Hello, David, this is Paul." The voice belonged to a local funeral director.
"Paul, how are you doing?"
"Just fine. Listen, I just had a call come in about a Mary Smith. She passed away early this morning at the Winchester Hospital. Because she had no church affiliation, the family asked if I could find a cleric to do a brief funeral service on Thursday morning. Are you available?" "What time?"
"10:00 a.m."
"I can do that. Tell me what you know about Mary. Also, I'd like the name and phone number of the person making the arrangements."
How common this situation is. A man or woman dies without church affiliation, and the family calls the undertaker and asks if he can suggest a cleric. Generic funerals I call them, burials for men and women who die without a church home and for whom any clergy will do. Religion may not have been important in life, but it becomes so in death.
What's the best way to handle these services? Having performed several hundred in my two and a half decades of ministry (they seem to be more frequent now than years ago), I think my successes and failures have taught me some valuable lessons worth sharing.
Get information
First, the pastor should ask the funeral director upfront for as much information as he can provide about the deceased and his or her family. How old? Cause of death? Length of illness? Next of kin? Family dynamics? Was the deceased a dear old mother who lived a long and loving life? Was he an alcoholic who left behind a trail of bitterness? Was it a sudden death? A tragic death? Did it involve a protracted sickness? What was the reason for no church affiliation?
The answers to these questions and others will help surface the salient spiritual and emotional issues confronting the bereaved family. And knowing these issues, goes a long way toward helping the pastor "hit the nail on the head" when it comes to caring for the family before, during, and after the funeral itself.
Next, as soon as possible, the pastor ought to call the family of the deceased and arrange for a home visit. This may threaten a generic family if they're carrying some unresolved baggage about clergy, religion, or church. Even so, the pastor should try to make his way into the home, for two reasons. One, a home visit says, "God loves you enough to enter into your personal hurting space," an important message for the generic family to hear. And two, it may open the door to a deeper long-term pastoral relationship.
Feel their pain
While visiting with a grieving family, the pastor needs to go out of his way to empathize with their pain. More often than not, generic funeral families are cautious, even suspicious, about clergy. Who knows what led to their disassociation from church in the first place? Maybe they were hurt, offended, or "turned off" by some pastor or church member. If so, a pastoral visit that comes across as pro forma could prove disastrous to effective ministry.
Soon after seminary, while working as a state hospital chaplain, I presided over the funerals of many welfare patients. Most were generic, in the sense that I had no previous pastoral connection with the deceased or their families. It was a welcome learning experience but one that often left me muttering, "Boy, I blew that one."
Sensing my frustration, my supervisor called me into his office and said, "David, when you do a funeral, even if it's with people you don't know, for goodness sake, feel. The family may not remember what you say, but they'll always remember whether or not you felt."
His comment was an immense help. These days people often say to me, "Dr. Reid, thank you so much. You have no idea how much comfort you gave us during our time of grief." Outwardly I respond with a smile, but inside I'm offering a few words of thanks to my former supervisor whose put me on the right track many years earlier.
Getting acquainted
It's important, too, when meeting with the family, that the pastor "get acquainted" with the deceased. Before meeting with a grieving family I prepare a mental list of questions. For example, if the deceased was an older woman, I may ask questions like: Was she a woman of faith? Where was she born? One of how many children? Are any of her siblings still living? Where was she raised? From what schools did she graduate? When did she get married? Did she work? How many children did she have? Grandchildren? Great grandchildren? What special interests did she enjoy? Any hobbies? What was her personality like? If there's one word that really captures her best, what would it be? What kind of funeral do you think she would have wanted?
Such questions, or their facsimiles, serve two purposes: (1) they facilitate the grieving process by encouraging verbal catharsis; and (2) they build a knowledge base from which the pastor can construct a funeral that is warm and personal.
