How can you comfort a grieving person? What should you do? What should you say? A Christian has both immediate and long-term opportunities to show God’s love to a grieving friend.

When you learn of the death?
Call immediately. Pray right on the phone with the grieving person.

Be certain his pastor and Sunday School teacher have been notified.

Stop by to visit as soon as possible. Pray before you knock. Don’t worry about what to say. Your presence, even briefly, conveys your care and God’s love.

Assess immediate needs. Do they need help with a child? If you’re a good friend, can you unobtrusively straighten the living room or kitchen before guests begin to arrive?

Volunteer to help with notification phone calls, incoming calls or answering the door.

Before the funeral?
Consider practical needs, such as airport transportation, housing out-of-town guests, babysitting or pet-sitting. Do they need to borrow an extra car? Does the vegetable garden need water or the lawn need mowing?

Deliver a bouquet of fresh flowers from your garden.

Plan ahead for bereavement ministry by preparing grocery bags of paper products?cups, plates, plastic forks, toilet paper, paper towels, tissues. Deliver a bag to the home as soon as you learn of a death.

Place a journal near the door to record names of guests who visit, bring food or flowers.

Ask if they would like you to stop and notify any neighbors.

Write funeral details?time, place, viewings, special requests?by the phone for quick reference.

Sit with the bereaved and listen.

If children are around, be intentional about showing God’s love to them. Listen. Bring puzzle books or loan toys. Offer to take the kids to a nearby park for an hour.

Friends often bring food to help feed guests who come to the home. If you bring food, only use disposable containers. Prepare a dish that is simple to serve. A veggie tray might be better for grazing guests than a corn casserole.

Attach a note so they’ll know who brought the food. When you deliver it to the door, voice a brief prayer with the person who answers the door.

If there is an overage of perishable food, offer to share your freezer space.

If the funeral is out of town, don’t insist on bringing food they must store. Save that ministry for their return.

If a group from church prepares a meal (Bible class, women on mission, deacon wives, etc.), include a card with signatures, a group photo or a list of names.

At the funeral:
Be there. Your presence at the funeral speaks volumes.

If security is an issue, a trusted church member may volunteer to stay at the bereaved person’s home during the funeral.
Help find childcare during the funeral for out of town family who need it.

Recruit volunteer greeters for the funeral.

Some churches prepare a meal for visiting relatives before or after the funeral. Add a printed note on the table to indicate your prayers for the family. Our church has a regular volunteer team who does kitchen duties, while the appropriate Bible class brings and serves the food.

After the funeral: (Grief ministry continues beyond the funeral service!)

Send a daily (or weekly) encouraging Scripture by e-mail or snail mail.

Put the bereaved person’s name on a card by your dressing mirror as a prayer reminder.

Call a few days after the funeral to compliment the funeral service and check on the griever. Make a date to meet for tea and to listen.

Within the week, deliver an appropriate book with Scriptural encouragements, such as “Grace for the Widow,” by Joyce Rogers.

Within three weeks, invite the griever to dinner.

Offer to assist the bereaved with thank you notes if needed.

Seek out the bereaved person at church, speak to them and sit beside them. Call when they’re absent from church.
Program your number into his or her phone so they can call in an emergency, or if they just need to chat.

On each month of next year’s calendar, mark the date of the death. On those days, send a note, make a call, or meet the griever for coffee.

Memorial gift ideas: Plant a tree in her memory. Write a poem or letter with memories of the deceased. Purchase a park bench for the church lawn, a stained glass window, cement sculpture for the prayer garden, Bibles for church pews, a book for the church library or a scholarship in his memory. Give the grieving friend a garden stone, a beautiful journal, a “pamper basket” or an assortment of restaurant gift cards.

If the funeral service is recorded, a deacon may deliver a few CDs to the bereaved person.

Call occasionally in the evening when the griever is alone.

If you have access to a lake house or vacation site, offer it for a getaway.

If the bereaved person lives alone, freeze individual plates of food to share.

If you know another Christian who’s experienced a similar grief, introduce them.

Laugh together. Cry together. Take him fishing. Take her to the library or shopping. Help with paperwork. Text. Share Christian books and magazines. Talk with joy and remembrance about the deceased person’s life. Laughter is a great medicine!

Include him or her on your guest list when you entertain during upcoming months.

A church might form grief support groups, such as widows and widowers, parents of deceased children, or a general grief support group for fellowship, prayer, Bible study, outings, ministry projects or mission trips.

A deacon and spouse or church member might be assigned to help the bereaved person with physical, spiritual and social needs.

A children’s class can “adopt” a recent widow or widower to send cards, deliver candies and help with small projects.
Acknowledge important dates or holidays, such as birthday, anniversary, Father’s Day. If the bereaved person is alone, invite him or her to join you for the occasion.

