By Jeff Brumley
A CBF-supported conference called to help Newtown-area clergy has inspired Fellowship leaders to develop plans for responding to man-made disasters like the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre.
The April 26 workshop in Connecticut has similarly led other participants, including Mercer University and former CBF pastor Greg Hunt, author of Leading Congregations through Crisis, to consider ways to provide spiritual and emotional support to local pastors and first-responders following such horrific events.
“I saw a potential breakthrough as these groups came together,” CBF Responds coordinator Charles Ray said of all those gathered at Wilton Baptist Church, a Fellowship congregation located about 20 miles south of Newtown.
The event was co-sponsored by CBF organizations in Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas. CBF disaster response also provided funds.
“I thought: what if we could put all this together to form a new template – a new way forward?” Ray said.
While Ray and others interviewed said it’s too early to predict what such a template might look like, it would likely build on what was done in Wilton – sessions for ministers in need of counseling themselves.
‘Crushed with good will’
One problem local clergy identified was being immediately overwhelmed by well-meaning supporters from around the nation. Wilton Baptist Pastor Jason Coker described it as being “crushed with good will, but crushed nonetheless.”
That can possibly be avoided if CBF and other faith-based groups think in terms of being second-responders who go in weeks or months later to assess what affected communities need going forward, said Hunt, who was one of the speakers at the Wilton event.
Hunt said the workshop revealed that one need will almost always be providing pastoral and other care to local ministers in such situations.
“If we had come in immediately, it wouldn’t have been welcomed, because those ministers were overwhelmed with the kindness and concern,” Hunt said. Some four months after Sandy Hook, “there is enough time to pause and take measure of what they went through.”
‘Get them talking’
Hunt said a disaster-relief plan for tragedies like Newtown should include chaplains, counselors and workshops capable of addressing the isolation and stress that pastors face in order to prevent burnout.
“We could create a kind of response system like what we did up here,” he said about the Connecticut workshop. “That allows us to go in there and gather pastors together and get them talking to help them heal and strengthen and regain their missional bearing.”
He said a second-responder approach is right in line with the CBF disaster-relief philosophy of going in later and staying longer.
Even so, CBF responders will have to rethink what disaster relief means in man-made tragedies, said Tommy Deal, the Fellowship’s national disaster-response coordinator. “People think of disaster and they think of feeding or mucking out, distributing food and water,” Deal said. But with the shootings in Connecticut, disaster relief may mean swapping out chainsaws for chaplains.
Deal said there are common denominators in man-made and natural calamities. “They are similar in the fact that there are people in crisis and God’s people are carriers of light in dark times,” he said.
The essential questions are the same, too: “Can we bring comfort, can we bring strength, and can we be a listening ear or that soft shoulder?”