? How do you know when to pull in some more specialization?

Dave Stone: We are back. We're back right here at the place where you tune in every Tuesday. It's called Pastor to Pastor with Dave Stone. I am your host. Thank you for being here with us. Thanks for coming back week after week and joining us.

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Well, our guest today is a Harvard graduate, a former Wall Street analyst turned social researcher. Her name is Shaunti Feldhahn, and she is changing the way that the church helps hurting people. She has so much wisdom to share with us. You may know about her from so many of the resources that she has available through her statistics and studies that she's done.

So many different polls that we've probably quoted, I know I've quoted in sermons before. I know that she's going to help you in your walk with Christ and also in your service in the church. So, listen to my conversation with Shaunti Feldhahn. Shaunti, it's great to have you on. Thank you for joining us from Georgia.

Shaunti Feldhahn: I'm delighted to be with you.

Dave Stone: You are special because you are our first, are you ready for this, our first Harvard graduate we have ever had on this show. I promise you, you're the first one. We have had some who claim that they can spell the word Harvard, but you're the first graduate.

Shaunti Feldhahn: Well, hey, I'm delighted to break new ground for you guys. We have to have some Christians from Harvard. It really does happen.

Actually, your audience might be really interested to learn that there is a lot of Christian activity actually going on at Harvard right now. It's really encouraging. I was literally just up there just a few weeks back speaking at a gathering for all the Christian alumni of Harvard to come back to the school. It's called Faith and Veritas, and it's under the auspices of an official program that was started by Harvard Law School called the Program on Biblical Law and Christian Legal Studies.

This is an official Harvard program. There's amazing work going on there for the gospel. It's a battleground, but there's amazing work going on. I know that's not what we're talking about today, but it's kind of interesting.

Dave Stone: That is amazing. Had I heard that years ago, I may have gone there. Well, maybe not because I never would have been accepted.

Shaunti Feldhahn: The only reason I was is that God has amazing ways of getting people where he wants them because, believe me, I should not have been accepted.

Dave Stone: Well, my ACT score was very close to my shoe size, if that tells you anything. So, the odds of me ever being accepted there are slim to none. But thank you, and thank you for speaking at a level that we can understand. Already I'm going to look up the word "auspices," but I'm joking.

You have a lot of different skill sets and you've been on quite a journey because you started out as an analyst, social researcher as well, author, speaker. You wear a lot of different hats, and not to say that you've stopped doing any of those, but talk to us a little bit about how that progression took place. We have a lot of people listening who just want to be used by the Lord. Some of them are bi-vocational pastors, others are core volunteers and leaders within the church. Many of them are pastors that are on staff. Tell us a little bit about your journey and how God's been using you through the years.

Shaunti Feldhahn: My journey is a perfect example of when God wants something to happen and wants someone to be in a particular place for a particular reason, he does it. I started out and got that master's degree from Harvard, went to work on Wall Street as an analyst, had no idea that God was basically building up an analytical and research skill set that was going to be used in a completely different way.

I ended up a number of years later when my husband Jeff and I moved to Atlanta, ended up stumbling over some things I didn't know about men and realizing what a big deal this was for marriage. I did a big research study of men and it became a book that became a bestseller and just launched myself and my husband and our team into social research.

So now what we spend most of our time doing is digging out and investigating and communicating what are the little things that make a big difference in people's lives to help us thrive. Obviously, the topic of the conversation today, one of the biggies right now, is mental health.

Dave Stone: No question. It's not going to go away. It's not like all of a sudden we're going to fix this overnight. The loneliness epidemic has run rampant, especially since COVID. Mental health issues, some of the statistics that I was looking at are downright frightening. 90% of Americans feel like we are in a mental health crisis. I don't know why that's not higher, but still, if you get nine out of ten on anything, that's pretty major.

96% of church leaders agree that a community of believers supporting one another is one of the best ways to foster good mental health inside of the church. You experienced a frightening moment in your own life when you had a diagnosis. I'm certain that played a pivotal role in how it is that we deal with worry, anxiety, and some of the different issues. Take us back to that day and that journey that you were on.