God promises his comfort, and He challenges each of us to comfort others.

I love wild places. The relative silence of a remote location restores me as few things do and I try to find such a place a couple of times a year. No apologies for that. God does declare himself in what he has made and humbles me when I consider the subtlety and majesty of his things. In untamed things I also see sin in its rawest state. Parasites and predators, disease and rot are intermingled with the most idyllic scenes. For me, the gospel is there in creation glorious, masked, and frustrated.

God’s glory is also manifest in the places built by men. Tammi and I recently visited two national parks in Utah?a land where towns and asphalt are often within sight of heights and canyons rarely touched by humans. We loved the view and experience of God’s dramatic architecture. But we also visited briefly a man-made wonder that seemed coldly functional by comparison yet magnificent in its own right.

Hoover Dam’s 2,080-megawatt capacity provides power to a huge area of the Southwest. It additionally collects water equivalent to the two-year flow of the Colorado River so that people can live, even prosper, in the arid country without feeling so deeply the effects of drought and flooding. The engineering feat itself is a marvel of creativity and industry. The project required 7,000 workers and about 200 engineers. The dam is 660 feet thick at its base and by the time it had risen to its full height it required 4.5 million cubic yards of concrete. The strength and stresses required to hold back that much water are beyond my imagination. Looking at it from a dizzying height, I could see that the river gorge must have been a real sight before the dam was built. It still is an impressive vista, but now the depth of the canyon and the power of the river are domesticated for the use of millions.

We might thoughtlessly decry the concrete, power lines, asphalt and infrastructure that mar the wild beauty of the Colorado, but we’d be foolish to do so. In fact you could go to the Grand Canyon to see that same river untamed, and you’d be using electricity in the gift shop there that was generated at Hoover Dam. The enormous concrete barrier is also God’s work, done through the earth’s caretaker.

God’s charge to Adam in Genesis 1:28 was to “fill the earth and subdue it.” In doing this, the man and his offspring would continue, participate in the creative work of God. That charge was made more difficult but not revoked after the fall of man. The building of canals and dams and harbors and weatherproof homes seems very much in keeping with the command to subdue the earth, especially an earth twisted by sin and sometimes determined to kill mankind.

I’m deeply grateful for state and national parks that keep more or less wild areas for our recreation. Those who provided and protect these areas have enriched our lives. But I’m grateful for the highway system that gets me where I need to be, for the builders who make places for us to work, live, and do business. Yes, we have abused creation in some ways and yes, God takes that seriously. But I must remind myself often that the subjection of creation is not, by definition, abuse. There can be a different kind of beauty when the wild potential of creation is harnessed for the well-being of Adam’s kin.

Where I live, I usually have to travel a bit to perceive the wonder of wild creation; nice as they are, the green belts of our city rarely capture my imagination. But I am daily, literally as I write this, surrounded by works done by creation’s steward to make North Texas habitable and orderly. Who can deny that we need those things? And if you’ll consider the skill amassed over the course of centuries that allows us to raise buildings visible for 20 miles or climate-controlled sports arenas that can hold 100,000 (mostly seated) fans, it’s clear that even masked by sin, mankind has been given amazing potential by the Master Creator.

For me, this reverie is an attitude adjustment I find necessary after spending time among stunning natural wonders. Rightly, we cannot despise the workaday wonders of our cities and towns. Imperfect as they are, those manmade orderings of creation can also proclaim the glory of God revealed through those who bear his image.

Funeral messages are by nature underprepared. It is rare for a preacher to have more than 72 hours notice before the service?three days filled with regular responsibilities plus extra time spent with the family of the deceased. It is a privilege, though, a chance to minister to people uniquely prepared for a word of comfort and gentle exhortation. The service is also an opportunity to preach the gospel to folks who never attend any other kind of religious service. How could a preacher miss this teachable moment to speak God’s word, however briefly, to those he’s never seen before and will likely never see again in this life?

I think in doing so, a preacher is saying what the dead person would say if he or she could be heard by our ears. It sounds odd to say but if the dead one who entered eternity days ago could rejoin his body for just a moment he would grab his friends or loved ones by the collar and say, “Listen to my example in this life!” That would be true of the godly departed and of those who weren’t.

In our culture, funerals are more likely to be the only truly religious service that lost people attend. It is becoming ever more common for weddings to be nonreligious or vaguely ecumenical (Revelation 3:16 comes to mind), so we often hear a weak homily, hear terrible music, and go to a rowdy party rather than anything consonant with the importance of the commitment being made. Truly nonreligious funerals are more rare?even though the religious aspect can be pretty weak. People are more serious at a funeral, more likely to think about ultimate things. It is a shame that weddings are becoming less serious, but funerals remain an entrée into the lives of the most spiritually poor people we’ll ever meet.

