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"I Just Say I'm Here to Listen"

By CAROLYN CLICK (cclick@thestate.com)

One day a week, Marje Warner travels the halls of Palmetto Health Richland [Hospital] to offer an encouraging spiritual word to patients and their families.

Sometimes she prays with them. Sometimes she simply pulls up a chair and listens to a family member who's awaiting word from a surgeon or another medical specialist.

"If someone is sitting there alone and they have nothing else to think about, sometimes you end up talking a long time," Warner said. "Before I know it, they are telling me their life history and the patient's life history."

Warner is one of 30 Stephen Ministers, volunteers trained by the hospital's pastoral staff to be a "caring, listening presence" to patients.

She takes her role seriously. She learned the importance of a compassionate word several years ago, when her husband was ill and hospitalized.

Ten years ago, the hospital adopted the Stephen Minister model--which has enjoyed widespread acceptance among Christians nationwide--to assist the chaplain staff.

The ministry is named after Stephen, a deacon in the early Christian church who was commissioned by the apostles to care for the needs of people in the Christian community.

"None of us plan to go to the hospital," said the Rev. Charles Berger, manager of chaplaincy and pastoral education at Palmetto Health Richland. "Often, it is a crisis--a physical crisis and a family crisis."

[Stephen Ministers at Palmetto Health Richland receive] 50 hours of training over 20 weeks and commit to working four hours a week over a two-year period. . . .

"We train them on how to enter a room, how to come alongside a person to provide support and care, how to be sensitive to religious diversity," he said.

Berger tells his Stephen Ministers not to lose heart even if a patient or family member declines to meet with them.

"Sometimes they go into a room and a person says 'Nope, I don't want to see you,'" he said.

But in a place where patients have to adhere to rigid schedules of doctors and nurses, that may be one place to insert themselves.

"I tell them, 'You know you just made their day. There was one little facet of their day they had control over,'" Berger said. . . .

Warner, a member of Forest Lake Presbyterian Church, said she can never surmise who will want to talk and who won't.

"I just say I'm here to listen."

Copyright © 2006 by The State. Originally published in The State, Metro/Region Section, 09/30/2006, p. B3.

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