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Why Should Open-Air Preachers Consider Speaking at Nursing Homes? | Brandon Rhea

Why Should Open-Air Preachers Consider Speaking at Nursing Homes? | Brandon Rhea

by | Jul 12, 2024 | Apologetics, Evangelism, Practical Theology

For most people nursing homes are places to be avoided. The worst facilities come across as cold, damp, stale, and dreary. The building is not a home but an institution. Germs are pervasive, and the smell of cleaning chemicals ubiquitous. The hallways are filled with people in wheelchairs who may be sleeping, yelling—because they have dementia—or scooting around to find a person with whom to visit. Yes, nursing homes can be unpleasant.

Yet, they are filled with gospel opportunities. According to the Centers for Disease Control, there were 15,600 licensed homes in America in 2014 with 1.4 million residents. With the aging of the baby boomer population the need will increase. For the next eleven years, 10,000 people daily will turn 65. The need for long-term care is going to exponentially grow in the next 30 years.

Who is going to bring these people the gospel? As the title suggests, if you are an open-air preacher, consider ministering at your local nursing home. The fields are rich for the harvest. Here are seven reasons why you should take your gospel “combines” into a nursing home.

 

1. Most nursing homes have weekly worship services.

Generally, these facilities offer a Sunday service and possibly a mid-week. In my community, the churches take turns in leading the services on Sundays while the mid-week is dedicated to a few pastors. The opportunity exists and usually the nursing home staff is looking for people who can fill these slots. Just as open-air preachers go to bus stops, outdoor festivals, and sporting events to find a crowd, nursing homes provide a consistent audience to hear God’s Word.

 

2. It is an opportunity to preach the gospel to the lost.

No one from the nursing home staff will censure your message. Therefore, you can preach the gospel of Jesus Christ boldly. Pretend that you are on the street. Unfortunately, many of the residents are lost. They have heard a gospel of works from the Catholic church. Or they think that they are a good person. Maybe, they have not attended church for years. Due to health issues, many are on the cliff’s edge of eternity. They are one disease, one infection, one breath from standing before God. Someone must go and tell them about their need for a Savior.

Will it work? Is it too late? Are they too hardened? Absolutely not! If God gave us a spiritual resurrection while we “were dead in our trespasses and sins,” then He can save those who are almost physically dead. Preaching in this setting shows a person’s trust in God’s power to save and not man’s.

 

3. It keeps heresy out.

Since nursing home directors are trying to find people to fill the slots, they may without discernment allow false gospel preachers to come. Between the Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roman Catholics, and mainline liberal denominations, there are many false gospels which could be preached. If you fill the slot, then you protect the hearers from listening to Satan’s lies.

 

4. It is an opportunity to encourage Christians.

Imagine, as a lover of God’s Word and Sunday worship, you become ill and are admitted to a nursing home. Consequently, you are not able to commune with the saints. Think of the discouragement that it would cause. The best of days—the Lord’s Day—has now been taken from you. Therefore, you become depressed and feel isolated from the body of Christ. Now apply the Golden Rule. Show the type of love to others that you would want shown to you.

Friends, by preaching at nursing homes, you can edify your brothers and sisters in Christ. You can bring the worship of God to them. They will be reminded of God’s promises. He has not abandoned them and has a plan even in this trial. They will hear the sweet gospel which has saved their soul and will rejoice.

 

5. It allows you to minister to the staff.

Besides the residents, nursing staff is usually present in the services or outside of the room. By using your outdoor preaching voice, you can evangelize the nurses and aides too. The Lord may use it to bring a younger generation to Christ.

 

6. There is a need for the younger generation to replace the older ministers.

From my observations, the average age of the preachers at the nursing homes is not much younger than retirement age. Those who are faithfully preaching the Word will suddenly become the residents. Who will replace them?

With the resurgence of the doctrines of grace and reformed methodology, there has not been a desire for younger pastors to go to the nursing homes. Why? They may not have seen it modeled. Or they are too busy. Or they know that it is not glamorous and will not increase attendance or giving to their churches. Or they have never considered doing it. With the increasingly aging population combined with disinterested younger pastors, there will be a shortfall of gospel ambassadors to nursing home residents.

 

7. It will produce the fruit of humility.

For a preacher who has spent time in his study to craft a message, it is humbling to see half of his hearers slouched over in their wheelchairs and only a few making eye contact. Nursing home ministry is not about boasting in yourself or promoting your ministry. It is hidden from the Facebook live feed or Instagram pictures. It will not make other Christians perceive you as a zealous, courageous, maverick follower of Jesus. All of these thoughts are temptations when an open-air preacher exhorts publicly on a street corner.

Instead, the nursing home will help you die to yourself. Mark 10:45 says, “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, and give his life as a ransom for many.” You will not receive fame or street credit from other preachers. On the contrary, your actions will probably be forgotten by everyone but Jesus.

 

Conclusion

If God has stirred in you a desire to minister at nursing homes, please talk to your pastor first. Ask your pastor for advice, including if you have the maturity to do this ministry. Do not be an autonomous renegade Christian. As believers we need the accountability of elders and the local church for our soul’s well-being (Hebrews 13:17). Once you have your church’s support, then call around to the nursing homes. Remember you will be more credible to the nursing home director if you are representing an established church body and not just yourself.

May the Lord bless your efforts to sow the seed of the gospel to the young or old, healthy or sick, poor or rich.

