Leading Them Gently Toward Biblical Truth
A woman sits across from her pastor. She is in her fifties, a longtime member of the church, a Sunday school teacher, a person who has raised her kids in the faith. Her hands are trembling slightly. She has rehearsed this conversation for weeks. Finally she says it: "Pastor, something happened to me during my surgery. I left my body. I saw Jesus. He spoke to me. I have not told anyone except my husband. I was afraid you would think I was crazy."
Her pastor pauses. He has never been taught how to handle this moment. Nothing in seminary prepared him for it. He feels an internal tug-of-war. Part of him wants to say, "That was probably just the anesthesia." Part of him wants to say, "Praise God! Tell me everything!" Neither is quite right. He knows that. But what is right? What does a faithful shepherd do when a member of the flock walks into the office and says, "I think I saw the Lord"?
This chapter is for that pastor. It is also for the elder who gets a phone call from a ministry leader who had a cardiac event last week. It is for the Christian counselor whose new client was a hospice nurse for years and saw her own mother die, and now has questions she has never been able to ask. It is for the small group leader whose quietest member finally told the group, "The year I almost died from the car accident, I was in heaven for a while." It is for anyone in the church who is called to shepherd people through the deepest moments of their lives.
Near-death experiences and deathbed experiences are not rare events happening to strangers far away. They are happening in our pews. They are happening to our families. Surveys suggest that between four and nine percent of the general population report having had a near-death experience, and in some studies the number climbs higher.1 When we scale that to a typical American congregation of five hundred people, we are likely looking at twenty or more NDErs sitting in the pews on any given Sunday — and many of them have never told anyone.2 Deathbed experiences are even more common. Multiple studies suggest that somewhere between half and ninety percent of dying patients report some form of DBE in their final days, depending on how carefully the nursing staff is trained to ask.3 If we have been in ministry for more than a few years, we have already cared for NDErs and DBErs. We just may not have known it.
The thesis of this chapter is simple. Pastors, elders, Christian counselors, and mature believers in pastoral roles will increasingly meet church members who have had NDEs or DBEs. These experiences are often spiritually significant. They can also be spiritually destabilizing. Caring for NDErs well requires specific competencies: listening carefully, discerning the actual features of the experience, helping the experiencer integrate it with biblical faith, and protecting them from unhealthy influences in the broader NDE community. This chapter walks through a framework for that kind of care.
Let me start by naming what is happening. Pastors today will meet NDErs. The phenomenon is too widespread for pastoral ministry to avoid it. The only real question is whether we will meet these moments wisely or badly. J. Steve Miller puts the problem plainly. "Fortunately, forty years later, we have mountains of data on DBEs and NDEs—so much that psychiatrists/counselors and ministers/chaplains have no excuse for dismissing and shutting down such discussions with patients and families."4 And yet dismissal happens all the time. Miller recounts a hospital patient in 1980 who had a powerful NDE and tried to share it with his pastor. The pastor let him get halfway through the story, then said, "That's not in the Bible," walked out of the hospital room, and slammed the door.5 The patient then called a psychiatrist, who hung up on him halfway through.
Both of those responses were pastoral failures, and both could have been avoided by a few hours of preparation. Yet they are the norm in many churches even now. Why? Because most pastors are not taught anything about NDEs in seminary, and most of what they have heard from Christian sources comes from one of two poles — wholesale dismissal or uncritical enthusiasm. Both extremes fail the person in front of us.
Wholesale dismissal says, in essence: "Do not put stock in such things. Your brain was dying. It was probably a trick of the anesthesia, or at worst a demonic deception. Move on." Uncritical enthusiasm says the opposite: "Praise God! You saw heaven! Let us hear your testimony Sunday morning! Write a book! This is a miracle!" Each approach has its own appeal, and each lets the pastor off the hook quickly. Neither actually shepherds the experiencer.
Shepherding requires patience, listening, biblical grounding, discernment, and time. It requires the willingness to sit with not-knowing. It requires the courage to affirm what can be affirmed and to question what needs questioning, without doing either one prematurely. This is the kind of care Paul describes when he says, "We were gentle among you, like a nursing mother taking care of her own children" (1 Thessalonians 2:7). It is not soft work, but it is tender work. Mature pastoral care for NDErs takes the shape of a shepherd, not a prosecutor or a cheerleader.
If four to nine percent of the population reports an NDE, and if over eighty percent of dying patients report some form of deathbed experience when carefully asked, then every pastor in active ministry is already caring for experiencers, whether he knows it or not. The question is not whether we will meet these stories. The question is whether we will meet them wisely.
Before we build a framework, we need to understand the hidden landscape. Many NDErs never tell their pastor about their experience at all. The reason is simple: they are afraid. Research on NDE aftereffects has documented the fear repeatedly. Experiencers worry that their pastor will think they are crazy, that their fellow Christians will doubt their salvation, that someone will accuse them of dabbling in the occult, or that the church will react so strongly the experiencer will have to leave. So they stay silent. Miller describes this with sympathy: "People strongly resist sharing their NDEs and DBEs. They're afraid people won't believe them or will think they're crazy. If someone shares her experience with you, it's a privilege. It shows she trusts you or may be desperate for answers."6
Think about what that means for pastoral ministry. When an NDEr finally sits down and tells you what happened, that person has almost certainly rehearsed the conversation, worked up the courage, weighed whether you can be trusted, and chosen you as a safer person than most. You are probably not the first person they thought about telling — but you may be the first person they actually tell. The way you respond in the first five minutes will shape whether you get the rest of the conversation, and probably whether you get any future conversation at all.
That is a heavy weight, but it is also a high privilege. It means that when we shepherd NDErs well, we are stepping into a sacred trust. We are being handed the most important spiritual experience of someone's life. Handle it tenderly.
The absence of pastoral preparation has, in many cases, produced real collateral damage. Shaun Tabatt and Randy Kay have documented the stories of experiencers who were rejected by their local churches and drifted instead into the broader NDE conference circuit — where the theology is often a mix of Christian-sounding phrases and New Age doctrine.7 Many of those experiencers were evangelical Christians when their NDE happened. They tried to tell their pastors. Their pastors waved them off. Then they found an NDE community that would not wave them off — but that community gradually reshaped their theology away from the faith they started with. The pastoral vacuum did not create nothing. It created space for someone else to do the shaping.
This is why this chapter matters. If the local church will not shepherd NDErs, someone else will. And that someone else may not share our commitments to Scripture, to the unique Lordship of Christ, or to the sufficiency of the gospel. Pastoral care for NDErs is not a fringe concern. It is a quiet frontline in the discipleship of our people.