Shaunti Feldhahn: Jeff and I, four days before Christmas in 2020, get a call from one of my doctors saying, "Oh, by the way, your biopsy was abnormal. You have breast cancer." It was so unexpected. No family history for breast cancer whatsoever. It truly just never occurred to me that it might actually be breast cancer.

This was at the height of COVID, so there was so much anxiety and it was so lonely. We were all in quarantine and kind of locked down. Jeff was completely supportive, but he was just as worried as I was. The thing that made so much difference in that time was we have a friend who is a wonderful couple who are believers who live across the street from us.

The wife, Sarah, said, "You know what? We have a fire pit in our backyard. We can't be in each other's house right now, but how about you just ask some friends every Tuesday night, say, to come over and sit around the fire pit and share life and talk and let you process this?"

That one thing was truly a lifeline of just having people who could walk alongside me through this intense fear and anxiety and pain and all the treatments and all the things that came along with that. It was amazing. It wasn't a group of people going, "Okay, here's the five steps that you need to take to combat anxiety." They just listened.

Dave Stone: The New Testament is filled with all these "one anothers." I think there's a dozen of them, might be 13. But bear one another's burdens, love one another, accept one another, honor one another, confess your sins to one another. But that one talking about bearing each other's burdens and giving that opportunity.

We had John Townsend on recently and John talked about how important it is and Christian leaders struggle in this area. We feel like it's our job to bear each other's burdens within the church, but Christian leaders say, "Well, I can't pull the veil back and let people realize that I'm struggling." Was that difficult for you to invite those ladies over to the fire pit the first time and close friends just to come over and be there for you?

Shaunti Feldhahn: It was, in the sense that I think probably a lot of church leaders feel like I don't want to inconvenience someone. I'm supposed to be the one that has it all together. Here I am, this researcher and author.

But thankfully God had disabused me of that notion years before. So even though it took a bit of doing to say, "Hey, I need someone to walk alongside me," and of course then there's all the anticipation of, "Is anybody going to take me up on it?" they did. It was truly a perfect example of something super simple that makes an enormous difference in the lives of someone who's hurting.

Dave Stone: I promise you this, and you might validate this, it was healthy for all of those others as well, especially at that time, for them to get together and to feel like they were helping and they were serving. It probably helped them with some of their anxiety and issues.

Shaunti Feldhahn: One of the things that we did for this project that we're going to be talking about is we, mostly me, but myself and my co-author Jim Sells, interviewed and surveyed more than 2,000 pastors and church leaders.

I can still remember one of those conversations where a pastor unpacked as I was speaking with him about how there was this pivotal change in his life when he reached out to a local counselor who was just a friend. I think the counselor had gone to his church for a while and was at another church now.

He said, "Bob, I just need someone to walk with. Can we get together for coffee every couple of weeks?" The counselor said, "Absolutely," just as a friend, not as a client. After they'd met for coffee a couple of times, Bob comes in and he goes, "You know, I was telling another pastor friend about our little coffee meetings and he asked if he could join us."

The pastor I was talking to was like, "Absolutely." So now there's three people, and then pretty soon another pastor heard and another pastor heard and this one little group of pastors would get together every couple of weeks on a Tuesday night at a coffee shop or at somebody's home. It all started because the pastor said, "I need a friend."

Dave Stone: That's a beautiful picture. I love that phrase that you said, "someone to walk with." We all need somebody to walk beside us. God created us with a need for community. I think that's part of why the Trinity exists is to show that there is this dependence that we need one another.

It's strange to think about God needing God the Father, needing God the Spirit, and God the Son, but you see the three of them working in concert together. I love that passage in Ecclesiastes. We hear it a lot at weddings, but it goes so much deeper than that. Two are better than one, and then it finishes with a cord of three strands is not easily broken.

