Ministering in Grief: Presence, Perspective, and What Not to Do

by Jacki C. King Church Answers Women

Ministry provides us with a front-row seat to the full range of human experience. One week, you are standing in a sanctuary decorated with flowers, watching a young couple promise forever. The next week, you are in a hospital room where machines hum louder than the conversation. On any given day, you can find yourself at the hospital celebrating a young couple’s first baby being born, feeling the fear and excitement of the days ahead. And in the next moment, you’re standing at a graveside, trying to find words that don’t feel as thin as paper as a family questions how they will even make it through their next moments.

If you stay in leadership long enough, you will walk with people through some of their highest moments and memories—engagements, marriages, new babies, graduations, job promotions—and through some of their darkest nightmares: terminal diagnoses, sudden loss, addiction, betrayal, and divorce. Ministry is tilled through different seasons, and grief is one of those seasons we do not talk about enough.

I recently lost a close friend to cancer. She was only 32, and during my own questions and wonderings, it reminded me that we live in a culture that avoids death. We try to run from it with all the modern technologies and efforts at our fingertips. We sanitize it and whisper about it. We treat it as if it is an interruption to “real life,” rather than part of the natural cycle that takes hold of all of us. But Scripture does not avoid it. The apostles wrote about death with startling clarity. They called it an enemy, yes, but a defeated one. They spoke of groaning, longing, waiting, and resurrection hope. A theology of dying is not morbid. It is deeply Christian.

Grief is part of our embodied existence in a broken…