I write this chapter for pastors primarily, but I widen the tent. Elders, small group leaders, Christian counselors, chaplains, lay ministry leaders, mature believers who are walking closely with an NDEr — all of these are included. Even if you are not an ordained pastor, the principles apply whenever you are functioning as a shepherding presence in someone's life. Chapter 33 addressed the general Christian friend or family member who hears an NDE account.8 This chapter goes deeper. It is for the one who is not just receiving the account but actively walking with the experiencer over months and years.
We will develop a six-phase framework for pastoral care of NDErs, then work through several specific scenarios that pastors actually encounter. After that, we will look at five competencies that pastors should develop for this kind of ministry, and at four honest limits on what pastoral care can accomplish. I will close with an encouragement about why this work matters.
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Let me sketch a framework before we get into the details. Pastoral care for an NDEr generally moves through six phases, though they often overlap and loop back on each other. The phases are not a rigid script. They are signposts that help us know roughly where we are in the journey.
Phase 1 is initial engagement — making space for the person to tell the story. Phase 2 is understanding the experience — asking good questions that help the story become clear. Phase 3 is assessing the experience — discerning, for your own pastoral purposes, what is biblically consistent and what is not. Phase 4 is guiding integration — helping the NDEr anchor the experience in Scripture and the life of the church. Phase 5 is incorporating into church life — weaving the NDEr into the body of Christ rather than letting the experience become an island. Phase 6 is long-term shepherding — walking with the NDEr over years, watching for drift and celebrating growth.
Each phase builds on the previous ones. Skipping Phase 1 for the sake of Phase 3 is a classic pastoral error. So is lingering in Phase 1 so long that we never help the person integrate what they experienced. Walk through all six, in order, at a pace that honors the person.
The first task is to make space. An NDEr has rarely told more than one or two people, and is usually coming to you nervous. Your first job is not to teach, not to correct, not even to discern. It is to make the room safe enough for the story to be told.
Welcome them warmly. Something like, "I am honored that you are sharing this with me. I want to hear what you went through." That opening signal — I want to hear — unlocks doors that otherwise stay shut. Do not rush. Do not check your watch. A fifteen-minute conversation is almost always too short; schedule a longer session if you can. If the person caught you between meetings, make a plan to come back and give the conversation the time it deserves.
Begin with open-ended questions and then get out of the way. "Tell me what happened. Take it at whatever pace you want." Do not interrupt. Let the person tell it in their own order, with their own emphases. If they pause, let the pause sit. Do not rush in to fill silence with explanations or comfort.
Take notes sparingly, and only if you ask first. Most pastors I have talked with say that heavy note-taking during the first conversation makes the experiencer feel clinical, like they are a case study rather than a person. A few scribbles for memory, yes. Writing everything down as if you are taking a deposition, no. If it matters, ask: "Do you mind if I jot a couple of things down so I can remember them later?" Most people will say yes. Then jot sparingly.
Resist the urge to evaluate in real time. This is the hardest rule in the chapter. As you listen, your pastoral mind will want to sort and weigh everything as it comes in. That was biblical. That was odd. That was concerning. That was beautiful. Your mind can do some of that quiet sorting, but do not show it on your face, and do not voice it yet. In Phase 1, your only goal is to understand. Discernment comes in Phase 3.
Many pastors sabotage Phase 1 without even realizing it. A subtle frown at the wrong moment, a shift in posture when the NDEr describes something odd, a tightening of the jaw at the mention of a being of light — all of these communicate I am not safe to share this with. Watch your face. Watch your body. In Phase 1, you are a pastor with a soft face and an open posture, not a theology police officer on alert.
One of the most helpful practical postures I have learned is what pastoral counselors sometimes call the "ministry of presence." Henri Nouwen described pastoral care as "the ability to be present to people in their most vulnerable moments" — not with answers, but with the steady gift of being there.9 In Phase 1, that is exactly what we offer. We are not bringing answers. We are bringing presence.
There is also a practical prayer to breathe while you listen. Something like, Lord, help me hear. Help me love this person. Give me patience. Help me discern. Help me not rush. A settled heart in the pastor settles the room. A nervous pastor makes the NDEr feel they should not have told anyone.
Once the person has told the basic story, the work shifts. Now you ask questions that help both of you understand the experience more clearly. Good questions do three things: they invite depth, they help the experiencer put words on pieces they have not articulated before, and they give you the information you will need for Phase 3.
Start by clarifying the main elements of the experience. "When you say you saw a being of light, can you describe that being more? What did you notice about it?" "When you say you felt loved, what was that like? Did the love have a source that you could identify?" "At the moment you came back — what was it like? What did you feel?" These questions are not leading. They invite the NDEr to go back into the experience and look more carefully.
Ask about the aftermath. "What has it been like since then? Has anything changed in you?" Near-death experience researchers have documented for decades that NDEs produce consistent aftereffects: greatly reduced fear of death, increased sense of the sacred, stronger concern for others, a feeling of being changed at a deep level.10 Michael Sabom's Atlanta Study, for example, documented significant positive shifts on the Life Changes Questionnaire among NDE patients compared to cardiac-surgery patients who had not had an NDE — shifts in concern for spiritual matters, sense of God's presence, love for others, and reduced interest in material success.11 Sabom also found that among his Christian patients, NDEs typically deepened rather than undermined biblical faith.12 Knowing this pattern helps the pastor ask better questions and read the answers in context.
Ask about the person's spiritual history. "Before this happened, how were you walking with the Lord? How did you think about God? What was your prayer life like?" For a non-Christian NDEr, the parallel question is gentler: "Before this happened, how did you think about God and the afterlife, if you thought about those things at all?" The answers give you essential context. An NDE from a lifelong evangelical Christian and an NDE from a lifelong Hindu will produce different interpretive challenges, and the pastor needs to know where the person is starting from.
Ask about current integration. "How are you making sense of this now? What do you think it meant? Have you been reading anything about it? Have you talked to anyone else? Are there questions you cannot stop asking?" The answers here reveal whether the NDEr is already being shaped by outside influences — YouTube channels, NDE conferences, particular authors, online support groups — and what direction that shaping is going.
Also ask specific questions about the content of the experience that touch on discernment, but ask them gently, not as a pop quiz. "Did anyone speak to you while you were there? What did they say?" "Did you meet anyone you recognized?" "Did you come away believing anything new about God, or about Jesus, or about other religions, or about yourself?" These questions open up the theological content of the experience without setting off the defenses of someone who feels they are being tested.
"Take me back into that moment — what did you see?"
"What was that being like? How did you know what to call it?"
"What has changed in you since then?"
"Did you come back with any sense of mission or message?"
"How has this shaped what you believe now?"
"Have you shared it with anyone else? How did that go?"
"What is the hardest part of living with this experience?"
