Admonish the Idle

Admonish the Idle.  True emergencies always run the real risk of casualties. Triage during an emergency certainly saves lives, but at a cost. To say Yes to one emergency requires the difficult decision of saying No or Wait to another. Grim, but technically accurate, not every patient survives. Physical life is an unavoidably fatal condition. Applying a cool-headed, emotionally detached, and predetermined method for making important decisions about life-threatening situations is a skill that few have but all need at least a few times in their lives. The combat medic on the battlefield, the triage nurse or attending physician in the emergency department, the EMT at the fire or police department make crucial decisions daily; decisions which do not correspond to the strict code of first-come-first-served.

Some patients are genuine emergencies, who “skip in line” past those who are acutely though marginally less ill or injured. Other patients in the ER may have serious pain, but whose pain is more chronic. They must wait behind the full-blown emergencies and quickly escalating crises that rush past them in the waiting room. Understandably every patient internally feels like the priority, however, external factors ultimately determine the kind of patient care given and its timing in extreme conditions. Sorting which one is which is very delicate, often thankless, highly criticized, and heavily scrutinized work. Triage (from French, trier, meaning “to sort”) requires specialized training and a certain untaught ability to handle and even harness stress into heightened effectiveness. The bleeding-heart type of person, who is overly empathetic to every sad case, simply won’t last long in triage.

Paul hints at a kind of applicational triage in the church. Everyone needs care at some point, but spiritual care is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Sorting must happen. “And we urge you, brothers, admonish the idle, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with them all” (1 Thess. 5:14). Paul specifically addresses the church collectively (“brothers”), which does not single out the elders or pastors. Of course, the elders and pastors are also church folks, so they are included, but spiritual care is not reserved for only the church’s leadership. All the saints are qualified by God and deputized by Paul to engage as spiritual caregivers.

Triage must accompany spiritual care. We must assess and then adapt to three aspects of scalable degrees in need: the individual, the urgency, and the underlying conditions. (1) Admonish the idle: warn, alert, instruct the undisciplined person in the congregation whose passivity has become a true problem. (2) Encourage the fainthearted: console, alleviate, befriend the despondent person in the congregation whose despair is debilitating. (3) Help the weak: cling to, hold, support the powerless person in your congregation who is ill, injured, or immature. But the constant for spiritual caregiving is always appropriate: (4) Be patient with them all.