Just recently, I did a funeral for a family that has been dear to me for almost 25 years. The matriarch of this family lived a long and generous life, and she left a godly example to all who knew her. It was easy to preach the gospel in that context because her example preached the gospel. Her favorite verses were those that spoke of the benefits that come from trusting the Lord. As always, some attendees were likely lost or struggling spiritually. It occurred to me as I stood behind the casket that I’d seen a great number of funerals where people were deeply moved during the service but little affected in the days that followed. It seems as though the example of a beloved Christian person is nice and inspiring but also apart from us in some way. Maybe our disregard for the message of a well-lived life is a rationalization in service of neglecting important decisions. I do believe that this lady, three days in God’s presence, would have plainly, passionately called her mourners to follow her Lord. The dead do speak as we consider what we know of their lives, and if we’ll listen.

Of course, I’ve also done the more difficult funeral where the mourners grieve as those who have no hope. There is no godly legacy to cite, and it’s not an appropriate time to say that there is no godly legacy to cite. But such a person’s testimony has a spiritual message nonetheless. He is also three days into eternity, though his experience of it might be that of the rich man in Luke 16. And like that tormented soul, an ungodly dead person would very much wish that those he left behind would consider his example, as a warning. The preacher speaks for the ungodly dead also, though he is not so free to call attention to the example of a person who gave no apparent signs of faith in God.

The message is the same, though. In Christ we can have hope in this life and the next. In Christ we can find comfort even as we grieve the loss of someone dear to us. Since his example did not preach Christ, the opportunity to explain who our Lord is and how he gives life to those who believe seems more natural.

So find a way to gently, briefly, but directly cut loose when you preach a funeral. It’s pretty hard to deny that the person in the casket would say “amen” to your gospel message if he could. The message of redemption from sin and hope for eternity is the most comforting message that any preacher can offer.

The Baptist Missionary Association of Texas (BMAT) has announced it will recommend to its messengers a “working ministry relationship” between BMAT and the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention when the group meets Nov. 10 in Lufkin for its 110th annual session.

The related ministry agreement proposal is patterned after one the SBTC holds with the Korean Baptist Fellowship. Both groups will remain independent bodies but will cooperate on several levels of mission, marking a historic move after Baptist Missionary Association churches formed from among numerous Southern Baptist congregations in the late 19th century.

At last year’s BMAT annual session, a task force was named to continue dialogue with the SBTC on shared ministry.
Two BMAT institutions, the two-year Jacksonville College and the Texas Baptist Home, based in Waxahachie, are ministry affiliates of the SBTC and receive budgeted funding.

Over the summer, the BMAT task force and SBTC representatives developed the proposed agreement, spelling out that it is “one of cooperation with neither party having control over the other’s ministry activities. This does not create a partnership as that term is used in the Texas Business Organizations Code. Nor is either party the legal agent of the other.

“The purpose of this agreement is to establish guidelines and parameters for a working ministry relationship between the BMAT and SBTC.”

In it, both parties would endeavor to:

• “continued affirmation of a high view of Scripture and basic Baptist distinctives”;
• joint ministry opportunities;
• freely share information about each respective group with interested churches;
• cooperation between the two groups’ flagship publications, the Baptist Progress and the Southern Baptist TEXAN;
• Reciprocal linking of the SBTC and BMAT websites;
• Reciprocal exhibits at each group’s annual meetings;

Additionally, BMAT would provide the SBTC Facilitating Ministries Committee an annual report of BMAT ministry activities, and in turn the SBTC would provide the BMAT Administrative Committee with its annual Book of Reports.

The proposed agreement specifies that a “high view of Scripture would include but not be limited to the position that the Bible is factual in character and historicity in such matters as: 1) the supernatural character of the biblical miracles which occurred as factual events in time and space, 2) the historical accuracy of biblical narratives which occurred precisely as the text of Scripture indicates, and 3) the actual authorship of biblical writings as attributed by Scripture itself.”

The agreement would be for the 2011 calendar year.

Jacksonville pastor Vernon Lee, who served as president of the BMA of Texas when the original motion was approved for dialogue with the SBTC, said: “Our friends in the SBTC have been gracious, cooperative and generous during this process. I am very pleased with the progress we have made concerning an official working relationship with the SBTC, which will enable us to expand our efforts to work together here in Texas?. We do not yet know the full impact of the potential benefits of this agreement, but I am excitedly optimistic and confident that the manifold benefits will be eternally beneficial.”

In addition to the Korean Baptist Fellowship, the SBTC has related ministry agreements with Houston Baptist University and Baptist Credit Union.

?Based on reporting by the Baptist Progress