We're going to talk about some churches that do well at some of the initiatives, the church cares initiatives that you have launched in recent months. But before we talk about some of the positives and the good things that have happened, you probably have heard some war stories as well. I have seen at times where churches have done a poor job of really handling crisis moments or anxious moments for church members. What are some of the things that you've observed? Let's talk about some of the negative examples and then we'll flip the script and go to the positive.

Shaunti Feldhahn: Even the negative examples, because we've all seen them, we've all seen people who get offended and they're hurt and the church wasn't there for me, and we've all seen those examples. But what we've seen in this, and I can say this because of the research with more than 2,000 pastors, I can say this with confidence, which is all of these pastors, all of these churches deeply care for their people. There is a desire to help.

It's not from a lack of care, even though somebody who's hurting might experience it that way. But it's actually a problem that has grown up because of our care for people that we've gotten too tense about how we care for people and it leads to some of this unintentional hurt. Let me just explain that briefly because I know everybody's like, what?

Here's basically the pattern that we see. You mentioned and what we found in the study was that 96% of the pastors say one of the best ways to build mental health in the church, to help hurting people, is to have folks walking alongside one another in Christian community. I'm convinced that it was actually 100% and that some pastors just accidentally checked the wrong box on the survey because I don't know a single pastor that would disagree with that.

But there's this tension today because of the last 30-40 years of professionalizing care for mental and emotional health issues. Pastors have come to believe, 88% of those same pastors said, "But my job, my main job if it's a psychological issue, is to refer them out to a clinician."

Hey, I am a fan of bringing in specialized care when that is needed. My co-author on the book, Jim Sells, he's a clinical psychologist who's a leader at Regent University. He's trained Christian clinical psychologists for 30 years. So we are a fan of bringing in extra help when help is needed.

However, one of the problems with that is that we've become so nervous about, "Oh my gosh, I'm not a specialist. I don't know what to say. So I'll meet with somebody for a couple of times and then refer them out," instead of going, "Okay, maybe that referral is needed, perhaps."

But can we also say I'm going to refer them in, too? I'm going to find somebody to walk alongside them. I'm going to find if somebody has a really significant marriage issue and I'm not a specialist in this, I'm not sure what to do, I'll refer them to a professional.

One of the things that we all know today is that unfortunately there just aren't enough clinicians out there. There just aren't enough people to handle the demand. You see these incredible waitlists, these long waitlists, and you often see people not be able to afford it anyway if they're referred out.

We saw in the study, and this is where the hurt comes from, we found that 50% of the pastors that we surveyed, when we asked them how long is the average wait time when you refer somebody out, 50% said, "To be honest, I don't know."

Which means they're being referred out and then nothing. No ongoing conversation, no ability to find out if they are getting the help they need. So that's where the hurt comes from, because people are like, "I don't feel cared for." Instead of seeking all the answers and all the specialized care, which is needed in some cases, what we think will absolutely help people feel cared for and for us to be the body of Christ is to enlist laypeople who can walk alongside the basic needs. That then frees up the pastor and the professional for the more specialized ones.

Dave Stone: Part of that pain comes from living in limbo. They've asked for help, they are waiting and waiting for that appointment to finally come or for the person who is inundated that they have been sent to or referred out to, to be able to handle them. You made a great point financially as well.

There's a lot of people that say, "I guess the church doesn't have anything for me because I can't afford that." But more importantly, more times than not, is they can't wait. They can't wait three months to see that person because they're not sure they're going to make it because this problem is overwhelming.

I love that concept of when you say referring them in. I want to talk a little bit about the Church Cares initiative. Give us a quick explanation of that but talk about the Church Care strategy because I love that acrostic of Coordinated Attention, Restoration, and Encouragement. That's what CARE stands for in this.

Give us an overview of the Church Cares initiative because I promise you, if you're listening to this, this can be so helpful for you in your church. Every church needs to have something that they can pass along, that they have volunteers who have a gift of mercy and have the gift of grace and that can just come alongside of people to walk with them.

