An Introduction to Pastoral Care

Caring for the Community of the Christian Story

The revised model of pastoral care proposed in the schema of figure 3 in chapter 4 asserts that pastoral care takes place within the tension between the Christian community and its tradition, on the one hand, and the particularity of each contemporary human situation, on the other. The schema suggests that each end of that equation is to be taken seriously. Care in the Christian sense of the word always involves both care of the community and care of persons involved in any situation with which the pastor is confronted. It involves the pastor both as leader of a community of faith and as symbolic representative of the Christian tradition in personal relationships. Part 2 of this book will deal primarily with the development of this model of pastoral care as interpretive guidance in relation to the leadership of a congregation of Christians.

Influenced by a dominant trend in Western culture in the twentieth century toward specialization of roles and practices, the pastoral leadership of a congregation has likewise tended toward a certain quality of specialization. Pastors have been taught to think of their ministry as a collection of specialized functions. This way of thinking about ministry divides the pastor's work into several functions: preaching, teaching, administration, liturgical leadership, and pastoral care and counseling. One of the results of this functional mode of thinking is that each of these functional roles has to a considerable extent become a specialization claiming dominance in the work of ministry. Functional thinking has encouraged pastors to perceive themselves primarily from within the roles and practices of their specialized functions. Pastors thus tend to choose one or another of these so-called functions as their specialization.

As a result, many pastors evidence a lack of coherence in their work, resulting in a fragmentation of purpose, confusion among often conflicting methods of operation in various functions, valuing of one function and neglect of another, and the like. Pastors need a foundational, organizing image of the whole of pastoral ministry that can give coherence to and inform all of the various functional roles that the pastor plays in the life of the congregation.

I propose that the conceptual image that best gives coherence to ordained ministry within the church is that of the pastor as interpretive guide within the life of the Christian community. That image embraces the care of the community of Christians in all its dimensions. Seen from within a functional understanding of ordained ministry, the function of interpretive guidance thus becomes in a certain sense the "master function" that informs all the various subfunctions of pastoral ministry in the life of the Christian community. It becomes the perspective from which all the functions of ministry—preaching, teaching, pastoral care, organizing and administering, and so on—are given coherence and unity of purpose.

The two chapters of part 2 each take up an important aspect of caring for the community of the Christian story. Chapter 5 deals with the conceptualizing of the role of the minister as interpretive guide, particularly as that role relates to the caring leadership of a Christian community. Chapter 6 is concerned with the relationship between the Christian community and the surrounding cultural situation. Recognizing that Christians must live out their lives in numerous story-shaped activities and relationships, I will try to break open some of the implications of pluralism for the Christian community and its leadership.

Chapter 6 argues that in a fundamental sense the care for the community of believers as well as the care of individuals within or without the community is the work of the laity. The laity are not simply and primarily the recipients of the care of the ordained pastor, although the pastor's own care for the community and for individuals can and should provide all Christians with a symbolic model of care for one another and for the world. Care is thus seen as a primary metaphor that informs the ministry of the church, both lay and clerical. That metaphor symbolically connects the life of the community to the incarnate care of God for God's people and for the world as expressed in Jesus Christ, the One who cared supremely for the world.

Chapter 5

Pastoral Care As Interpretive Leadership

Some years ago I moved with my family to a community of twenty-five thousand people to become pastor of one of the churches of my denomination. We moved our household goods into the parsonage on a hot Thursday in June, and I conducted my first worship service the following Sunday. After greeting and being greeted by a good number of the members of my new congregation, we were just sitting down to a late lunch in our new home when the telephone rang. The person calling was the mother of one of the teenagers in the church.

"Has anyone talked with you about taking the kids to Summer Youth Institute this afternoon?" she asked.

"No, this is the first I've heard about that," I responded, somewhat nonplused by the question.

"Well, there are three of the youth going and I guess we just assumed that you would take them. Our last pastor always did."

As I quickly tried to formulate my response to what struck me as a very presumptuous request, several thoughts ran through my head. I remembered my first conversation with the pastoral relations committee of the church when my appointment as their pastor had just been finalized. My primary memory of that meeting was the question they had pressed me to answer: "What will be your program for our church?"

