The Family Line. What about a self-disclosive story that involves a family member? Here you must consider carefully the appropriateness of the story. You must take pains to determine whether the content truly illustrates your point. But even more important, consider whether the story casts the family member in too negative or too positive a light. Casting a spouse, child, or relative in a negative light is inexcusable. A more common problem is frequent bragging on family members. Such boasting sets apart your family members, creating distance between themselves and the congregants. A son or daughter does not need to be singled out from peers by a parent from the church pulpit. A spouse does not need a lift toward that pedestal that disrupts relationships with fellow members. Furthermore, painting rosy family pictures can set up a spouse or child for a hard fall when they fail. Sharing a story about a family member is questionable at best.

Perhaps after careful reflection, you determine a family story to be both effective and appropriate. If so, then you must follow the wise credo of seeking permission from the family member in question. Failure to deal correctly with these stories is a grievous error, one with possible fallout both in the church and at home.

The Privacy Line. There is a final line never to cross when it comes to self-disclosive stories-that of sharing confidences from counseling situations. Sharing information from counseling ministry carries significant dangers. Broken confidences can devastate a pastoral relationship, let alone your relationship with the congregation. A perceived violation of trust can render you unapproachable, with members turning elsewhere when seeking personal help. Even references to counseling situations from previous ministry posts can be disruptive. Current members will hesitate to seek your guidance for fear that you might use them as a public example some day at another ministry setting. Furthermore, even if you are using a story from a previous context, some current members might suspect that you are talking about them.

I remember a situation in which a preacher told a story from a counseling context, making sure to note that it was from a past church. Following the message, an angry member accused the preacher of breaking a confidence, certain that the story was actually about her. The woman was convinced that the preacher was taking the story about her and simply altering the place and time. In other words, she believed the preacher to be twisting the story into a white lie that could be told in a safer, once-removed fashion.

Sharing stories from counseling situations can cause painful effects on pastor-parishioner relations. In our litigious society, pastors face the added danger of lawsuits. In response to such risks, some pastor-parishioner relations are held in check by joint adherence to a ministerial code of ethics. I have never seen a code that expressly forbids pulpit disclosures of personal stories from counseling contexts. Even if such a dictum were too specific for the code as structured, we are wise to consider this rule to be included in the code.