A quiet pastoral note: most NDErs weep at some point during Phase 2. The experience stirs deep things. Do not be startled. Do not rush to comfort. Offer a tissue, wait, keep listening. The tears themselves are often part of what needs to happen in the room.
Most pastors find that Phase 2 cannot be finished in one session. That is fine. Slow is usually better than fast. Tell the person so: "There is no rush. I would like to sit with this for a week and meet again next Tuesday, if that is alright with you." Then keep that appointment.
Now the pastor quietly begins to discern. Notice what I said: quietly. Phase 3 happens mostly in your own heart and study, not in the counseling room. It is the internal work that equips you for the guidance phases later.
Draw on the seven tests developed in Chapter 10. Briefly, those seven tests are:13 (1) the Christological Test — does the experience present a biblical Christ? (2) the Doctrinal Test — does the theology the NDEr is drawing from it align with Scripture? (3) the Moral and Ethical Test — does it push toward holiness or away from it? (4) the Ecclesiastical Test — does it drive the person toward or away from the visible church? (5) the Fruit-Over-Time Test — what is growing in the person's life over months and years? (6) the Pattern-Match Test — does the experience match the recognizable pattern of genuine NDEs documented in the research, or does it tilt toward the known problematic patterns? (7) the Whole-Person Test — is the person being drawn into fuller integration with Christ, Scripture, and community, or into spiritual isolation and self-exaltation?
Most of your pastoral work here is honest listening to what the person has already told you, checking it against those seven tests in the back of your mind. You are not filing a verdict. You are forming a pastoral judgment about where this experiencer stands and what they need from you.
Some of the specific questions to consider quietly:
Does the experience pass the Christological Test? If the experiencer met a being they identify as Jesus, did that being look, act, and speak in ways consistent with the Jesus of the New Testament — the crucified, risen, ascended Lord? Or was the "Jesus" a generic being of light who taught universalism? Chapter 14 developed the criteria for identifying a genuine Christ encounter. Miller's research is striking here: across his studies of uploaded NDE accounts, Jesus appears with surprising frequency in experiences from culturally non-Christian contexts, and the Jesus encountered is almost always the identifiable Jesus of the Gospels.14 That pattern does not guarantee any individual case, but it is part of the context.
Does the theology the NDEr is drawing from the experience line up with Scripture? Remember the experience-interpretation distinction: even a genuine experience can be interpreted wrongly.15 An NDEr may have genuinely met the Lord and yet be concluding, "So all religions must lead to the same place." That conclusion does not follow from the experience — but the NDEr may be drawing it anyway, often because they are reading books or following teachers who are pulling them in that direction.
What fruit is emerging? Is the person being drawn toward repentance, humility, service, love for the church, love for the lost, deeper prayer, more honesty about sin, more desire for Christ? Or toward spiritual pride, special-authority claims, isolation from the body, novel doctrines, fascination with the paranormal? Fruit takes time to show, but early fruit is still worth noticing.
Are there specific concerning elements? Did the being tell the NDEr they had lived past lives? That they should begin doing readings or communicating with the dead? That sin does not exist? That they are divine? That they should follow a voice that is still speaking to them inside their head? These specific red flags deserve specific pastoral attention later.
The assessment is for you, not them. In Phase 3 you are not delivering a verdict to the NDEr. You are clarifying your own pastoral read so you know how to guide them in Phase 4. Delivering a verdict in Phase 3 is premature. The person is not asking for a ruling; they are asking for a shepherd.
An important warning: pastors sometimes over-read concerns into an account because the whole topic makes us nervous. A person who describes an overwhelming sense of love is not automatically drifting into universalism. A person who describes a beautiful place is not automatically making a bid for special authority. Evaluate the specifics, not the genre. And remember the baseline: the professional research consistently finds that most NDEs are broadly consistent with biblical teaching about death, the intermediate state, and the love of God.16 The experience the NDEr is telling you about is statistically more likely to be biblically compatible than not.
Now the work shifts again. Having listened (Phase 1), clarified (Phase 2), and quietly assessed (Phase 3), you begin to guide the person's integration of what happened. This is the pastoral work proper: helping them think biblically, name honestly, and walk faithfully.
The first move is to affirm what is genuine. If the experience, as best you can tell, is broadly consistent with Scripture, say so. "From everything you have told me, I believe God met you in this experience. What you describe is consistent with what Scripture says about Jesus, about heaven, and about God's love for you. You are not crazy. You are not imagining things. I believe the Lord was near to you." I cannot overstate how much this matters. The experiencer has usually been afraid for months that you would say something dismissive. Hearing a settled, Bible-believing pastor affirm the Lord's presence in a real spiritual moment gives them permission to trust their own story, and also to trust the Lord who was in it.
Be careful here, though, not to over-affirm. You are not canonizing the experience or declaring it infallible. You are saying, in essence, I believe God was present with you, and what you describe lines up with Scripture. That is a pastoral judgment, not a prophetic pronouncement.
The second move is to identify specific concerns gently, if there are any. If a particular element raised a flag for you in Phase 3, name it softly, in its own moment. Do not dump a list of concerns all at once. Take one thing at a time. "There was one specific thing you said that I want to think through with you, if you are open to it. You mentioned that you came away feeling like every religion is just a different path to the same God. That is a big conclusion, and I am not sure it fits with what you yourself described happened. Can we sit with that one together for a little while?" The tone is not You got it wrong. The tone is Let us think about this together.
The third move is to point back to Scripture. "What do you think the Bible says about this? Let us open it and read what Jesus actually taught about that question, and see whether what you took from the experience matches what He already revealed in Scripture." Use the Bible as the shared standard that neither of you invented. This frees you from being "the pastor imposing his opinion" and puts both of you under the authority of the Word. That move is theologically right and pastorally wise.
Some passages that frequently come up in Phase 4 conversations:
You will not need all of these in every conversation, and you certainly do not march through them like a checklist. You use the one or two that pertain to whatever specific issue has come up for this specific experiencer.
The fourth move is to warn about NDE community pressures. "As you keep integrating this experience, you are likely to run into books, YouTube channels, and conferences that will want to shape how you interpret it. Some of that world is helpful. Some of it leads in directions that will not fit with the Bible. Let us talk about how to tell the difference." NDErs often stumble into the broader NDE ecosystem hungry for someone who will take their experience seriously, and some of that ecosystem is solid and Christ-centered while other parts of it are openly New Age. Tabatt's NDE Conspiracy provides a careful map of that landscape.17 Help the NDEr navigate with eyes open rather than letting them stumble into it alone.