My response then had been to remind the committee members that it was really their church, not mine. "We will need to work out together what the program of the church we will try to become should be." The discussion that followed had not been an easy or comfortable one for me or, I sensed from the tone of several comments, the laypeople. I came away from that meeting with a clear realization that I would need in the coming months to clarify just what my pastoral leaders up rose was to be. Somehow, the presumptuous request now before me fell on my ears as an echo of the same tone of expectation about pastoral leadership that I had encountered in the meeting with the pastoral relations committee.

phone after church that morning. She had been most fulsome in her greeting, a little too gushy, in a manner that seemed to reflect anxiety. I had made a mental note to make further inquiry about what was going on with this parishioner.

"I had not planned on going to the Youth Institute," I found myself saying to my caller. Her initial response was silence, an uncomfortable silence for me and, I assumed, an uncomfortable one for my caller as well. Then came the verbal response, spoken with anxious hostility: "But how will the kids get to Institute?"

"I guess the parents will need to get together and decide who will take them."

"Well, all right then. I suppose that's what we'll have to do."

As the telephone conversation ended, I was struck with the awareness that I had taken a significant and perhaps risky step toward defining for my new congregation an important dimension of my pastoral role. I was not going to be the one who ran churchly errands or did things for them or their children that they could do for themselves. So what was I to be for and with the congregation? How were they as a congregation to experience my care?

The Multidimensional Nature of Pastoral Care

Our study of the history of pastoral care in earlier chapters has already confronted us with the complex dialectics of care in the church. Pastoral care involves not only the care of individuals and families, but also the care of the community itself. Pastoral care also entails the thoughtful reinterpretation of the tradition that shapes Christian identity as that tradition is brought into dialogical relationship with contemporary culture and its impact on the community of Christians as well as its individual members. I shared the story of my first encounters with members of a local church not in order to discourage readers from driving young parishioners to summer camp, but to illustrate how the issues contained in the quadrilateral schema (care of individuals, care of the community, care of the tradition, and care of the culture) quickly became relevant in my ministry in one local church. Consider some of the issues the story suggests that the first question presented

First, the story suggests that the first question presented to the newly arrived pastor by the congregation will be one concerning both the content and quality of the prospective pastoral relationship. "Who will you be to and for us?" The ways in which that question will be asked will no doubt vary tremendously from one parish to another. The undisguised form of the question put to me by the parish relations committee is probably unusual, but the question will usually be asked in one way or another. It is significant that the form of the question has to do with leadership.

What kind of leader will you be among us? Pastoral care in the parish begins with pastoral leadership. Setting the tone for that leadership will strongly affect every aspect of subsequent pastoral relationships.

Second, pastoral care in the parish is comprised of a complex set of relationships between the pastor and the congregation at multiple levels ranging from the congregation as a whole, to groups within the congregation, to families and individuals within the congregation. From the beginning of my first meeting with the pastoral relations committee, this representative group of laypeople was asking me who I was to be with them. Though there may have been members of that committee who had private and personal reasons for wanting to clarify that relationship, the first question concerned my relationship with the congregation as a whole. "What is your program going to be for our church?"

In an odd way the mother on the telephone was asking the same question. Who will you be here? What can we expect from you? Her decision to call me on the phone with her request rather than speak to me when we first met after morning worship perhaps suggests that at some level she knew that her question was loaded.

The anxiety with which she spoke likewise indicates that she was asking for more than simple information. Her inquiry, at least as I heard it, seems to have been prompted by concerns at several levels. Her request most obviously related to the role I was to play with the church as a whole and with the youth ministry in particular.

At another level, the tone of her approach to me conveyed a vague, unstated disclosure of her own personal need for care. Re-flection on that possibility alerts us to the likelihood that many, if not most requests for personal pastoral care will be made not in a direct manner, but in some disguised form. As a matter of fact, this may well be true of most requests for care at any level.

Third, this vignette of the beginning of my ministry reminds us that when we as pastors enter into ministry in a particular place, we become part of a story of life and ministry that has been going on for a long time before our arrival.

Newly arrived pastors always come into the middle of the stories of a congregation and its individual members, not at the beginning of those stories. In a certain sense the new pastor's arrival on the scene comes as an interruption or an intrusion into whatever stories are being enacted in that place. Given that reality, one of the first requirements of successful pastoral care in a given place of ministry involves patient, curious, and respectful listening to the history of the place as related by different people.

Some stories will be told by leaders of the congregation and some by people who are further from the center of the congregation's life. Friendly and respectful curiosity concerning these stories will do much to set a tone of care for the ensuing pastoral relationships.

