Funeral Service Essentials

Recently I was asked to do a Q & A with the pastoral interns and some of the staff at Clifton Baptist Church in Louisville, KY to discuss the logistics of funerals. As many of you know, there are all kinds of details that we would list as important and essential. Yet, in our conversation, I narrowed those down to four areas that must be proclaimed:

The Unchanging character of God 

You have all kinds of people who come to a funeral who are evaluating this death (and God’s role in it)  in all sorts of ways. We must use the objective truth of God’s Word to cut through all the different subjective conclusions and judgments about God that are being drawn in the minds of people. I accomplish this by allowing the first words out of my mouth to be Psalm 145:17-21.

The hope of the gospel 

This is our hope in life and certainly death. Therefore, the gospel must be clearly preached at every funeral you conduct. However, the setting of a funeral demands it be done clearly, yet sensitively. The best advice I ever received for funerals is this: Don’t preach the deceased into heaven, don’t preach them into hell, just preach the gospel for the people who are there. This is most helpful when conducting a funeral for someone with whom you didn’t know or doubted their eternal state. Regardless, it is a reminder that the gospel is the most important truth we can hold out to those looking for hope in the midst of death.

A call to respond to the gospel

If our focus is to preach the gospel to those who remain, then there must be some call for them to respond to the gospel. I hope we all agree that you cannot accomplish this in the setting of a funeral by some “hand-raising, music-manipulating, pleading to come forward during the 12th stanza of Just As I Am” type of response (my hope is we avoid this all together to some degree, but that is another post for another day). We can, however, plead with these people to respond in repentance and faith once the gospel has been preached in a similar way we should be pleading for sinners to turn to Christ every Sunday we preach. In both contexts, we trust in our sovereign God to awaken sinners to see their need for Christ and turn to Him as the gospel is faithfully proclaimed.

Instruct those present how to grieve 

This is often overlooked as an essential for funerals, but one we must take seriously. Though the gospel being preached is the most important thing we can say, we also have the task to help these people know how to grieve over this loss. We accomplish this by walking them through the importance of talking about the deceased, sharing the things they loved about them, the impact the deceased had on them, and the important things they learned from them. This provides times to laugh and cry, which gives a helpful template in walking through the grieving process. I think you will find the family of the deceased most grateful for your effort to instruct them in this way. As a result, I have found them more receptive to the other “most important and essential” elements that I share.

In a future post, I will explain how I accomplish all four of these essentials through one base text of Scripture.