Shaunti Feldhahn: You did a great job of setting that up because that's exactly it. What we believe, and when I say we, I'm talking about the Church Cares initiative and the leadership team, which is co-directed by Jim, who is the clinical psychologist I mentioned.

It actually came from a major donor who wants to remain anonymous but that anyone would know if I mentioned them. They basically had seen in their own life and in their own family that these issues around emotional and mental health, that the churches felt uncomfortable. Like, "I'm not a specialist in trauma. I'm not a specialist in somebody who was sexually abused as a child. I'm not a specialist in addiction. So let me refer you out," and then being in that limbo and thinking there's so much that the church can do even if yes, we still have that referral pathway.

The way that the Church Cares works is essentially, okay, a church wants to be able to be a church where people are cared for well. Every pastor wants that. We have to confront a couple of things. One, we have to recognize what I was talking about earlier, that all the needs in the church, whether they're big ones, little ones, basic things, really complicated things, all of the needs get referred to the pastor, which is one reason why every pastor I know is pretty overwhelmed. We found that in the survey too.

Then the pastor will often meet with somebody once or twice, refer out to a counselor, and that is the pathway that has grown up. What we're saying is, okay, think of the church as sort of a triangle with three levels. You've got the most authority and specialization at the top, that's the pastor.

Underneath that, the second level, you could call that trained helpers. These are not people who are clinicians, they're not licensed, but you know what? There is a specialization amongst, for example, if you have a Celebrate Recovery group in your church. They have a specialization in addiction and recovery and they may not know how to help somebody in their marriage, but they're pretty good at actually helping around this area of addiction.

By contrast, there's marriage ministries that somebody may not know how to help with addiction but know how to walk alongside someone who needs marriage help. So think of that middle level as we call those trained helpers. Then the bottom level of the triangle, which is the majority of people in the church, are just people who care.

We believe that there are some percentage of these who have the gift of mercy and we can with just a basic just a few hours of additional training in listening, listening well like I was talking about when I found out about the breast cancer, I just needed someone to listen and walk alongside. With a little bit of extra training, that group can be trained to be a little more officially available so that, for example, when that person who is down front crying and asking for prayer because they found out they have breast cancer, the person can pray for them.

Then instead of saying, "Hey, let me refer you to the pastor," which the pastor might love to talk to somebody but that's one of 30 people that have reached out to them that way, instead, the person who's down front is trained to say, "You know what? We have a team of people who walk alongside one another and I happen to know that there was one of these women went through breast cancer herself ten years ago. I know she'd love to talk to you."

To have that kind of structure available, which is very simple, that's what the Church Cares exists to do, to help create this kind of community in a really simple, doable way.

Dave Stone: That's something that every church can do. What you just explained with that triangle or that pyramid of at the top of that triangle is those who have been the most trained, those who have the most knowledge or experience, and then that middle group, just trained helpers who might have an expertise in some different area but there's a carryover to it. Then that bottom, that wide swath there, is the people who just have a heart for others and who care.

That's a perfect picture that is replicable. Is that a Harvard word, "replicable"? Did you like that? Any time I use multisyllable words, I impress myself and my wife listens occasionally and it's like, there you go, baby, that one's for you. But you think about that and all of a sudden now we're all getting to use our gifts, we're all getting to make a difference.

Let me give you an example. A few years ago our church was growing by leaps and bounds and we were struggling on keeping up with hospital visitation of our members because we had so many members that were in the hospital. We had divided it up with ministerial staff, pastoral staff, and we'd done all sorts of different things.

Finally we had a, similar to this, a care ministry where people really enjoyed doing this. So we kind of made it to where if it was somebody within your ministry or someone that you had a close relationship with, then we expected you to go and visit that person in the hospital. But if it was a person that was not as involved and maybe it was just a general phone call that came in and the person wasn't involved in serving or anything within the church, we wanted someone to come.

So we would have one of these care lay leaders that would go and visit them. Shaunti, here's what the observation was when we made that change. The people in the hospital said the visits were longer and they listened so much better.