The fifth move is to suggest trustworthy reading. A short list of reliable books can anchor the NDEr in Christ-centered reflection. Chapter 29 develops this in full, but for Phase 4 you might steer them toward Tabatt's The NDE Conspiracy, Miller's Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences?, Sabom's Light and Death, or Burke's Imagine Heaven. Chapters 30 and 31 address authors and teachers who should be approached with caution. You do not need to hand the NDEr a list of who is "banned" — that would be clumsy. But you can say, "If you are going to read about this, let me suggest a few that I think you would really benefit from."
The sixth move is to offer ongoing counsel. Integration of an NDE takes time. One session will not do it. Schedule a second meeting. And a third. And a sixth. Tell the person so. "This is not a one-conversation matter. I would love to keep meeting with you about this over the next several months while you process it." That commitment is itself pastoral grace. Many NDErs have never had anyone walk with them through this. Offering that walk is a gift.
In Phase 5, the pastor widens the circle. An NDE is not a solo project. The experiencer needs the body of Christ — other believers, the ordinary means of grace, the worship of the gathered church — to integrate the experience for the long haul.
First, help them stay in the church. Some NDErs drift away from their local congregation. The drift may be toward spiritual isolation ("no one else gets it"), or toward alternative spiritual communities (NDE conferences, online groups with a universalist or New Age flavor), or simply toward the couch. Pastorally, your job is to anchor them in the ordinary, local congregation where they already belong. Their experience was extraordinary; their discipleship should be ordinary. Remind them that the life of the saints runs through gathered worship, the preached Word, the Lord's Supper, baptism, prayer, and fellowship — not primarily through their one remarkable experience.
Second, be careful about public testimony. Most NDErs, once they have told their pastor, feel an internal pressure to tell everyone. They want to go share their experience with the whole church, or with a Christian podcast, or on YouTube. Pastoral counsel here is slow down. A public platform before the experience has been integrated can fossilize premature interpretations and commit the NDEr to positions they would later revise if given time. Something like: "I can see that you feel moved to share this widely. That is a good instinct, and in time it may be right. But let us give the experience two or three years to settle before we start turning it into public testimony. That gives us time to think carefully about how to say it in a way that will point people to Christ without causing confusion." Most mature NDErs, looking back, will say this counsel was wise.
When public testimony does come — and for some NDErs it should — help shape it carefully. Talk through the testimony in advance. Suggest what to include and what to leave out. Help the person think about which parts of the experience are directly edifying for a congregation, and which parts are personal and do not need to be publicized. Pastoral shaping of testimony is not censorship. It is stewardship. Paul's own testimony of his third-heaven experience is remarkable in part for what he did not say: "he was caught up into paradise and heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter" (2 Corinthians 12:4).18 Paul was deliberately restrained about the content. That restraint is a model.
Third, connect the experiencer with other mature Christians. You are not the only wise voice they need. Introduce them to a godly couple in the church who would be willing to walk alongside them. Connect them with a small group whose leader is spiritually seasoned. If possible, introduce them to another mature Christian NDEr who has walked the same road and can say, "I have been where you are, and here is what I wish I had known."
Fourth, include the experience in normal discipleship. The NDE is a chapter in the person's story, not a whole replacement story. Normal discipleship — reading the Bible together, praying, confessing sin, serving, growing in the fruit of the Spirit, being known by other believers — is the context in which the NDE should be held. Let it have its proper weight, neither more nor less. A lifetime of faithful discipleship that includes a powerful spiritual experience is the biblical norm. A lifetime built around one experience is not.
The ordinary means of grace — Word, sacrament, prayer, fellowship — are the primary instruments through which Christ shapes His people. Extraordinary experiences do not replace them. When we help an NDEr stay anchored in preaching, the Lord's Supper, baptism, and the gathered saints, we are placing their extraordinary experience back into the ordinary river of grace where it can be rightly understood and faithfully integrated.
Phase 6 is not really a separate phase so much as the ongoing commitment of the pastor to walk with the NDEr over years. Most of the other phases close within a few weeks or months. Phase 6 lasts for the rest of the experiencer's life in your church.
Watch for drift. Over the course of years, pay quiet attention. Is the NDEr gradually becoming more anchored in Christ, Scripture, and the church — or are they slowly drifting toward the NDE conference circuit, claiming special insight, taking on a spiritual authority the church has not recognized, or flirting with occult practices like mediumship? The drift is often slow. It looks like one conversation with one YouTube channel, followed a year later by a friendship with one conference speaker, followed two years later by a new theology that the church has never affirmed. Watch with patience, not paranoia, and speak gently when something concerning shows up.
Watch for growth. In the opposite direction, pay attention to the fruit. Is the NDEr growing in biblical literacy? In service? In love? In prayer? In willingness to submit to the body? In humility about their experience? Celebrate it, name it, thank God for it. Many NDErs, having been shepherded well, become some of the most rooted, grateful, joyful members of a congregation. The experience deepens rather than destabilizes their faith — which is exactly what Sabom's research found among committed Christian NDErs.19
Keep the experience proportionate. The NDE is significant. It is not, however, the center of the NDEr's identity as a Christian. Christ is. Help the person keep the experience in right proportion. Over time, most mature Christian NDErs I know speak less and less about the experience itself and more and more about the Savior they met in it. The experience becomes a hallway that leads to Christ, not a room they live in.
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No framework survives contact with real people unchanged. Every NDEr brings a different story, a different history, a different set of pressures. Let me walk through several specific pastoral scenarios that come up regularly. These are not meant to be exhaustive; they are meant to illustrate how the framework applies in concrete situations.
A man comes to you six months after his NDE. "Pastor, I have been thinking about this constantly. I think the Lord wants me to start a ministry around what He showed me. I want to start speaking. I want to write a book. I want to launch a podcast." He is genuinely on fire. He has a testimony. He has vision. He wants to go.
Pastoral counsel: slow down. Gently, warmly, but clearly. Integration of a major spiritual experience takes years, not months. Ministry built on a poorly integrated experience often does harm — to the NDEr, to the people they teach, and to the testimony of the church. The urgency the NDEr feels is real, and some of it is probably from the Lord. But the urgency to start a public ministry right now is usually more about the NDEr's own inner pressure than about God's timing.
I would say something like: "Brother, I can see the Lord has done something remarkable in you, and I thank God for it. Here is my counsel. Before you launch a ministry, spend three to five years deepening in Scripture, serving quietly in this local church, being known by the elders, and letting this experience settle. If God is calling you to teach this, that calling will still be there in three years. And the teaching that comes out of three years of deepening will bless far more people than the teaching that comes out of three months of enthusiasm. Let us walk this road together."
Some NDErs will resent this counsel. Some will go elsewhere to find a pastor who will platform them immediately. That is a risk you must accept. But a shepherd's job is not to give the flock what they want; it is to give them what they need. And most NDErs, looking back five or ten years later, thank the pastor who slowed them down. The ones who were not slowed down often look back and wish they had been.
