Indispensable Guide to Pastoral Care

Chapter One

What Makes Care Pastoral?

Now God said to Abram, Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.

(Genesis 12:1–2)

AS YOU BEGIN to read this, you may be sitting in a comfortable chair sipping a cup of coffee near a community of people who care about you, and feeling pretty contented with life. You may also be uncertain whether you really want to pursue this thing called ministry, or to follow the unknown path that lies between where you are now and where you think you may be going.

If so, you are living the twenty-first-century version of the story of Abram and Sarai that comes to us in Genesis. They are comfortably settled in Haran, surrounded by family and friends, and things are going well for them. Then God shows up with a call to leave their comfort and a promise to be blessed threefold: with a new land of their own, many descendants, and the privilege of blessing others. Most commentators on this passage focus on the first two blessings—the material and social benefits God promises them. We focus on the third blessing—the fact that God blesses them so that they can bless others. In many ways, that is exactly what is at the heart of our calls to ministry. Having blessed us and gifted us, God then calls us to share those gifts with others. In this book we consider how you are blessed to do this work of pastoral care, what it means for you to bless others, and how you may effectively offer and receive such blessings.

What Is Pastoral Care?

Your best friend decides to get married. Your sister loses her job unexpectedly. Your colleague is struggling to raise his teenage son, who always seems to be in trouble. Your father lies in the hospital, awaiting surgery for a life-threatening condition. Before you thought about becoming a minister, your response to each of these people was shaped by the kind of relationship you had with them personally. Perhaps you took your friend out for a celebratory glass of wine. Perhaps you offered a personal loan to your sister, to help her through the rough spots. Perhaps you shared with your colleague some of your own struggles with child-rearing. Perhaps you brought a potted plant or a bright balloon to your dad’s bedside.

Once you become a pastor, not only are your role and relationships different, others’ expectations about what you can and should do also change. Visiting someone who is ill or listening to someone who is hurting is different when you do so as a pastoral caregiver. Three elements make such care specifically pastoral: first, being present to others in a loving way; second, a foundation in relationship; and third, creating a balance between a particular way of being with others (presence) and certain things that you do while you are with them.

Love in Action

The word care comes from a Gothic word kara, which means to journey with or to be with. The journey that you take in pastoral caregiving is one of love that grows out of your deepest faith commitments. Most Christians readily affirm that God is love and is loving. Most also affirm that Jesus Christ was a gift of love sent by God to show human beings what love in the flesh looks like. So, one hallmark of what it means to be Christian is the call to reflect God’s love to others—to be love, and to live love.¹

Pastoral care, however, is not just about feeling love toward others. If you look to Jesus as a vital example of what pastoral care might look like in the day-to-day world, you find him embodying love in real, active ways: feeding people, physically and spiritually; touching and healing their bodies, minds, and souls; giving them good wine to drink; rubbing mud on their eyes; holding their hands; speaking and listening to them—all actions to change people’s physical conditions, personal situations, and relationships with each other and with God.

Based on Jesus’ model, pastoral care might take many forms today. These include: expressing genuine concern for others . . . ; helping acts by pastors who strive to heal, sustain, guide and reconcile troubled persons; promoting acceptance; service and shepherding; helping lead (others) to hear the Word and receive the sacraments; healing toward wholeness; (and) generating hope.² Given all the possibilities, it’s not surprising that contemporary thinkers about pastoral care have different views about exactly which loving actions are most central in pastoral caregiving. For example, they debate whether such care should focus mostly on healing careseekers,³ on sustaining them, on challenging them, on guiding them, or on something else. But despite their differences in focus, almost all agree that whatever form it takes, at its core pastoral care is love in action. And always, pastoral care is care that intentionally and knowingly involves three partners—the caregiver, the careseeker, and their God.

The Role of Relationships

The centrality of relationship—between persons and God—is clearly reflected in both Old and New Testament descriptions of care. In the Old Testament, the goal of care is the maintenance and restoration of relationships among human beings, between human beings and God, and of human beings with the world.⁴ Faithful people are told that because God cares for us, we are called to care for one another. In the New Testament, Jesus as pastoral caregiver serves, shepherds, heals, and draws strength from his relationship with God. He also commissions others—including us—to follow his example.

Pastoral care, then, is always done in the context of relationship between humans and the Divine. While you do have certain responsibilities as a pastoral caregiver, ultimately care is not just about you, and what you know and do. Care is about inviting the Holy into the caregiving situation, both directly and through engaging others in the wider community. It is really about remembering that God is, that God is with you, and that God wants the best for this person to whom you are offering care. It is making space for God to participate in whatever is occurring.

Being and Doing: Some Guidelines

Which is more significant in offering good care, being or doing? Some state that pastoral presence is more important, while others hold a pastor’s actions to be key. Both are vital.