It was because of what you just said. It was people who cared and it wasn't these pastoral ministers that are thinking, "Oh, I've got this lesson to write, I've got this sermon to preach this weekend, I've got these meetings that are getting ready to happen this afternoon." So we were trying to rush through and just check those names off. But when it was somebody that we knew well, we spent more time with them. What would happen is we didn't know the majority of the people we were going to visit, but these people who had this heart for others and this gift of mercy, they weren't in a rush.

Shaunti Feldhahn: It is so interesting. When we were doing this multi-year research project and looking for and talking to especially the pastors of churches that were already doing this well in some way, one of the things we're very aware of that the whole Church Cares structure is built to help churches regardless of how they want to do this because every church has their own DNA, every church has their own culture.

But we did see some commonalities. One of the things that was very common from a real practical standpoint and we put this in all our materials, is that most of the time the pastor wasn't the one to organize this. Every pastor I know is the busiest person I know and so they had reached out to somebody who was a trusted volunteer or maybe even a staff member or someone to say, "Can we think about putting this together?"

Then the next thing that they did was, maybe give some thought the coordinator whoever that person was gave some thought to how to do this, but then they stood up on stage at the worship services during the announcement time and said, "Hey, we're thinking of starting an initiative around this, around mental and emotional health, walking alongside one another, caring for people. If you are interested, we're going to have this meeting, an interest meeting on Thursday night," or whatever to advertise it.

The pastors were like, "And there were so many people that came out of the woodwork that had never even been volunteers before, but this kind of thing just really hits their heart because there are people in the body who have been given, as you put it, the gift of mercy and who have been given that passion or at least that interest, that willingness to kind of check it out." That pattern we heard replicated over and over and over of if you're not sure, just try that and see what God brings you.

Dave Stone: That is such a great suggestion. Every single one of us, everyone who's listening right now, that is something that's low hanging fruit that you can do and I pray that you will be just as surprised as most of these pastors are when they just say, "I can't believe it."

But think about it. There are people who like to work with the youth program, there's those who like to work with the sports, there's those that like to take care of the grounds. This scratches an itch for a person that says, "I just care about people." Maybe it's a person who's gone to a lot of counseling themselves and so it's like, "I've learned a whole lot from the fact that I went through some difficult seasons, now maybe I can help somebody else." It doesn't have to be the same problem or the same issue.

Shaunti Feldhahn: Giving people that pathway, that's the thing. That's what we're often missing because with all good intentions we have created this professionalized expectation that, "Oh my gosh, I'm not allowed or a layperson isn't allowed to help someone who has sexual trauma. I'll do damage. I need to refer that to a specialist."

Well again, yeah, maybe. One of the things that we suggest is do a little triage like when people are in need, maybe they need this specialist. But again, they are also going to need someone to walk alongside. There just needs to be a mechanism for all of that heart that so many people in the church already have to actually be used in that way. So that basically is the point, that is the goal of the book and the Church Cares initiative is to actually help pastors do that.

Dave Stone: When did you come out with the book *When Hurting People Come to Church*?

Shaunti Feldhahn: September 2025. Still very new.

Dave Stone: It's less than nine months old. It's fresh material. It's right where people are. Boy, I hear these stories that you're sharing, and this is a formalized program that we actually need some formality at times. When I say formal, I'm not meaning in the sense of, "Oh, this is formal, this is very rigid." I'm just saying this is a simple process that is clearly laid out.

If I can understand it, non-Harvard graduate, if I can understand it as I look at this triangle and I see that and I can say that's exactly how the church is. You have your people who have been exceptionally trained in some area, you have those who have been trained through experience, and then you have those that just care about people. It's so easily laid out that people can embrace this. It's an easy one for people, it's an incredible model.

I'm certain that as you have put this together that you and Jim have seen a variety of different things that have happened in a positive way within the life of the church. Share a story or two of how you've seen this work and play out in incredible ways within the body of Christ.