Fourth, the story suggests that the pastoral response to requests and questions (especially the first requests and questions) from a congregation needs to be undergirded by and expressive of a clearly understood theology of the church and of ministry. Such a theology can provide a critical check both on the validity of requests made to the pastor and on the appropriateness or inappropriateness of a given pastoral response. A well-thought-out theology was crucially important in my response to the pastoral relations committee. We will need to work out together what the program of the church we will try to become should be. This response implies several things.

It clearly expresses a theology of the church that is nonauthoritarian, egalitarian, and democratic in its style of governance. It values the corporate nature of the church and expresses my desire to avoid if possible the pitfalls of clericalism that have repeatedly brought trouble to the church in the past. It expresses a valuing of a dialogical approach to determining congregational decisions and actions.

My response also assumes that there are no congregations that fully measure up to the standards of the biblical vision of what the Christian congregation should be. The church is always becoming the church, not simply celebrating and living out what the church has already become.

Enabling the local congregation to value and appropriate its history is an important aspect of the pastor's care of the congregation. Just as important is the task of helping the congregation critically consider how it may more fully embody Christ's presence in the world.

Pastors enact their theological presuppositions to the extent that their manner of relating as well as their verbal responses to their congregants remains true to their theology of church and ministry. Pastoral theology is thus an enacted theology, an expression of what the pastor believes about the human condition, the Christian gospel, and the purpose of the church and its ministry as those beliefs are translated into caring pastoral response.

Viewed from the perspective of theology, the pastor's care of a congregation involves the pastor in leading the people in the construction and enactment of a "local theology."

Theology will become real and relevant for members of a local congregation as it is related to the concrete realities of the people in the congregation. Tending the process of this contextualization of theology is an important aspect of the pastor's care of the congregation. By tending that process with care, the pastor expresses care for the Christian tradition and for the larger cultural circumstances that surround the local situation. Said another way, pastoral care of a congregation of God's people involves the construction of a particular context-relevant theological awareness on the part of both pastor and people.

Dimensions of Congregational Life

To speak of pastoral care as involving the care of the congregation as a community that expresses its loyalty to the Christian tradition requires that we examine more closely what a congregation is and does. To provide caring leadership of a community of Christians, the pastor needs not only a clear vision of what a congregation should

An Introduction to Pastoral Care

be, but also the capacity to think and act with clarity in relation to the realities of a given congregation. It is useful to think of the life of the congregation as having five dimensions.

I will therefore speak of the congregation as (1) a community of language, (2) a community of memory, (3) a community of inquiry, (4) a community of mutual care, and a community of mission. The caring pastor is one who gives leadership to the congregation, exercise of all five of these dimensions of its life.

A Community of Language

To say that a congregation is a community of language is to say that the Christian congregation cultivates the capacity of its members to think and talk in certain ways about a wide range of human activities and problems.

Communication makes possible the development of an identifiable Christian group. The Bible provides the language through which communication takes place in the church. Persons are identified with the church as they convey meanings to one another in the language of Christians. Meanings carried in language become a part of the mind and selfhood of persons as they speak and hear. The language of the Bible, as the language of communication to the church, makes possible a common life among Christians.

James Gustafson asserts that for Christians there is a normative way of thinking and speaking meaningfully to one another that is rooted in an appropriation of biblical images and themes. To speak to one another utilizing the imagery of the Bible is to communicate in the native language of the Christian community. Biblical imagery is the mother tongue of Christian people, the language one learns to speak when one wants to say something important about life in the world. That does not, of course, mean that Christian talk is always Bible talk. But it does mean that within the Christian community the language of the Bible has been given a certain authority to which the members of that community are accountable.

For that language to function normatively for Christian people it must not only be spoken freely and naturally, but it must constantly be reinterpreted in relation to whatever immediate human endeavor or problem prompts the community of Christians to want to speak

Pastoral Care as Interpretive Leadership

in that vernacular. For Christian language to remain alive and relevant it must, in short, be cared for and cultivated. It is here that the pastor needs to function as interpretive guide. The pastor knows the Christian language and is fluent in the use of its images and themes, furthermore, the pastor seeks to sensitize the people to the nuanced significance of that language for their lives both as individuals and as a community.

To function as interpretive guide in relation to the church as a community of language the pastor needs not only to interpret the texts and stories of the Bible, but also to carefully guide the process of interpretation. The interpretive guide cultivates a dialogical relationship between biblical stories and the stories of people's lives today. Here the caring pastor functions as coach and facilitator. The good pastor is thus authoritative but not authoritarian. Rather than seeking to exercise the power of control over the thought and behavior of the people, she or he utilizes the power of the pastoral officer to empower the people in their ability to make normative use of biblical themes and images in their lives and in the governance and activity of the church.