God is Great; God is Good | Tom J. Nettles

God is Great; God is Good | Tom J. Nettles

by | Jul 6, 2024 | Old Testament, Systematic Theology

 

Elihu has challenged Job to listen to him in light of the failure of Zophar, Eliphaz, and Bildad. He invited Job to answer him as he had answered the other three interlocutors. Having rebuked Job for apparent self-righteousness (32:2; 33:9), and introduced the possibility that divine revelation is needed for certainty in these matters (33:13-16), Elihu has given a compelling notice of the advantage of a mediator who can ransom a man from the pit of righteous punishment. At that point he renewed his call to Job to answer his words if he found flaws in the reasoning. He gave a vivid image about the importance of the words we choose to communicate truth: “For the ear tests words as the palate tastes food” (33:32; 34:3). Then, with a note of striking confidence, he tells Job to hold his peace and give attention to Elihu’s wisdom (33:33). Moreover, he calls on knowledgeable and wise people to listen to his presentation for in the process of reasoning from revelation, we find truth and righteousness (34:4).

Elihu summarizes Job’s argument as being in line with the scoffing of unbelievers—“the company of the workers of iniquity, and walks with wicked men … his answers are like those of wicked men!” (34:8, 36). As we have seen, Job roils in deep perplexity concerning his suffering. He has tended to view his woes as a conflict of omnipotence against finiteness (19:6-10). He has resisted the false accusations that his suffering arises from God’s punishment for his harboring dark recesses of purposeful perversity, greed, and cruelty. Job has resisted the theology of his friend-accusers as inadequate—rightly so—but seems stuck in that worldview, unable to probe the reclusive sources of human iniquity and consequent divine chastening. Job cannot sense the edges or the deeply resident fount of his own conduct and thought-life as worthy of judgment or painful correction. Unable unreservedly to justify God in His complicity in Job’s pain and loss, he thus, in principle, aligns himself with the evil in their conclusions about God (5 -9; 34-37). Elihu proposes to disambiguate Job’s thought patterns.

Elihu begins his attempt to correct and teach Job with a basic theodicy. He defends God’s justice and absolute impartiality as an unshakeable foundation upon which all of life should be built. None should ever seek wisdom on the questions of life by inserting any question about God’s perfect righteousness, holiness, justice, goodness, and his perfectly impeccable operations of judgment, sanctifying influence, and absolute prerogative. God is righteous as well as sovereign.  If God chastened without moral cause, God would be unjust; but it is impossible for God to be unjust or wicked (34:10-12).

When God acts in an apparent arbitrary and peremptory manner, when absolute sovereignty seems to swallow up compassion, we should recall his utter holiness. He is never without moral cause in what he does. None has given him absolute right over his creation (12, 13), and he thus retains by natural right and exerts the prerogatives of purpose in the created order (14, 15). In observing his exercise of absolute prerogative, bear in mind that he also knows the universal moral failure of humanity and its susceptibility to immediate judgment. When Elihu asked rhetorically, “Will you condemn him who is most just?” he expected a resolute and unhesitating, “No!” (17). Even over those to whom we always should speak respectfully, God has the right of disposal and condemnation. “He is not partial to princes,” nor the rich but they die “in the middle of the night” without infliction of human hand (20). His vision of the true character is unblurred by earthly status and assumption of power and authority (18-20), so he overthrows, crushes, strikes them as wicked men in the sight of others, though they had appeared as righteous in their public ministrations (24-27). Their flawed sense of justice and inescapable partiality had appeared before the Lord, from whom nothing can be hidden, so that the powerless felt the sting of oppression and the absence of attentive justice (28-30). Individuals and nations alike have no compass of justice or of iniquity in the absence of divine disclosure (29). We sense, therefore, that God has given this revelation so that all kinds of injustice and iniquity—whether in public matters or in strictly personal matters—are rightly judged by God: “knowing the righteous judgment of God … we know the judgment of God is according to truth” (Romans 1:32; 2:2). We should know, therefore, that sovereign disposal always coincides with perfect moral judgment. We do not marvel at chastisement but that we are preserved from immediate judgment.

Under what circumstances has anyone ever given the fitting response to God’s chastening hand? Elihu, taught by God in this matter, prods Job to consent that his chastisement comes from the hands of a just God. He should on that account humbly learn how to implore God according to his terms and his righteousness. “I have borne chastisement; I will offend no more,” should come from the heart and lips of a rightly disposed spirit. Has anyone said such to God (31)? “Teach me what I do not see,” since my moral perceptions are blurred; when you so teach, “since I have done iniquity, I will not do it again” (32). These responses recognize the deceitful power of the hidden recesses of corruption and perceive “another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin and death which is in my members. O wretched man that I am!” (Romans 7:23, 24). Elihu asked poignantly, “Shall he recompense you on your terms, because you have rejected it?” (33). Since you do not seem to be satisfied that God acts with absolute justice and orders our lives to show us our sin to drive us to mercy rather than any form of self-righteousness, should God consent to your standard instead of His? Elihu pressed Job to acknowledge the truth of what he said and act accordingly, or to respond with a defense based on more profound insight.

Elihu, however, is convinced that those who have godly discernment (34) will recognize that Job’s perplexity thus far arises from a view of God, sin, and retribution that he holds in common with wicked men. For this stronghold of erroneous thought to be broken and corrected, Job needs even greater and more productive chastening. Should he continue to deeper entrenchment in self-defense at the price of consent to godly wisdom, righteousness, and mercy, he runs the risk of rebellion and charging God with cruelty (37).

Peter gives a clear word of revelation concerning the point that Elihu is probing. May the Lord in grace grant to each of us this apprehension of trial-approved faith. “In this you greatly rejoice, even though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been distressed by various trials, so that the proof of your faith, being more precious than gold which is perishable, even though tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honour at the revelation of Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 1:6, 7).

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