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Breakout Session
Preaching Forgiveness – the Vital Variable in Pastoral Care
Ron Nydam
Back to Preaching Forgiveness
Nydam introduced this session by noting the lack of forgiveness in contemporary society and, more importantly, the church. He began by asking the group, “When was the last time you read the Ten Commandments in a church service?” Nydam said the church stopped preaching on forgiveness for fear that it comes across as a “guilt trip.” Today, he said, churches emphasize the “theology of meaning and purpose” instead of the “theology of atonement.”
As a result, he said, “There is something going on about forgiveness that we don’t have a handle on with the kind of clarity that we may have had in the past, and so there is some sense that this is something really important that we have to tackle.”
Nydam described two ways that pastors need to incorporate forgiveness into their ministry.
First, forgiveness is a matter of pastoral care. Pastors must help members of the church see forgiveness as crucial to spiritual health.
During Nydam’s career as a therapist, he said,
90 percent of his patients had someone in their life that they had to forgive. Holding on to bitterness about past hurts can compromise intimacy.
This type of behavior is unhealthy in a secular setting, but even more detrimental to a Christian community. A church full of irritable, anxious, depressed, and bitter people is a broken community. So Nydam challenged pastors to work to address bitter hearts that may dwell within the members of their church.
Once the pastor recognizes a specific need for forgiveness within a church community, Nydam said, the challenge becomes helping the church member to face the pain of the injury they had received.
“Enter into their suffering yourself,” Nydam said. "The goal is to set one’s heart free.” The pastor must provide accountability, resistance to the hurt itself, patience while a person fights the forgiveness process, and empathy for the person him or herself.
When the pastor is able to carry out these four tasks, Nydam said, forgiveness will almost always inevitably follow-although it may take time. “When I listen to people who are forgiving, sometimes I hear of people forgiving because they are simply exhausted," he said. "They finally release it because there is no energy in their grip to hold on to their anger or their hurt anymore.” Other times, “forgiveness happens because the gates of suffering are carefully opened.”
Preaching is the second area in which to incorporate forgiveness. Preaching forgiveness, Nydam said, forms a church community that is continually reminded and guided by the Christian virtue of keeping a forgiving heart. This will generally carry over into personal forgiveness.
Nydam challenged preachers to preach forgiveness as a “spiritual necessity,” to keep forgiveness out of the back of our minds
and stress it as important to our growth as members of the body of Christ.
Second, he called pastors to preach the wisdom of forgiveness, to portray it as the smart way to live. From both a spiritual and therapeutic perspective, forgiveness is important for personal well-being, for salvation, for reconciliation with our brothers and sisters, and for the restoration of fellowship with other believers.
Third, Nydam affirmed the importance of preaching on the power of forgiveness; “This is about telling stories,” he said. Making it clear how God’s Spirit changes lives effectively illustrates how repentance changes the past and how forgiveness has the potential to change the future.
Nydam ended by emphasizing the importance of coming together as a body of Christian believers. “As a church community, we have to confront the culture," he said. "If the culture calls the shots on how we operate, we are in a deep fault position.”
-Cara Daining