A while back Jerry Wilkins — like many pastors and directors of missions (DOM) — began to eye his upcoming retirement years and think about how to spend them purposefully.
“You hear of a lot of ministers retiring and going into missions work,” said Wilkins, who served as DOM for Tuscaloosa Baptist Association for 28 years.
But he and his wife, Carole, began to feel that God was laying on their hearts a different kind of missions field.
“When you near 70, you want to start leaving something behind,” Jerry Wilkins said.
And the couple began to think that the thing they could leave behind was to help the hurting by putting into books what they had been helping people with one-on-one for a long time.
“My wife and I have been counseling for years,” he said. “She was a biblical lay counselor and has done free counseling with thousands of people.”
When she retired they decided to write a book together about marriage.
“We really just want to help so many hurting marriages out there,” Jerry Wilkins said.
The result was a book called “The Great Marriage Physician,” a book currently displayed in the front window of the couple’s local Barnes & Noble bookstore, along with “The Marriage Doctor,” a version of the same book aimed at a secular audience.
Carole Wilkins said she and her husband feel like there are a lot of people who need access to good advice on how to handle hard situations.
“In my counseling ministry I saw so many problems but I knew God had all the answers,” she said. “We’ve just tried to put it in book form as much as we can.”
And hurting couples aren’t the only people the Wilkinses have felt called to help through the written word.
Jerry Wilkins’ newest book, “Smooth Sailing,” describes mistakes ministers make and talks about “how to avoid storms in your ministry.”
And together the couple has five more books coming out over the next two years. Each handles practical subjects like dealing with conflict and stress.
“About five years ago I realized that when churches and marriages are in conflict, we often toss God’s Word out the window and forget everything about how we are to act and speak,” Jerry Wilkins said.
So the book coming out soon on conflict talks about how to apply Scripture to the moments where there is interpersonal tension.
Another of the books, called “The Counseling Pulpit,” shows a pastor how to preach in such a way that he is counseling the hurting members of his church who sit in the pews every Sunday.
“For example Carole wrote a chapter on phobias, and then I wrote two sermon outlines on fear to go along with that chapter,” Jerry Wilkins said.
Their hope is that putting practical help in people’s hands will help them tackle everyday problems head on and avoid the pain of a broken marriage or a wounded ministry.
It’s a mission Jerry Wilkins started back in 1990 with a book he wrote called “Marketing Your Sunday School,” which got his feet wet as an author. He then decided to write a practical guide to associational missions, a book he emailed for free chapter by chapter to every DOM in the Southern Baptist Convention.
Carole Wilkins began much the same way. She wrote books on the topics most relevant to her clients and passed them out to them for free.
She said she felt getting practical help in the hands of the hurting was one of the best things she could do for them.
“I just never dreamed that God would bring it to this point,” she said. “I’m still amazed.”
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