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Re-Thinking Pastoral Care
by Thomas Parkinson
The recent story of pastoral care and counseling in America has been a tragic one. Every Christian tradition – Catholic, Protestant, Conservative, Liberal – has experienced the devastating consequences of pastoral care and counseling that turns into sexual and emotional abuse. Appropriate boundaries between pastors and parishioners have been crossed, pastoral authority has been used to exploit others, and lives have been broken because of misguided ventures into pastoral care and counseling.
In the midst of such an unsettling story, pastors today (including myself) struggle to grasp the primary goals and habits that should shape a ministry of pastoral care. Part of the difficulty for pastors today is coming to grips with what it means to be somebody’s pastor instead of their therapist, friend, or lover. Time and again the context of pastoral care is the intimate settings of people’s lives (living rooms, dining rooms, hospital rooms). In such settings it is easy for pastors to lose sense of what they are supposed to be doing in these places, where the deep and personal contours of people’s lives are exposed.
The seventh chapter of Will Willimon’s book Pastor provides a fitting response to the confusion that is the current state of pastoral care and counseling. According to Willimon, the primary challenge for pastors is to offer care that is distinctively Christian. Because pastoral care so often takes place with persons who have significant needs, pastors often feel that the goal of pastoral care is to help people in need – to enable them to be well. This is especially the case in light of the dominance of medical concerns faced by pastors. Since most pastors spend a lot of time visiting the sick and dying, the result is the conception that pastoral care is about enabling people to be healthy. This, Willimon argues, is a big hindrance to care that is distinctively Christian. “Perhaps” he says, “our overarching goal in our pastoral counseling ought to be contributing to our people’s maturity in Christ, rather than to their health” (183).
For Willimon this means that pastors will need to resist the temptation to do all that they can to make people comfortable in moments of pastoral care and counseling. Sure, pastors should make parishioners feel welcome and should create spaces where people can feel free to share their feelings, but that doesn’t mean that pastors should simply avoid speaking a hard word.
Instead, Willimon says, Pastors should be spiritual guides, encouraging (not coercing) people to see their lives in the light of God’s grace and to live accordingly. Providing comfort is not the only means of guiding people. “Pastoral counsel is more than merely tending the wounded, lifting up the brokenhearted. It is also a matter of teaching, guiding, and admonishing the well and well fixed, the satisfied and the content” (185). Care that is Christian challenges people in all circumstances of life to live lives that are faithful to Jesus. This means that pastoral care entails both comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.
So, then, how exactly do pastors cultivate a ministry of pastoral care that guides people into faithful living? While there is no one right way to do this, Willimon is clear that it will first and foremost require pastors who listen discerningly (180). Listening is a skill that some pastors (including myself) struggle with. In reflecting on Willimon’s call for pastoral listening, it occurs to me that there are at least three ways that pastors must listen if they are to be faithful Christian care-givers. First, pastors must listen to God. And while this seems obvious enough, I’m willing to bet that it is one of the most glaring miscues in pastoral care relationships that go bad. If pastors are to guide people into godly living, then they must have some sense of what God is calling people to do. Listening to God is the only way that this can happen. Prayer, scripture reading, and other spiritual disciplines are the tools God has given to enable pastors (and all people for that matter) to hear God’s voice. The pastor who has not spent time listening to God before the moment of pastoral care cannot possibly have anything to offer the parishioner that is distinctively Christian.
Second, pastoral care requires pastors to listen to those for whom they care. This kind of listening involves more than listening to what people say in a counseling session (though this is important), but it also entails listening to their lives. By observing how people live, and what their lives say about their faith, pastors are most prepared to offer godly guidance.
Finally, pastoral care requires pastors to listen to themselves. This kind of listening requires pastors to reflect on how their ministry of caring is affecting their own lives. Is the ministry of pastoral care draining the pastor of energy, harming her own sense of faithfulness, making her feel uncomfortable? By listening to the self, pastors are able to detect particular problems, boundary issues, and selfish motives before they turn into the kind of exploitative pastoral relationships that have dominated headlines in recent years.
Pastoral care and counseling is one of the most sacred and vital gifts of pastoral ministry. With it comes great responsibility. When done well, pastoral care can be life-giving and can be nothing short of a means of God’s grace. But, as is all too evident, when done poorly pastoral care can do more harm than good.
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The Pastor as Guide
by Chad Holtz
A few years ago I was in London and did what visitors to London do – board a double-decker bus and take a tour of the city. Our tour guide seemed trustworthy (he had the accent) and truly interested in our having a good time. He was also very inquisitive. The entire tour he asked nothing but questions such as, “What do you think about this building over here?” or “How does the antiquity of this building make you feel?” He was also very gracious for allowing me to wax eloquent about my favorite attraction, Big Ben, as it is named after one of my favorite football players. He seemed fascinated by my knowledge of clocks, towers, history and football. It was the sort of tour that left me feeling very good about myself. It was worth every penny.
And I knew no more of London after the tour than I did before.
The above story is true only in that I have been to London. The rest is a modern day parable summarizing what I think to be Willimon’s major critique of pastoral care. After a brief tour of pastoral care as it was rendered from the early church forward, Willimon writes,
A major difference between the pastoral care of previous ages of the church and that of our modern era is the switch from care that utilized mostly corporate, priestly, liturgical actions to care that has increasingly limited itself to individualistic, psychologically oriented techniques heavily influenced by prevailing secular therapies (175).
Willimon laments the ways in which pastoral care has in many ways mirrored the secular ways of caring for the soul. He writes that “Counseling is in service to the modern fiction that our lives are what we do and decide, the result of our humane technique, a story that we are telling ourselves” (186). In other words, counseling is the tourist on the bus above, directing the way things go, setting the parameters of the trip.
This is not the Christian way. Christians believe that our lives are not our own but are also a story told by God. We are not the authors of our lives, God is. As such, the pastor is called to be a guide, someone who knows something (not everything, but something) about helping people imagine their lives in light of the gospel. “A skilled pastor,” Willimon writes, “is able to see Christ within the life of a pained parishioner” (185).
This is a valuable insight for all of us who are pastors to keep in mind. We must always remember that our main goal in offering pastoral care is not better health (although that may be a by-product) but helping people grow in their maturity in Christ.
Pastors are guides. Hopefully we can say after time spent with a parishioner that he or she knows more about the story God is writing than they knew before their visit.
Filed under: Pastor by Willimon, books, by Will Willimon | Tagged: Church, Counseling, Guide, Jesus Christ, Pastor, Psychology, Therapy, William Willimon