Shaunti Feldhahn: I'm so glad you asked that because there were so many just awesome, encouraging examples. Actually, one of the things we did in the book itself is actually there's a chapter right near the beginning that is five kind of case studies.

Again, every church is different. Some are big, some are small, some are urban, some are rural, different ethnicities, multicultural. What does it look like in different environments? One of the stories, I think it's probably the first story of the first of those case studies because I just love this example so much, was this church in a relatively remote, rural area. It was about an hour away from the nearest city.

Out in an area, not like necessarily farming country, but just not a big urban area. It was in one of the areas that, as we all know, the opioid crisis has become very difficult in certain places, and this was one of them. The church and the pastors, there were a couple of pastors most of whom were bi-vocational, few hundred people, and the pastors were like, "We have to figure out what to do because all these people were coming to the church for help and there's very few counselors in this area. What do we do?"

So they took the money that they had been saving to try to renovate the sanctuary, and I'm changing a few of the identifying details to keep the privacy. We do this throughout the book. But they took this pot of money that they had had and said, "Instead of doing the renovations, here's what we're going to do. We're going to hire part-time a pastor to be in charge of a recovery program of some kind. We don't know what it's going to look like, but let's hire somebody part-time."

So they hired this gentleman who had started a recovery program at a different church and he came in and he said, "You know what we really need? We really need people walking alongside one another at the beginning of this. We don't have enough time and money and specialization to be able to create a rehab or a whatever."

So here's what we're going to do. Every Friday night we are going to have the Friday night meeting and it's going to be dinner. We're going to just order pizza. If you could contribute five bucks, great, if not, that's fine. So we're going to give everybody a chance to have dinner together so they can just fellowship. Then we'll have a bit of worship and teaching and discussion groups.

That was Friday nights. It was a very simple model. The first night, and I know I'm not going to get the numbers exactly right, but it was something like this. So the first Friday night, 50 people show up, which is huge! He was expecting five. 50 people showed up and it's like, "Wow, okay, we're off to a really good start. There's a lot of need here."

These were a lot of people who had been on waiting lists to see professionals in the city or whatever. Then within a few weeks it was like, "Okay, now we're at 70, and now we're at 100, and now we're at 200." When I talked to this guy it was like three years, maybe four years later, they now had 500 people every Friday night from all over the area.

He said, "The thing that is amazing is not only is there now fellowship and people walking alongside and supporting one another in this arena," he said, "what happens so often is that because of that idea that not everything requires a professional, not everything requires the specialization, some percentage of those people would come to him and go, 'You know what? I'm going to take myself off the waiting list. I think I'm good for now. I'm working the program, I've got accountability, I've got support. There's people around me to help if I'm struggling. I think I'm okay to take myself off the waiting list to see that professional in the city.'"

As he put it, this wasn't like a giant in-person rehab. This was just people caring for one another. That's an example of what we heard over and over and over of regardless of what it ends up looking like in your church, God blesses the effort to bring that care and that culture of care back into the church rather than feeling like we have to refer everything out of it.

Dave Stone: I love that. That was such a good synopsis and it also shows the ingenuity and creativity of just saying, "Hey, we don't need to throw more money at this, instead, we just need to bank upon the fact that the body of Christ will be there for one another." I'm not surprised at all that they got healthier even without the counseling just through the fellowship. As you were speaking, Shaunti, I wrote down the word "fellowship" and about one second later you said fellowship and I'm like, that's how you cure a loneliness epidemic, is you give opportunities for people to come together. If you have people who have this heart for others and who are good listeners, incredible things can happen.

Shaunti Feldhahn: Can I give you the silliest example? I love this. This was another conversation with another pastor that I was talking to and they also had seen a real culture shift in their church. When I was asking how, he goes, "I think it's related to our date nights."

I said, "What do you mean by your date nights?" Because Jeff and I, my husband and I, we do a lot of marriage conferences and we speak at a lot of date nights at churches where it's the traditional thing of, "Hey, let's bring all our couples together and hear great content, at least I hope it's great content." So that's what I was thinking.