A Community of Memory

To comfortably and meaningfully speak the language of the Christian tradition, the community of Christians must remember that they are a people whose identity is shaped by the Bible. But being a community of memory means more than simply remembering how and when to speak the language. It also means remembering the stories that come down to us from the history of the people called Christians. It means the retelling of those stories and the celebration of events and symbolic acts that remind God's people of who they are. As James Gustafson writes:

Subjective understanding comes through remembering and reliving the past. Christians gain not only knowledge about the past, but in a sense participate in the past life of the Church. The self participates in the meaningful history of the Church, and comes to interpret and understand itself in the light of those meanings. The meaning of the past is internalized. The same past is internalized by many. In these processes the sense of common purpose and life grows, and the identity of persons with the historical community is deepened. Continuity of an inner community, and a sense of inner unity, exist through common memory.

Gustafson goes on to speak of the importance of Christians expiencing a continuity between their own life as Christians and the lives of Christian people of the past. To remember is to be reminded of who we are and who we desire to be. Nurturing that sense of continuity within members of the congregation is an important aspect of the pastor's care for the community.

Memory functions at multiple levels in people's lives, as does the pastor's work as nurturer of memory. Some memories can be held in common by members of the Christian community and thereby make possible the common life of Christians together. In the great celebrations of the church—Christmas, Easter, the Lord's Supper, even Sabbath worship itself—the gathered community of Christians is reminded of the life they hold in common not only with their fellow worshipers, but also with all the "fellowship of the saints" who came before them. The care-filled leadership of these celebrations is certainly one of the most important aspects of the pastor's care for the gathered community and for the tradition.

This public ministry of the pastor, important as it is, is not the only context in which the pastor functions as a nurturer of memory. In a sense the pastor wears the mantle of reminder wherever she or he goes in the daily round of varied personal contacts. In pastoral care circles this is often referred to as the “ministry of presence.” As a symbolic figure, the pastor cannot escape being a reminder of whatever membership in the Christian community and ministry within it has come to mean to the individual.

Sometimes this can be a source of considerable discomfort to both the pastor and to the person receiving his or her ministry. I recall, for example, a pastoral care student who went to visit a woman who had just lost her young child to the ravages of leukemia. Introducing himself as one of the pastors in the hospital, he offered to pray with the distraught mother. Her response was immediate: "Your expletive prayers haven't done any good in the past.

Why do you think they would help me now?" She then spit in the startled young man's face. Obviously his presence had not meant to this person what the young pastor intended. It did, however, give him the opportunity to

Pastoral Care as Interpretive Leadership

convey to the woman the meaning of a caring and accepting relationship with a representative of the Christian community and its tradition. Startled by what the woman had said and done, he nevertheless made a courageous decision to stay with her and listen as she vented her pent-up rage and disappointment.

A Community of Inquiry

To be the pastoral leader of a Christian community means to engender in persons, both individually and as a community, a mood and habit of inquiry, most particularly inquiry into the ultimate meaning of their actions and the actions of others upon them. To care deeply for persons is to inquire with them, search with them, question with them about what the events of their lives mean at the deepest level. It also means to inquire with them into the ways in which their questions have been presented in the past and how those questions have been answered, most particularly with the people of the Bible.

To be a pastoral leader of a community of inquiry means to help people articulate their own questions and help them find answers to those questions. It means that the pastor eschews the temptation to provide for others quick and easy answers to their questions even when it may appear that an obvious answer exists. In this way the pastor seeks to nurture inquiry rather than end it by presenting an authoritative response.

It is here that the thoughtful pastor most often experiences the tension that was schematized in figure 3 in the preceding chapter. On the one hand, the pastor is called to be the chief representative of the Christian community and the theologian-in-residence of the community. As such, the pastor is expected to interpret human situations from the perspective the Christian tradition embodies.

On the other hand, as I wrote in chapter 4, the caring pastor identifies with and takes seriously the particularity of whatever situation is at hand. She or he attempts to assist persons caught in any given situation, whether it be a situation of tragic illness or of interpersonal conflict, to articulate the questions that situation raises, and to press those questions against whatever the Christian tradition has to say about them. Here the pastor needs to cultivate the capacity to enter

An Introduction to Pastoral Care

into and facilitate genuine dialogue between the two elements of the equation: the tradition and the situation. As interpretive guide, the pastor stands in the center of that dialogue while remaining open to the possibility of reinterpretation and new insight.