Part of this counsel includes pointing out the pattern we see in the broader world of NDE ministry. Some of the teachers whose ministries went public too quickly later drifted into significant theological error, because the experience was never properly integrated with Scripture before it became a platform.20 The platform fossilized half-formed conclusions and made it costly to revise them later. That pattern is a warning. Help your NDEr avoid it.
A woman comes to you convinced that her NDE taught her that all religions are equally valid paths, that there is no such thing as sin, that everyone goes to a beautiful place when they die. She is not hostile. She is not trying to provoke. She genuinely believes this is what the Lord told her.
This scenario is harder. Pastoral care here requires both clarity and patience, and it requires many conversations rather than one.
Do not lead with correction. That sets off defenses and forecloses the relationship. Lead with listening (Phase 1). Love the person without endorsing the conclusions. Let them tell the story all the way through. Do not endorse the doctrines they have drawn from it, but do not fight about those doctrines in the first conversation either.
In later conversations, begin to distinguish the experience from the interpretation. "I want to make sure I understand. You felt overwhelming love and peace. You saw a beautiful place. You met a being of light. Those are the things that actually happened. The conclusion — that therefore all religions are the same — is a conclusion you drew from the experience. What in the experience itself taught you that specifically?" You are gently helping the NDEr see that their interpretation is a second step, not the same thing as the experience.
Then, slowly, bring Scripture in. "I want to share something I have been thinking about. Jesus Himself, the risen Lord, spoke directly in the New Testament about whether all religions lead to the same place. He said, 'I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me' (John 14:6). Paul said, 'There is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus' (1 Timothy 2:5). Peter said, 'There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved' (Acts 4:12). These are not my opinions. These are the words of the Savior and His apostles in the Scriptures. If the being you met was Jesus, He would not contradict what He said in the New Testament. So either the being was not Jesus, or the message has been filtered by something in the experience or in the way you understood it. Let us think about that together."
Note what is happening here. You are not saying, "You are wrong and your experience was demonic." You are saying, "Here is what the biblical Jesus said. If the being you met was Him, He cannot be teaching a different message now." That move — the Galatians 1:6–9 principle in soft form — is the quiet backbone of faithful pastoral care in this scenario.
Expect this scenario to take many months or years. Do not rush the NDEr. Do not platform her teaching. But do not cut her off either. Pray for her regularly. Be patient. The Holy Spirit does in months what we cannot do in minutes.
A man had a distressing NDE. He went to a dark place. He felt separated from love. He experienced terror. He came back and has not slept well in months. He avoids church. He cannot stop thinking about it. He is drinking more. He has not told his wife everything because he does not want to scare her.
This scenario requires specialized care. Pastoral presence is essential, but it is probably not enough. Distressing NDEs are a real phenomenon.21 They require careful pastoral engagement plus, in many cases, qualified Christian counseling for the trauma-related aspects.
Your role as pastor is first to be present. Meet with him. Pray with him. Sit with him when he cannot find words. Affirm that distressing NDEs do happen, that they are not proof he is lost, and that the Lord is not finished with him. Recall that Howard Storm, whose NDE began as a distressing experience, called out to Jesus and was rescued — and went on to serve as a pastor.22 The shape of a distressing NDE is not fixed destiny.
Your role as pastor is second to connect him with help beyond you. A qualified Christian counselor who understands trauma can work with him on the sleep issues, the avoidance, the dissociation, the fear. That counselor is not competing with you; they are supplementing what you offer. Do not pretend to be the only resource he needs. Humility about the limits of your own expertise is itself pastoral care.
Do not tell him to "just get over it." Do not tell him it was "just a hallucination." Both responses fail to honor what actually happened. Distressing NDEs are real experiences. They must be received with the same seriousness as joyful NDEs, even if their content was darker. In some cases, the distressing NDE has been the turning point of an NDEr's entire life — the moment the Lord got their attention.23 Walk with him patiently. Ask God for wisdom. Stay close.
A woman who was not a Christian had an NDE, and now, for the first time in her life, she is open to Jesus. She wanders into your church. She wants to know what the Bible says. She is asking real questions. Her worldview has been softened, and the soil of her heart has been prepared.
This is a precious evangelistic opportunity, and pastors should embrace it wholeheartedly. The NDE may have prepared the soil, but conversion is still a work of grace. She needs the gospel — the actual, specific gospel of Jesus crucified for our sins and risen from the dead — preached to her plainly, followed up with discipleship.
Do not assume the NDE itself was the conversion. An NDE can open the door to faith without completing it. Walk her through the gospel. Open the Scriptures. Show her Christ in the Gospels. Invite her to trust in Him. Baptize her when she professes faith. Begin the long work of discipleship.
Storm's trajectory illustrates this pattern. Storm was an atheist art professor when his distressing NDE occurred. In the experience, he called out to Jesus, and what followed transformed him.24 But it was not the NDE itself that saved him; it was Jesus, the same Jesus offered in the gospel. Our evangelistic task with an unbelieving NDEr is to take their experience seriously as the Lord's means of opening their heart, and then to preach Christ to them plainly, as we would to any seeker.
There is a related opportunity here that pastors often miss. An unbelieving NDEr who is now open to faith can often help evangelize their family and friends more effectively than a trained pastor could. They have credibility their unbelieving friends accept because the friends know them from before. Disciple them carefully. Equip them with Scripture. And then watch the Lord use their life.
Sometimes the NDEr does not come to the pastor first. They come after years in a different world. Perhaps they read an Eben Alexander book, or went to an NDE conference, or joined an online community, or fell under the influence of a teacher who blends Christian language with New Age doctrine. By the time they sit down in your office, they have been shaped by voices very different from yours.
Your task is patient re-formation. Do not tear down everything they have learned in one sitting. That usually ends the relationship before it has started. Instead, anchor slowly in biblical teaching, piece by piece, one conversation at a time.
Begin with the common ground. Many of the NDE teachers the person has read will have said something true about God's love, about the reality of life beyond death, about the sacredness of life here. Affirm the true parts. "Yes, God does love you more than you can imagine. Yes, this life is sacred. Yes, death is not the end." Starting with truth the person has already accepted builds trust for the places where you will later need to correct.
Then introduce the specifics of biblical teaching without tearing down the person's previous teachers directly. "Here is what Scripture teaches about that specific question. Let us read it together." Focus on the Bible, not on naming the authors you disagree with. The person will often connect the dots themselves over time. They will read the Bible and start to notice that what Scripture teaches does not match what their favorite YouTube channel teaches. Let the Spirit do that work through the Word.
