Melissa Gepford
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Concise Guide For Congregational Care
$14.99Add to cartAn essential resource for pastors, care ministers, chaplains, and anyone else who provides spiritual care for people in hospital, hospice, or home settings.
A key feature of The Concise Guide for Congregational Care is its rich assortment of prayers, scripture passages, and other brief readings for spiritual caregivers to use on-the-spot. These are arranged topically, so that caregivers can quickly find the right words to share in each situation. The book also includes important procedures and protocols for providing spiritual care, talking points for particularly challenging circumstances, and links to other helpful resources.
The Concise Guide is based on resources developed at Abingdon Press for use in congregations as part of a comprehensive congregational care ministry. Those resources equip pastors and others to develop, launch, and sustain a congregational care ministry, and to train volunteer care ministers. (See The Congregational Care Ministry: Implementation Guide, and The Congregational Care Ministry: Care Minister’s Manual, by Karen Lampe and Melissa Gepford, and www.thecaringcongregation.com.) The Concise Guide is a take-along resource for care ministers of all types to use while they are providing care. It supplies the essential information and words needed for a variety of care situations, in a format that is easy and appropriate to pull from a bag or pocket at the bedside or other intimate setting.
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Caring Congregation Ministry
$19.99Add to cartPastors and congregations everywhere yearn to care for others, especially those who are suffering from loss or pain of any kind. But pastors cannot care for an entire church, and laity typically don’t have the training to do it. The Caring Congregation Ministry is a model for ministry that’s been proven to work in small and large churches across the U.S. It is a laity-centered ministry, where laypersons receive rigorous training and then are commissioned to serve as Congregational Care Ministers, caring for one another, for their own congregation.
This remarkable approach to congregational care was first developed by author Karen Lampe and her team at The United Methodist Church of the Resurrection, in Kansas City. It has been tested, refined, and strengthened, and is now being adapted in all sorts of congregational settings. One early adapter was co-author Melissa Gepford, who launched a Caring Congregation Ministry in her own rural church. Karen and Melissa have partnered to share this immensely practical guide for any pastor or leader seeking to create a version of this ministry in their own church.
This Implementation Guide is the main book for getting started. It introduces the ministry model and explains the Five Essentials which form the ministry’s foundation. It is extremely practical, full of checklists and other tools to help pastors and other leaders understand (and explain) this way of providing congregational care.
The Implementation Guide also includes a section focused on the crucial component of this ministry–the Congregational Care Minister, or CCM. This section fully describes the characteristics of CCM’s, how to recruit people to this ministry, how to discern if candidates are a good fit, and how to conduct the CCM training over a multi-week period. It details the critical information CCM’s must know, and the behaviors and habits they must practice in order to be effective.
Note that the companion book, The Caring Congregation Ministry: Care Minister’s Manual, is required for the CCM training. It serves as a training workbook, which then becomes the CCM’s personal reference manual.
The Implementation Guide closes with thoughtful and immediately helpful chapters full of information on situations involving special care, including personal crisis and trauma, community trauma, mental illness, recovery/addiction, and important considerations for doing this ministry in times of social distancing.
This book provides ev