A Community of Mutual Care

A primary function of the Christian community is that of creating and maintaining a climate of relationship within which all members of the community are understood and cared for. To experience such a community is to overcome the loneliness that pervades contemporary culture.

The Dictionary of Pastoral Care and Counseling defines pastoral care of the congregation as "the ministry of oversight and nurture offered by a religious community to its members, including acts of discipline, support, comfort, and celebration." To be a member of the Christian community thus means to give and receive a variety of forms of care. At times, one experiences one's membership in the community in some form of discipline. As noted in chapter 1, the forms of discipline exercised by Christian communities in ancient times have largely disappeared. Penance in the form of exclusion from the community of worshipers is unheard of in our time, for example.

However, there are still ways in which the community of Christians exercises its social pressure on its members with regard to all manner of behaviors and attitudes. More often, however, active members of Christian communities experience their fellow Christians as sources of support, mutual encouragement, and comfort.

Life brings to some persons most of the time and to all persons some of the time situations that tax their own internal or material resources beyond their capacity to sustain hopeful, vital living. One cannot live entirely on one's own. If the truth were known, it is probably that fact about human nature that more than anything else entices people into the relationships of communities such as the church. All of us need and long for a set of sustaining relationships within which we can be open and assured of acceptance.

On the other hand, much of modern life tends toward alienation rather than mutual support. Competition rules much of the marketplace of human relationships. Prejudice, stereotyping, and indifference

Pastoral Care as Interpretive Leadership

ence abound in human relationships, even among family members and coworkers, to say nothing of the Christian community itself. Countering these alienating tendencies in human relationships is an important aspect of the work of the church as a community. The pastor nourishes and engenders a climate of mutual

The community for which she or he seeks to provide interpretive leadership. By his or her manner of relating within the community, others are encouraged to create and participate in a community where everyone feels cared for and nourished. In addition, the pastor needs to recognize that she or he is not alone in providing pastoral care in the fellowship of the community.

Guiding the process of care within the community should mean facilitating and empowering the members of the community in their capacity to care for one another. Organizing, offering training, and, where appropriate, supervising laypeople in their activities of mutual care are significant aspects of pastoral care leadership.

A Community of Mission

As a community that seeks to be faithful to its Lord, the church is called out of itself into the world around it. As H. Richard Niebuhr has said of the influence of biblical faith on Christians, the church "loses its character as Church when it concentrates on itself, worships itself and seeks to make love of the Church the first commandment."

Niebuhr goes on to point out that to be faithful to the God of the church and to Christ, who is its head, the ultimate objective of the Christian community is to increase among all people the love of God and neighbor. Thus, important as is the mutual care of one another, that care is not enough to fulfill the Christian community's loyalty to its tradition.

As interpretive guide of the community of Christians, the pastor is thus called not only to nurture the process by which the community cares for its members, but also to nurture within the members of the community an awareness of the needs of all people in the world. Engaging in pastoral care as interpretive guide means much more than simply being a faithful chaplain to the congregation. It also means articulating the call of the gospel to be concerned for and actively involved in social ministries that care for the dispossessed, the homeless, and the victims of political and economic injustice everywhere.

Dieter Hessel reiterates what our study of the history of pastoral care in part 1 of this book demonstrated; namely, that any attempt to divide the work of ministry between pastoral care and social

Since God is radically social, all modes or dimensions of ministry are social in ways that encompass both personal growth and political responsibility. Congregations must develop the modes of ministry with intentionality and competence, so that ministry contributes to social transformation as well as human fulfillment, to health of community and country as well as human fulfillment, to health of community and country as well as congregational renewal, to local/global action as well as to church growth.

The pastor is called to lead the Christian community to better care for one another and to care for the larger world of human need. In that ministry the pastor is both prophet and priest, and the mode of her or his ministry will most often be as interpretive guide to the people of the community, interpreting with them both the biblical vision of the Christian tradition and the situations that exist in the contemporary world.

At this point, it will be helpful to consider the pastoral care experience of an acquaintance of mine, in which virtually all the dimensions of pastoral care as interpretive guidance were evident. (In order to protect the confidentiality of those involved, I have altered some details of the incident.)