Instead, when he unpacked it, it was like, "No, we actually take the money that we would have used to do an event and instead we spread it out over, I think it's once a month that he said every Friday night we offer free childcare at the church and tell everybody to go with their spouse or go get another couple and go out and go on a date, go have dinner, go to a movie, go have fun, get some fellowship, and we'll watch the kids."

He said, "Honestly, supporting the marriages in the church in that really simple way, like free childcare once a month so you can go take some friends and go get together with them," he said, "it started to change the marriages and started to change the fellowship culture of the church." He was like, "That was their big turning point." So again, silly example, but there's so many different ways that we can get that walking alongside one another going.

Dave Stone: It's a practical example. Yes, it might be silly in the simplicity of it, and yet at the heart of everything that you've been sharing, at the heart of the Church Cares initiative, is the fact that this is simple, it's practical, it's replicable, it's usable, and it doesn't matter the size of the church.

That could work, just having free babysitting. I've heard of churches that do that. I think that's so cool. You talk about therapy and how we want to refer out, but what if our first thought was to refer in and to come up with some of these solutions? You've just given us great solutions. Where can people find out more about the Church Cares initiative beyond just the book, but talk to us a little bit about where we can find resources?

Shaunti Feldhahn: Yes, so we're actually partnering with Focus on the Family and so we have a special page just for pastors who are listening to this because of this podcast and wanting to help one another. It's thechurchcares.com, which is the main website, /focus.

Right there we're curating some resources that are specific to help the focus-minded pastor to be able to step into this space. Probably one of the most important things that we would encourage everybody to look at is we pulled together all the best practices of the churches that were already kind of doing this well in some ways because we found commonalities.

For example, one of the things that everybody found worked was to say, "Hey," from the stage, "Hey, we're thinking of doing a working group, come on Thursday night for an interest meeting." But there were a lot of other things that were very practical needs like, "Okay, if I'm a listener, I need to be trained. I need some basic what do I say, what do I do, what's the process?"

So we created what we call the Church Cares Kit. It's taking all of those best practices, everything from, "Hey, what are some of the legalities? What do you need to make sure that you know you put in your bylaws? For example, 'Hey, what we're doing here is discipleship and care, it's not therapy.'"

That way you're protected because that's a religious environment that if somebody tries to bring a lawsuit against you, you're protected because you've said officially this is religious discipleship. We're not trying to do some sort of modified therapy here. That is so wise.

So the Church Cares Kit includes all of that kind of stuff and the listening training that we put together and we're just about to release a new version of it, a more upgraded version of it. It's just a few hours of what anybody can learn to listen. Train all of your small group leaders in this as a start, for example.

Dave Stone: I love the fact that you've got one-stop shopping, one place where you can find all these best practices. Let me make certain I've got it: the Church Cares Kit. That will give the best information and it will also help to train people just in a matter of a few hours.

A new thing for a lot of people that we're trying to get to be part of the assumption within the church is that average everyday believers who care for one another can walk alongside someone in need with some real distress by learning how to listen and be there for one another. Then, of course, part of the training is how do you know when to refer? How do you know when to pull in some more specialization?

But it might get them over that hump rather than being caught in limbo and living out there to where each and every day that they don't talk to someone, the quality of their life goes down and they're saying, "Nobody cares, no one's there for me."

Shaunti, you have given us so many practical things that we can do, and I hope churches will take this to heart because it can make a huge difference. You gave us great examples of this working in churches. Thank you for your research. Thank you, we've quoted you many times with different statistics. It's eye-opening. Thank you for taking the time and may God continue to bless you.

Shaunti Feldhahn: Thank you. Really, really appreciate you and to all the people who are listening. I and the Church Cares people deeply, deeply appreciate the work that the pastor of the local church is doing.

Dave Stone: Everything you've talked about is the very reason why we have this podcast because it's to let people know that they're not alone. That's what they desperately need. That's what I desperately need is just to know that there are other people who understand the pressures of being in Christian leadership. You've done so much today. Thank you for taking time for us.