Another important lesson: The pastor should always walk the generic funeral family through the funeral service beforehand. Anxiety runs high in most funerals, but in generic funeral situations, it can be inordinately so. Why? Because in addition to the anxiety engendered by the grief experience itself, generic funeral families often feel uncomfortable in the context of rituals that resemble church worship. The solution? Take the grieving family on a tour of the funeral service ahead of time. Spell out how long the service will last, what Bible passages will be read, the number of prayers that will be offered, the theme of the meditation, etc. This kind of preview reassures the family that the pastor's "real" agenda in taking on the funeral is not to force religion down their throat (a behind-the-scenes apprehension that many generic families harbor but rarely verbalize) but to bring all the resources of Christian faith to bear on their pain, with the expectation that in the end it will help to heal their hurt.
The pastor should always make a brief appearance at the funeral home during prefuneral visiting hours. My experience indicated that this often takes the family by surprise, but it goes a long way toward convincing them that the caring being offered is genuine. Such a favorable impression greatly increases the likelihood that the family will perceive the pastor, and his message, as credible.
"He didn't have to come to the funeral home, but he did. That really impressed me."
The measure of a good funeral
The pastor must maintain the integrity of the generic funeral as a service of worship. Generic funeral families often live with a secular perspective on life, which influences what they expect from a funeral often just a good word spoken about their departed loved one, properly seasoned with a pinch of genuine Christian faith. In recent years I've noticed that this thinking has led to an increased number of occasions when family members and friends want to participate in the funeral service—a bit of saccharin poetry here, a bit of romanticized prose there—whatever, as long as it affords the chance to say something nice about the deceased. At face value, there is no problem with this. But it is a problem if the motivation springs from a secular belief that a good eulogy alone is the measure of a good funeral.
It isn't. And it's the pastor's duty to help the family understand that it isn't. A good funeral isn't just a good word about the deceased, but first and foremost, the good news about faith. That is to say, the funeral is a service of worship. Above all else, the pastor is a good news messenger of God's unmitigated love, Christ's atoning death, the healing power of the Holy Spirit, the importance of eternal accountability, the hope of heaven, the assurance of divine mercy, and the blessing of a supportive community of faith. The pastor is the doctor of the soul, and the spiritual truths that he prescribes in the context of funeral worship are a significant part of what the generic family needs for their healing, even if they don't know it. The real challenge comes in finding a way to present these truths with clarity and conviction so that a secular-minded man or woman may find them healing.
To help this process, the pastor should develop a reservoir of funeral meditations to fit any funeral occasion and become so familiar with them that he or she can deliver them from memory.
Often generic funeral congregations look bored and disinterested during the funeral because they don't resonate with the message on a soul level. Their eyes flit, their feet shuffle, and they twist in their seats. Part of my solution to the problem is to know my funeral meditation "cold," so I can present it without the use of notes or manuscript. This greatly enhances eye contact, which in turn elicits a higher level of attentiveness. What also helps is that, as soon as the funeral service begins, you visually scout out those men or women in the generic congregation who seem most willing to make eye contact and to zero in on them. Hundreds of generic funeral situations have taught me that there are always "seekers" present.
One final lesson
A post-funeral contact with the family is always in order. I like to telephone the generic family once or twice within a week after the funeral to ask how they're faring and to extend an open-ended invitation for my services at any time. Most often I never hear from the family again, but it's helpful to know that I've done everything I can to love and serve them in the name of Jesus. Once that's been done, I continue to serve them through prayer, trusting that in the end their well-being rests in the hands of a merciful and beneficent God, whose inti mate involvement with even the least on this earth is beyond question.
More than anything else, I believe it's the pastor's privilege and duty in working with grieving generic families to have his personal investment in their lives serve as a signpost, pointing to a God whose character is unquestioned, whose love is unbounded, and whose lordship over life is not limited to this earthly time and space. In the end, if the seeds of these truths are sown in the heart of a hurting soul, even one who has never known Him, then the day may come when they blossom into an eternally rich and rewarding relationship with the Divine. Clearly, that would make any pastor feel that the time he or she in vested in the generic family during their season of grief was well-spent.