St. Matthew's Church is a congregation of 1,500 members located in an upper-middle-class suburb of a relatively large city where there is a major tertiary medical center. The church membership includes a sizable number of medical personnel, along with the number of business and professional people one would expect to find in a relatively affluent congregation. The congregation includes numerous retired persons living on fixed incomes, many families with young children, and a fair number of young and middle-aged singles. The diverse congregation includes a relatively balanced mix

Pastoral Care as Interpretive Leadership

ture of people with a so-called liberal religious and political mindset and people of a more conservative persuasion. The series of incidents that provide the focus of our attention with a three-

The series of the focus of our attention here took place in connection with a three-week medical mission trip to Somalia organized by a small group of highly motivated doctors and nurses in the congregation and somewhat loosely sponsored by the congregational missions committee. The group making the trip included medical personnel as well as others who went along to provide support for other aspects of the mission. The associate pastor of the church accompanied the group to provide pastoral care for members of the mission and, as appropriate, for those receiving their care.

The instigators and unofficial leaders of the mission, many of whom were members of the mission committee, took firm charge of the arrangements and the selection of the participants. They made several informal reports of their activities to the committee, but did not ask for assistance in establishing the policies that would govern the mission. The missions committee remained somewhat passive in its stance toward the mission but was generally encouraging and supportive. The senior pastor was not consulted, perhaps because he was relatively new to the parish, having arrived after the initial planning had taken place.

It had been decided early in the planning by the project's instigators that the group going to Somalia would not include any married couples. Married persons could participate, but their spouses would need to remain at home. It was also decided that the mission group would meet intensively over a period of several months before departure in order that close relationships could develop and general policies for the mission be unanimously agreed upon. Prayer and Bible study were included in these preliminary meetings. In several announcements to the congregation, members of the church were invited to offer prayerful support of the mission; the lay administrative board of the church was not, however, asked to give its approval of the project.

The first incident for which the senior pastor was called upon to provide interpretive guidance involved a male and a female member of the mission group, along with their respective spouses. These two persons had become more and more romantically involved with each other prior to and during the time the group spent in Somalia. By the time the group returned home, this relationship had blossomed into a full-blown affair. Now both partners in the affair were considering divorcing their spouses in order that they could be free to marry each other. Neither wanted to leave the church and seemed from reports made to the pastor by other members of the mission group, to expect that their newfound love relationship would be accepted by others in the congregation.

The affair first came to the senior pastor's attention when the associate pastor reported her suspicions about it upon her return. Not long after that, both of the spouses who had been left behind came to the pastor seeking pastoral care. The jilted husband expressed great anger toward both his wife and the other man, declaring that "there is not room enough in this church for both of us," and in a similar manner expressing a desire to "punish" his wife for her unfaithfulness.

The forsaken wife also came to the pastor, asking for his help in restoring her marriage. She freely admitted her part in the demise of the marriage and talked about her preoccupation with the couple's two children and with the burden she and her husband shared in relation to her aging parents.

Not long after the pastor had the first of several conversations with the forsaken wife, the woman involved in the affair called the pastor asking if he would see her and her suitor together to discuss some of the implications of their relationship. When he saw them, somewhat to his surprise, they did not ask for his judgment or opinion concerning the relationship as such. Neither did they ask for his counsel concerning their relationship. Rather, they asked him about the effect their both seeking divorce from their spouses and subsequent marriage might have on their future leadership roles in the church.

In reporting the incident to his peer group the pastor confessed his confusion at this point. He felt that the couple was asking for his care, but their request was made in such an ambiguous manner that he felt somewhat helpless to turn the conversation in a productive direction. He then became aware of his own negative feelings toward them and their relationship, mingled with a sincere desire to relate to them in a nonjudgmental manner.

A second incident requiring the senior pastor's involvement pertained to a young single woman in the mission group who was not yet a member of the congregation, although she had been participating in the young adult activities of the church for several months. She had recently completed training as a nurse in a distant city and had come to the community to work at the medical center. The daughter of missionary parents, she had been born in Vietnam but had spent most of her adolescence and adult life in the United States. Greatly moved by the plight of the people of Somalia, this

Greatly women returned from the mission trip with what she felt to be a clear call to go into full-time missionary work as a nurse in Somalia. She had talked informally with the pastor about her desire, but no plans had been made to present her to the lay board of the congregation and ask for the sponsorship of the church.

