In 1993, I participated in a parish-based unit of CPE. In one of our private sessions, my supervisor mentioned that her church had just called an intentional interim minister – it appeared to be a fascinating ministry and she thought it was something I should investigate. With that she handed me a slip of paper with a phone number and a name. The name was Neil Chafin, director of the North Carolina Baptist Hospital School of Pastoral Care Foundation.

I made that call and we talked about a new department that had just been birthed called the Center for Congregational Health. Although it was too late for me to get into the inaugural interim training event, I contracted with Neil for a 13-week directed study that filled in some gaps between the Center’s training and the training I took through the Interim Ministry Network. That was the beginning of an incredibly rich relationship which ended with Neil’s death on Sunday, January 16.

It was Neil’s genius that created the Center for Congregational Health. He knew people had a quality place to go when they needed medical help – Baptist Hospital. He knew people had a quality place to go when they were dealing with issues around mental health – CareNet. But, he kept asking, “Where do congregations and their leaders go when they need help?”

He asked his question to a lot of folks, in a lot of places, but it finally started to gel when he discussed it with Dewey Hobbs, director of the Department of Pastoral Care at Baptist Hospital, and Roy Smith, Secretary General of the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina.

I began working with the Center in 1994, and Neil trained me to become a member of the Interim Ministry Network faculty. It was that relationship that taught me what a truly multi-talented individual he was. I watched his expertise in putting together designs, admired his gifted teaching from the overflow, as well as his ability to shift designs and schedules in mid-stream in order to address needs and issues raised by the participants.

Neil was a gentle soul who cared about people, always had time to visit with you, and was genuinely interested in what was happening in your personal as well as professional life. And rare was the time those visits ended that you did not have a new nugget of truth that proved to be valuable for you, a client with whom you were working, or a new training design that just was not coming together.

I often think about perhaps his most valuable advice for me: “Don’t ever let interim ministry become a recipe – always keep it a tool box for helping congregations become healthy, and healthy congregations remain healthy.”

Thanks, friend, I will continue to remember that.