Be patient. Re-formation takes a long time. Do not expect the person to drop their prior framework in one conversation. Expect eighteen months, two years, sometimes five. But expect fruit, because the Word of God does not return empty.
Deathbed experiences deserve their own scenario because they come up more often than we realize. A grieving Christian comes to you: "Pastor, my mother saw Jesus before she died. She pointed to the corner of the room and said He was there. Then she died smiling. Was that real?"
This is almost always a moment to affirm. DBEs are even more reliable than NDEs, typically cleaner, simpler, more obviously aligned with biblical teaching.25 The dying grandmother who sees Jesus or sees deceased loved ones or speaks of a light is on firmly biblical ground — Scripture already presents the death of the saints as a going-to-be-with-the-Lord event (Luke 23:43; 2 Corinthians 5:8; Philippians 1:23). Miller's research on DBEs documents that over eighty percent of dying patients report some form of deathbed experience when nursing staff are trained to ask.26 Your parishioner's mother is part of a well-documented pattern.
Affirm what the grieving Christian is telling you. "Yes, I believe that was real. Scripture describes the death of believers as being taken to be with the Lord, and your mother's vision lines up with what Christians across the centuries have experienced at the threshold. God was with her. Jesus was with her. You can hold onto that."
This scenario is less about discernment and more about comfort. DBEs at the bedside of a dying believer are almost always straightforward. Receive them as the grace-gifts they are. Weep with those who weep. Give thanks with those who give thanks. Let the experience strengthen the bereaved Christian's confidence in the Lord's care for His people.
A family comes to you. Their eight-year-old was in an accident. He was in the hospital for weeks. A few months later, he started mentioning matter-of-factly that he had seen Jesus during his time in the ICU. The parents do not know what to do with this.
Children's NDE and DBE accounts deserve special care. Children generally do not filter their experience through sophisticated theological categories, and their simplicity is often a strength. But they are also highly suggestible, so the way adults react shapes the way they remember.
Coach the parents. "Ask him simple, open questions. What did you see? What did you feel? Do not lead him. Do not suggest elaborate interpretations. Just let him describe what he remembers, in his own words. Do not turn it into a story you tell others. Do not publicize it. If God gave him something, it belongs to him and to the family for now."
Meet with the child yourself, gently, with a parent present. Be warm. Listen. Thank him for telling you. Do not make a big deal of it in a way that would encourage embellishment. Children who had NDEs often integrate the experience naturally as they grow, if the adults around them do not make it strange.
Some of the most influential but also most scrutinized NDE books of recent years involve children's experiences (most famously the Burpo and Malarkey cases).27 The lesson from those cases is clear: children's experiences deserve to be received with warmth, but adults should be extremely careful about shaping, publicizing, or monetizing them. Let the child be a child. Let the experience be quietly real. Do not build a platform on a child.
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Before moving on to competencies, let me name several common pastoral errors. These are the mistakes I have watched faithful pastors make when they first encounter NDE pastoral care, and each one has a predictable cost.
Error 1: Reflexive dismissal. The pastor hears enough of the story to categorize it, then waves it away. "Well, you have been through a lot. That morphine can really throw you for a loop." Or: "That was probably just your brain shutting down. Let us get you back to the things that matter." This is the error of Miller's 1980 pastor who walked out of the hospital room.28 The NDEr learns that the pastor is unsafe. They stop telling. They may leave the church. They may find another community — often a worse one — willing to receive their story. The pastoral cost of reflexive dismissal is enormous, and it is usually invisible because the NDEr never comes back to complain. They just quietly disappear.
Error 2: Uncritical endorsement. The opposite error. The pastor hears the story and immediately canonizes it. "Praise God! You saw Jesus! This is a miracle! Let me put you in front of the whole church this Sunday!" This error treats the NDEr as an instant oracle. It platforms premature interpretation. It exposes the congregation to whatever theology the NDEr eventually ends up embracing, which may or may not be biblical. It also puts the NDEr in a position where they feel obligated to maintain a particular version of their story, which can harden interpretive mistakes into public testimony.
Error 3: Turning the conversation into an apologetic debate. Some pastors, especially those trained in apologetics, respond to an NDE account by immediately launching into the consciousness-survives-death debate, substance dualism versus physicalism, and the problems with materialist accounts of mind.29 That material is genuinely important in its place, and it is the theological backbone for why pastors can take NDEs seriously at all. But the moment the NDEr first tells her story is not the moment for that conversation. She is not asking you to prove that her consciousness survived her body's clinical death. She is asking whether you will honor what she went through. Save the apologetic conversation for later.
Error 4: Making it about yourself. The pastor interrupts to tell his own story, or to quote the last NDE book he read, or to demonstrate how much he knows about the field. The NDEr wants to be heard. Your knowledge can come out later. In Phase 1, your role is receiver, not transmitter.
Error 5: Demanding immediate theological integration. "So, what does this mean for your faith?" Asked too soon, that question puts pressure on the NDEr to close the theological loop before they have even unpacked what happened. Let integration unfold over time. Ask the question eventually, but not in the first week.
Error 6: Treating discernment as the whole task. Some pastors, once they understand that NDE accounts require discernment, make discernment the entire frame of their care. Every conversation becomes an interrogation. Every detail becomes a test. The NDEr starts to feel like a suspect rather than a shepherded saint. Discernment matters, but it is a servant of love, not a replacement for it.
Error 7: Making the shepherding task too big or too small. Some pastors treat each NDEr case as a crisis requiring months of intense counseling. That is too big. Others treat it as a one-conversation matter. That is too small. The right size is steady, long-term, ordinary shepherding — the same kind of care you provide for other members of your flock working through significant life events, just with the particular skills this chapter describes.
Many of the errors above are driven by the pastor's own fear — fear of saying the wrong thing, fear of being deceived, fear of the supernatural, fear of the theological territory. Honest self-knowledge helps. If we notice that we are dismissing or endorsing too quickly, we should ask ourselves: what am I afraid of? A settled shepherd who has put his own fears into Christ's hands can receive an NDE account with a steady heart. A fearful shepherd cannot. Work on your fear in prayer before you try to work on the NDEr.
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The next generation of faithful pastors will need specific competencies for this ministry. Let me name five that I think matter most. None of them is heroic. All of them can be built over time by ordinary effort.
You cannot shepherd NDErs if you do not know what the Bible teaches about death, the intermediate state, heaven, Hades, resurrection, and final judgment. This is not optional. Without a clear biblical framework, every pastoral conversation becomes guesswork.