Not long after the return of the mission group, the chairperson of the missions committee called the pastor, saying that the missions committee would like to have a “commissioning service” for the young nurse at the close of morning worship the following Sunday. Feeling that a formal commissioning was premature since the congregation had not officially offered its sponsorship, to say nothing of formal action by the denomination, the pastor balked, saying that he could not do that without prior approval of the official bodies of the church.

Needless to say, the pastoral response was met with considerable anger on the part of the missions chairperson, who launched into a long diatribe about how the congregation was only interested in its own affairs and did not have an adequate concept of the mission of the church "out there in the world." The commissioning should be held in order to "draw St. Matthew's outside of itself into a larger understanding of missions."

Still uncomfortable with the irregular nature of the request and the lack of opportunity for elected representatives of the congregation to give or withhold their approval and blessing of the young nurse's plans, the pastor stood firm in his refusal to hold the commissioning service. He said that having such a service involving the entire congregation would be "like having a shotgun wedding! I would much prefer people to have the freedom to choose. Unless people have the right to say no, they cannot say yes.

There has been no opening to say no prior to the service. It would be inappropriate to make promises prior to a chance to determine if this was appropriate."

The pastor did agree to discuss the matter further with

The pastor did agree to the mission of the

At the breakfast meeting with the small group from the missions committee the pastor met with considerable resistance to his proposed compromise. Again the issue seemed to turn on the question of how a big congregation like St. Matthew's was to be educated about their responsibility to care for people in far corners of the world rather than simply being self-centered. The missions committee chairperson used a metaphorical image of the church as a number of "little trains trying to move one big rock in the middle.

Each little train must be allowed to do its own work." The pastor responded that the independent trains can work against one another as they try to move the rock (the church). He proposed an alternative metaphor of a "big ocean liner, where you turn the wheel and a long time later you see some results."

There followed a long discussion concerning who had authority in the church, where that authority came from, and how it should be properly used.

The story of St. Matthew's Church continues. Like most stories of churches, its final chapter is yet to be written. We will leave the story at this point in order to reflect on what it has to tell us about the ways in which all the elements of congregational life very often come together at once in the life of any congregation. What does this particular story tell us about pastoral care as care of the congregation? Of the tradition that gives a congregation its identity?

Of persons within the congregation and their care for one another? Of the care of the congregation for persons outside its own boundaries?

Pastoral Care as Interpretive Leadership

The first and most obvious lesson that the situation at St. Matthew's has to teach us is that very often the need for care at all levels is presented to the pastor at once. Rarely does the parish pastor have the luxury of caring for one individual at a time, or, on the other hand, simply caring for the congregation as a community. At various times during the course of the episode at St. Matthew's Church, the senior pastor had to consider at least three different responsibilities.

First, he has to be called to care of the congregation in its pilgrimage toward becoming the people of God they were called to be. He could not act pastorally in this situation without first taking into account the long-term effects of his actions on the congregation. We see this most clearly in his decision regarding whether or not to hold the consecration service as requested by the missions chairperson. Here he saw not only an opportunity to educate his people concerning the importance of world missions, but also an occasion for making decisions about what the church was to sponsor or not sponsor. In this regard it is interesting that he exercised his authority as pastor to empower the congregation to act for themselves rather than assuming the power to act for them.

Reviewing the story of this incident we find ourselves empathizing with the pastor in his dilemma with regard to the missions committee and its chairperson. One can guess that in many respects his sympathies were with the mission faction and its leadership. The missions chairperson seems to speak much of the right language.

He has heard the biblical call to God's people to "go into all the world." We can guess that the pastor probably shares much of the chairperson's impatience with the congregation's self-centeredness. Yet in this situation he quite apparently feels that he must stand against the other's position.

His care for the congregation must take precedence. A closer look at the pastor's stance reveals the possibility that in refusing the chairperson's desire, the pastor may well be performing an indirect act of care for him as well. What is the chairperson with the pastor's refusal? Could it possibly be a time for the chairperson to reconsider the way in which he tends to insist on his own way?

If so, we can see that, unpleasant as it is, he has been offered an act of care.

The pastor's care for the congregation is less clear in regard to the incident of the extramarital affair, no doubt because of the somewhat private nature of the problem presented. Here we can only reflectively question with the pastor how the two impending divorces and the remarriage will affect the congregation. Can the community contain such a violation and disruption of its standards with regard to marriage and family life?

Should it contain such behavior? What about the care of the two marital partners whose covenants with their spouses have been violated? Here the problem of church discipline is raised in an interesting way.

How are the pastor and the congregation to exercise discipline in this situation?