Pastoral presence is like a building that provides shelter in life’s storms. It is built on a relationship that includes God, who supports the worth of each person. Its walls offer support in troubling times, and its windows admit new awareness of oneself, others, and God. Its roof is the resources of the Christian tradition upon which all may draw—resources such as prayer, scripture, and sacraments. This building dwells in a community of faith or has a path to that community, through the person of the caregiver and his or her activities.

The Theological Dimension of Care

The single element that sets pastoral care apart from all other caregiving practices is this: pastoral care is performed within and out of an intentional theological context. Theology comes from two roots, theos and logos. They mean, respectively, God and word or knowledge. So, pastoral care is care you offer out of, and in the context of, your knowledge or understandings of God. As you engage in this care, you will continually reflect on your own theological understandings—for example, of what healing or salvation or confession means to you—and encourage your careseekers to reflect on theirs.

John Quinlan suggests that the pastor, by attitude and action, attempts to convey the care and concern of God, of the church, of the Christian community, and ultimately of Jesus Christ. S/he attempts to help people meet their need for intimacy with God and journeys with them in their search for meaning.⁵

Resources for Pastoral Care

In the twenty-first century, you are blessed with a vast number of resources to support you in your pastoral care work. In chapter 6, you will learn how to draw on traditional resources of the church such as scripture, prayer, the sacraments, and ritual as helpful and meaningful tools in caregiving. And, as you will see, we have many resources outside of the faith tradition on which to draw as well. Work in the social sciences, especially in psychology and sociology, continues to form and shape theory and practice in pastoral work. How helpful you find these various resources in your caregiving will tend to depend on your particular faith tradition.

The Role of Community

In a recent book, Nancy Ramsay describes two emerging concepts in pastoral care: the Communal Contextual paradigm and the Intercultural paradigm.⁶ The first is relevant here; the second one, below.

The Communal Contextual paradigm says that human beings live as part of a network or web of relationships, and that those relationships need to be taken into account when offering care to an individual. Careseekers have parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, children, cousins, spouses, partners, and friends. Depending on the work they do, careseekers may have students, patients, clients, or customers. They have friends and acquaintances with whom they play golf or bridge, discuss books or football, attend movies or charity events. And, if they are part of a faith community, they may have fellow choir members, mission teammates, or potluck supper partners.

Surprisingly, until recently that fact has been largely overlooked by pastoral caregivers. Taking a cue from modern psychology, caregivers have tended to view careseekers as isolated individuals who have solely personal concerns. While helping them in their struggles with life problems or their wrestling with theological ideas, caregivers may forget the many people who affect this particular careseeker’s life, either in contributing to her difficulties or in helping her find healing. Human beings are above all social beings, and we do well to take into account the communities of which they are a part when we offer care.⁷

For example, imagine a careseeker (call her Diane⁸) who comes to see you because she is having problems with her teenage son. He is using drugs and was recently arrested for shoplifting. She tells you she just doesn’t know what to do.

The traditional individualistic approach would examine Diane’s beliefs, feelings, and actions in relation to her son, perhaps asking how she may be contributing to his problems, and what she might do differently to solve them. The Communal Contextual approach would explore these things, but also explore what other people (such as the father, siblings, and friends) play significant roles in the son’s life, and how they might also influence his behavior.

Individual Differences and Interculturalism

The Intercultural Paradigm refers to something a bit different—not just the fact that persons are parts of communities, but that the particular communities to which they belong also affect their experience of the world.

For almost a century, psychologists focused most research on young adult Euro-American males attending universities—largely because it was convenient to do so. Studies of their learning processes, social attitudes, emotions, and more concluded that the behavioral findings applied not just to this particular group of people, but to all people.

In recent decades, researchers have begun to question that conclusion, and to ask whether particularities about a person—their gender, ethnicity, age, and other variables—might affect the way people think, feel, and behave. And of course they do.

From this realization, the term social location was coined to indicate that each person lives out of a particular set of characteristics and circumstances that locates them in the social world—characteristics like gender, age, race, ethnicity, culture, sexual orientation, education, socioeconomic level, and social roles (for example, occupation, political party membership, etc.). While individuals may share some commonalities with others, human beings are formed by such a rich composite of circumstances that each person is truly unique.

I write this book from the social location of a Euro-American woman from English/Irish/Scottish and Dutch/German roots, who is a middle-aged, ordained Christian Protestant clergywoman in the United Church of Christ tradition, whose life partner of thirty years is male. All of those things—and many others—have shaped my history, and shape how I understand, practice, and write about pastoral care. In turn, you read this book from your particular social location, which has shaped your history and your understandings.

Being aware of your own social location is important because it affects both your life in general and the care you give. You bring your social location with you into every caregiving situation, and you in turn are influenced by the careseeker’s social location. As you will see later, this important fact can raise certain challenges for you when you are attending to others.

Your Faith Tradition

Your social location includes the faith