The core framework looks like this. At bodily death, the soul separates from the body and enters the intermediate state. For the believer, that means being with Christ in paradise (Luke 23:43; 2 Corinthians 5:8; Philippians 1:23). The classic evangelical defense of this view — sometimes called "holistic dualism" — has been argued most thoroughly by John Cooper in Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting.30 Cooper shows from both Old and New Testament exegesis that Scripture teaches a conscious intermediate state in which the person, though without a body, is still the same person, awaiting the resurrection of the body at Christ's return.31 Farris's theological anthropology makes the same case from a more systematic and philosophical angle.32 For the unbeliever, the intermediate state is Hades — a place of conscious awareness and distress, distinct from the final Lake of Fire that comes after the last judgment (Luke 16:19–31; Revelation 20:11–15).
This framework is precisely the biblical architecture within which NDEs make sense. If the soul can consciously exist apart from the body during the intermediate state, then it is not theologically impossible for the soul to consciously experience something during the brief window of clinical death before resuscitation. The framework does not prove any particular NDE is genuine, but it removes the category-error objection that NDEs are automatically impossible.33
Likewise, the framework is what allows us to distinguish (a) what NDErs are visiting in their experiences (the intermediate paradise, or in distressing cases, perhaps Hades), (b) what Scripture describes as the final state (the new heavens and new earth, Revelation 21–22), and (c) the difference between "heaven" in the intermediate sense and "heaven" in the final glorified sense.34 This distinction matters pastorally because it lets us affirm NDE glimpses of paradise without overclaiming — what NDErs visit is real but not yet the final consummation. The best is still ahead.
If you are a pastor and you have never worked through Cooper carefully, that is the first assignment. Read it slowly. Mark it up. Let it settle into your preaching. You will find that your ordinary funeral sermons, your sick-bed prayers, your gospel presentations, and your NDE pastoral care all become more confident and more grounded.
You do not need to become a specialist. You need to have read enough that you recognize the terrain. The reading list is short enough to be doable. Start with Tabatt, Miller, Sabom, and Burke. Add Miller's volume on deathbed experiences. Add a reliable secular overview — Greyson's After or van Lommel's Consciousness Beyond Life — for familiarity with the broader research. Over time, read one problematic NDE book carefully (Alexander's Proof of Heaven, for instance) so that you recognize the pattern when one of your people has been reading it.
You should know the names. The reliable Christian authors who can be recommended with appreciation: Tabatt, Miller, Sabom, Burke, Habermas, Moreland, Woodford, McCormack, Storm (original account), Braxton, Kay.35 The authors whose theology departs significantly from biblical Christianity and who require extensive caution: Alexander, Eadie, Moorjani, Brinkley, Atwater, late Moody, late Ring.36 Chapters 29 through 32 of this book go into detail on all of these. At minimum, you want to know a name when an NDEr mentions it, and to have a sense of where that teacher falls on the spectrum.
You also want to know the basic shape of the research. Greyson's NDE Scale, Sabom's Atlanta Study, Miller's compatibility studies, Long's God Study, Long's large-scale NDERF analysis.37 You do not need to memorize details. You need enough familiarity to answer the NDEr who says, "The researchers say this experience is just the dying brain." You want to be able to say, in your own words, "Actually, the professional research literature is more divided than that, and the stronger studies find significant problems with the dying-brain explanation."
Discernment is not a spooky gift reserved for a few. It is a biblical skill all mature Christians are commanded to cultivate (1 John 4:1; 1 Thessalonians 5:19–21; Hebrews 5:14). For NDE pastoral care, discernment involves three specific things.
First, familiarity with the seven tests developed in Chapter 10.38 They can be carried in your head and applied quietly to any experience that comes across your desk. You do not deliver them as a checklist; you use them as internal scaffolding.
Second, familiarity with the principle of 2 Corinthians 11:14: Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. This is not paranoia; it is apostolic teaching. Beauty alone does not guarantee divine origin. Beauty plus alignment with Scripture, plus evidence of the Spirit's work, plus ongoing fruit — that combination is what points toward authenticity. Any one of those factors alone is not sufficient.
Third, the ability to distinguish the experience from the interpretation.39 This is the single most important discernment skill. Most pastoral problems with NDEs are not that the experience was fake or demonic; they are that the experiencer's interpretation ran past what the experience itself warrants. Helping people tell those two things apart is quiet, patient, crucial pastoral work.
Generic pastoral care skills apply here fully. Listening without interruption. Asking open questions. Reflecting back what you heard. Walking with people over time. Integrating traumatic or deep experience with ongoing discipleship. These are not unique to NDE care; they are the basic skills of shepherding the flock through any significant life event. If you have been a faithful pastor for ten years, you already have most of what you need. The NDE setting just applies familiar skills to a specific topic.
The classic works in evangelical pastoral care literature are worth your time. Eugene Peterson's The Contemplative Pastor and his Working the Angles describe the posture of presence and patience that NDE care requires.40 Henri Nouwen's The Wounded Healer (though not from an evangelical tradition) provides images of pastoral presence that are easily baptized into an evangelical framework.41 Thomas Oden's Pastoral Theology gives a fuller theological backbone to the whole work.42 For biblical counseling specifically, David Powlison's Speaking Truth in Love and Ed Welch's Side by Side give practical shape to how to speak truth in pastoral conversations without running over people.43 And if you have never read Richard Baxter's The Reformed Pastor, read it. Its vision of the pastor as shepherd of souls is the heritage into which NDE care fits.44
This is not a skill that can be trained in a seminary course. It is formed in the slow work of ministry over years. The pastor who expects integration to happen in a single meeting will always be frustrated. The pastor who is willing to walk with a person over eighteen months or five years or a decade will see fruit.
The temptation in our ministry culture is to want results fast. Immediate clarity. Immediate transformation. Immediate theological alignment. NDE pastoral care does not work that way. The Lord does in months or years what we cannot do in minutes. The pastor's role is to stay present, stay patient, and trust the Holy Spirit's long, slow, kind work in the experiencer's heart.
Part of relational patience is also relational steadiness. The NDEr may hit moments of backsliding, doubt, fresh obsession, or drift. You do not respond to those moments with alarm. You respond with steady pastoral presence. "I am still here. Let us talk about it." Steadiness, over time, is more powerful than intensity in a single moment.
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After competencies, let us be honest about limits. The pastor cannot do everything. Knowing our limits is part of faithful care, because overreach is a form of pride that damages both us and the flock.
Limit 1: The pastor cannot definitively validate or invalidate any particular NDE with certainty. I assess; I do not pronounce. The pastor forms a pastoral judgment for the purposes of guiding the NDEr. That judgment is fallible. It is not a prophetic verdict. I can say, "From everything you have told me, this experience appears consistent with Scripture, and I believe God was genuinely with you." I cannot say, "I declare your experience authentic, sealed by the Holy Spirit." The Lord is the one who knows. I only assess as best I can.