Shaunti Feldhahn: Absolutely.

Dave Stone: Shaunti shared her heart with us and I do want to make you aware that she's been five years on that journey and she's nearly through her breast cancer treatment and is doing extremely well. I'd be remiss if I didn't pass that along to you.

She is a person that has this heartbeat, and that's why at the heart of it is that Church Cares Kit is because she wants people to be equipped with all the different resources that can be out there to help us all out. What a beautiful picture just to think about how it is the body of Christ coming together through fellowship, through encouragement. It's all those "one anothers" that we talked about a little bit earlier. Never underestimate the power of a listening ear.

That leads us to our story that I want to share with you today because it's a story that actually comes from a woman who was a comedian, she was a humorous writer, and her name was Erma Bombeck. Strangely, the story that I'm going to share with you is one of the most serious ones that I ever read in one of her books.

She writes and says, "It was one of those days. There were three phone calls—strike that, three monologues—and I had to resist the urge to say at the end of the conversations, 'Well, it's been nice listening to you.' But later in the cab from my home to the airport, I got another assault on my ear, this time by a cab driver rambling on and on about his son in college.

Finally I made it to the gate area at the airport. 30 whole minutes before my plane took off. Time for me to be alone with my thoughts, to open up a book and to let my mind wander until a voice next to me belonging to an elderly woman said, 'I'll bet it's cold in Chicago.'

Stone-faced I replied, 'It's likely.' 'I haven't been to Chicago in nearly three years,' she persisted. 'My son lives there.' I kept my eyes focused on my book and I said, 'That's nice.'

Then she said, 'My husband's body is on this plane. We've been married for 53 years. I don't drive, you know, and when he died a nun drove me to the hospital, back to my home. We aren't even Catholic. The funeral director let me come to the airport with him.'"

Erma Bombeck writes, "I don't think I have ever detested myself more so than I did at that moment. Here was another human being screaming to be heard and in desperation had turned to a cold stranger who was more interested in her fictional novel than the real-life drama that was unfolding at her elbow.

The woman needed no advice, no money, no expertise, not even compassion. She just needed someone to listen. She talked numbly and steadily until we boarded the plane and then she found her seat in another section. As I put away my coat, I heard her voice say to her seat companion, 'I'll bet it's cold in Chicago.' And I prayed, 'Please God, let her listen. Let her listen.'"

I wonder how many times God brings someone into our paths, but we've got our mind on so many other things that we just miss it. We've got our own agenda and we're doing that. The God of the universe wants to scream from heaven, "But you're right there! You are the person! You are my representation, you are my ambassador, you are here for this purpose to give them hope, to provide a listening ear, a comforting shoulder, and a word of encouragement and reassurance."

Let's make certain that we take advantage of the opportunities where God places us and where God intersects our paths with someone in need. We can do that individually, but also as Shaunti has reminded us, we can do that collectively as the body of Christ and as Christians.

I love getting to hear from Shaunti today. You can grab a copy of the book that she co-authored with clinical psychologist Dr. Jim Sells. It's entitled *When Hurting People Come to Church*. You can get your Church Cares Kit at thechurchcares.com/focus.

As she said, this is a website just for you and when you sign up for free, you can see the links in our show notes. You can check those things out and I promise you the Church Cares is going to be a kit that you want to have for your church. Well, as always, thank you for listening to Pastor to Pastor.

Shaunti unknowingly described what Pastor to Pastor is all about when she used that phrase "someone to walk with." That's what we want to be for you in your ministry is we want to be someone to walk with you in the tough times of ministry and the great times of ministry. You know we drop a brand new episode every Tuesday. It's designed to encourage, to inspire, and to challenge you because we realize that leadership can be lonely and that's why we call this Pastor to Pastor. It's for a reason. It's to remind you you're not alone. Until next time, I'm Dave Stone, saying God bless.

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