Limit 2: The pastor cannot force the NDEr to adopt correct theology. I can guide. I can teach. I can hold the Bible open with them. I cannot produce belief in another human heart. Only the Spirit can. This is freeing, not discouraging. It relieves the pastor of the burden of manufacturing conviction. Our job is faithful presentation of Scripture and patient walking alongside. The Spirit's job is the miracle of conversion and sanctification.
Limit 3: The pastor cannot replace the ordinary means of grace. The NDE is a moment, a marker, a hallway. It is not a substitute for preaching, sacrament, prayer, and gathered worship. When we help the NDEr integrate their experience, we are placing it alongside — never ahead of — the Word read and preached, the Table shared, the waters of baptism, the life of the gathered church. The ordinary means of grace are the continuous pipeline through which the Spirit nourishes the soul. The NDE is a single glass of water; the ordinary means are the well.
Limit 4: The pastor does not know everything. Sometimes the right pastoral response is, "I do not know. Let us think about this together. Let us pray. Let us open the Word." Humility is itself pastoral care. A pastor who pretends to know everything eventually damages his people. A pastor who humbly confesses the limits of his knowledge invites the NDEr into the shared work of seeking understanding together. That shared posture is closer to the biblical vision of the body of Christ than any pastoral omniscience could ever be.
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Let me close the pastoral-care material with a little practical language. Pastors often tell me that the hardest part is knowing what to actually say. Here are some phrases that tend to land well in specific situations. Adapt them to your own voice.
When the NDEr first sits down: "I am honored that you are sharing this with me. Take your time. I want to hear the whole thing."
When they hesitate mid-story: "Take as long as you need. There is no hurry."
When they ask, "Do you think I am crazy?": "No. I believe you went through something real. Let us keep talking."
When they ask, "Do you think it was from God?": "That is exactly the right question to sit with. Let us pray about it and think it through carefully over some conversations. I have some thoughts, but I want to understand more first."
When there is something concerning in the account: "I want to think through one specific thing with you, if you are open. It is not about doubting your experience. It is about wondering whether that one specific part fits with the rest. Let us look at Scripture together."
When affirmation is in order: "What you are describing is consistent with what Scripture teaches about Jesus, about heaven, and about God's love for you. I believe God met you. You are not imagining things."
When the person wants to platform their experience too soon: "I hear your heart. Let us think about this. I wonder if we could give it a couple of years to settle first. I want to help you get the testimony in a shape that will really bless people."
When you do not know: "I do not know. That is an honest answer. Let us pray about it and study it out together. I will go find some things to read and come back."
When the NDEr feels alone: "You are not alone. Millions of people have had experiences like yours. Many of them have walked with Jesus through it. We will walk it together."
When it is time to pray: "Let me pray for you right now."
None of these phrases is magic. But they tend to land softly, open doors rather than close them, and communicate presence rather than distance. Collect your own phrases over time. Steal from fellow pastors who do this well. Adapt them to your own voice and your own congregation.
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For the pastor reading this chapter who has never done this work before, and who now feels both motivated and overwhelmed, let me offer a short on-ramp. You do not have to master everything at once.
Start by reading Cooper's Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting over the next month or two. That is your biblical-theology foundation. While you are doing that, read Tabatt's The NDE Conspiracy on the side. That is your discernment framework. If you finish both of those, pick up Miller's Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? That is your baseline for how remarkably compatible most NDE reports are with biblical teaching. Together, those three give you a sturdy foundation.
Then listen. When an NDEr comes to you — and one will — listen all the way through. Do not panic. Use the six-phase framework as a rough map. Ask questions. Pray. Schedule a follow-up meeting. Trust the process. Most of what your parishioner needs is your steady, biblically grounded, loving presence over time. You do not need to be a specialist. You need to be a shepherd.
When you hit a question you cannot answer, be honest. Pull out a book and read together. Call a fellow pastor who has more experience. Consult a chaplain. Pray for wisdom. Nothing in NDE pastoral care requires solo heroic expertise. It requires humble, faithful, ongoing presence.
And remember — the Lord has called you to shepherd this person in this moment. He is not calling you to master the whole field in an afternoon. He is calling you to love the one in front of you. The rest will come.
· · ·
Let me close with an encouragement. NDErs in the church are a gift, not a problem. Their experiences, properly integrated with Scripture and the life of the body, can deepen congregational faith, open evangelistic doors that would not otherwise be open, and testify with unusual power to the reality of heaven, the nearness of the Lord, and the tenderness of Christ at the threshold of death.
Think about what you have when an NDEr is in the pew. You have a person who can say, "Death is not the end. I have been there. Jesus was there." You have a witness whose testimony can reach skeptics that a sermon cannot reach. You have a living reminder, every Sunday, that the gospel is not an abstraction — that Jesus really is who He said He is, really is risen, really is with His people even when they pass through the valley of the shadow.
Pastors equipped to shepherd NDErs well will find this a rich area of ministry. Pastors who neglect it will miss opportunities, fail people who needed their shepherding, and eventually find themselves watching those people drift into communities that do not have the gospel. The cost of pastoral neglect here is high, and it is usually silent. The NDEr who was brushed off rarely complains to the elders. They just quietly find somewhere else to be heard.
I want to put in one last pastoral word, because I think it matters. NDE and DBE pastoral care is not primarily about discernment. It is primarily about love. Discernment is necessary; it is the servant of love, not the substitute for it. A pastor whose heart is warmed with love for the person in front of him, who holds Scripture in one hand and the person's hand in the other, who is willing to walk slowly over years, who does not need immediate clarity to keep showing up — that pastor is the one who shepherds NDErs well. The love comes first. The discernment follows. Both are needed. Neither replaces the other.
Think, finally, of the picture at the edge of death. An elderly saint, dying in a hospital bed, looks toward the corner of the room. She smiles. She says, "Jesus is here." Her pastor, sitting beside her, has been visiting faithfully for years. He does not need to run a theological checklist. He knows his sheep. He squeezes her hand. He says, "Yes, my friend. He is here. He loves you. He has come for you." She closes her eyes. She breathes her last. She goes to be with the Lord.
That is the ministry this chapter is training us for. It is not primarily about exotic cases or conference teachers or controversial books. It is primarily about being a faithful shepherd at the threshold of death, where the Lord meets His people in ways that sometimes spill over into words and visions and experiences too deep to contain. Our task is to receive those moments with care, to anchor them in Scripture, to guard the flock from counterfeits, and to walk with our people all the way home.
May the Lord make us good shepherds after the pattern of the Good Shepherd, who lays down His life for the sheep.
Baxter, Richard. The Reformed Pastor. Edited by William Brown. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1974. Originally published 1656.
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