Second, the pastor has to consider his responsibility for the careful interpretation and reinterpretation of the biblical and theological tradition that by his ordination he is called upon to keep in lively dialogical relationship with the events in the lives of his congregation.

If the pastor of St. Matthew's Church is to fulfill his function as theologian-in-residence for his congregation, he must be alert for opportunities to foster a reflective dialogical process between situations in the common life of the congregation and the images and themes that have shaped Christian identity in times past. We would expect that dialogue to be a mutually critical process rather than simply a proclamation of truths that have already been demonstrated. Where and when, we may ask, do opportunities arise in the series of incidents at St. Matthew's for the pastor to foster this kind of dialogue?

In that regard, several critical events in the story come to mind. I think, for example, of the conferences the pastor had with all four of the central characters involved in or directly affected by the extramarital affair. All four came to the pastor because they respect his office as pastoral theologian. The errant couple seem to be seeking the pastor's blessing on their relationship.

Neither of them want to leave the church. Yet they wonder aloud about how their behavior will affect their future in the congregation. Does that not indirectly invite the pastor to help them think about what their behavior and the norms for Christian life have to say to each other?

Their request for care seems clearly, albeit indirectly, to ask for talk about their situation in the language of Christian faith.

I think also of the tangled sequence of events involving the missions committee and the Somalian mission. Would not serious and sustained conversation about the meaning and purpose of the church's mission in the world and, perhaps even more, talk about the catalytic function of committed groups within the congregation be an important aspect of the pastor's care for the tradition and for the community of Christians? If so, how is the pastor to foster such conversation? Here the quality of pastoral leadership seems crucial. Third, the pastor must consider his responsibility to fulfill the

Third, the pastoral role with individuals and families in the congregation. The story of St. Matthew's Church demonstrates dramatically the way in which the care of the congregation and its tradition is virtually always intertwined with and complicated by the needs of various individuals for pastoral care directed to their particular need and expectation. The pastor of St. Matthew's could not simply deal with group and congressional issues as the story unfolded. In the midst of thinking and acting as pastoral leader and administrator of the church, he also had to respond to the unique needs of particular persons as well.

Balancing care of the individual with care for the larger community, such an ongoing challenge for the parish minister, is not as pressing a task for the clergyperson engaged in counseling or psychotherapy as a specialized ministry. In the latter case, ministers ordinarily have no acknowledged responsibility beyond that to the person being counseled in a private office. Not so with parish pastors. They quite frequently have to balance (and on occasion, juggle) their responsibility to individual parishioners and their responsibility to the larger congregation.

We have discussed how the pastor at St. Matthew's was confronted with his obligation to the first three nexus points of our quadrilateral schema: care for the community, care for the tradition, and care for individuals. I want now to consider the fourth point of the quadrilateral: care of the culture. The Christian community is not the only community to which its members belong.

Rather, the Christian community and its tradition are set within a world of many communities. These multiple communities have a profound effect upon people, and they shape many of the human needs and problems that call for the care of pastors and churches. The next chapter will seek to address this complexity of modern life in multiple communities.

The Christian Community in a World of Many Communities

"Howard" was no stranger to me. I had been his pastoral counselor for several years. Our relationship had been prompted by his general dissatisfaction with his work as an attorney, an increasingly troubled marriage, and his growing awareness that his drinking was beginning to interfere with his ability to cope with his job and his marriage. Over the years we had worked together I had seen him get his drinking problem well enough in hand that he had been "dry" for over a year, though he still had dreams (both while asleep and awake) that revealed a persistent wish to "get good and drunk, chunk it all, and go lie on the beach in Florida." Our work together had also resulted, quite without any direct suggestion from me, in his taking a more active role in his community of faith.

One day, Howard came to me to talk about his difficulties in prioritizing his commitments of his time and energy. As he put it, "I don't know when I should be faithful to what. All the worlds I live in keep wanting my full attention at the same time."

I immediately found myself strongly empathizing with Howard. I too had often found myself caught in a conflict of loyalties, as have, I would imagine, most people who read this book. But my lawyer counsellee seemed more troubled about this human dilemma than what you and I ordinarily experience.

My help-seeking friend needed little prompting to relate the incident that had sparked his heightened awareness of his old problem of divided loyalties. As a corporate lawyer whose practice involved legal work for “big money” transactions between both large and small corporations, Howard was frequently involved in high-pressure, “we need this done by yesterday!” situations. On the weekend just before we met, Howard had been involved in one of those situations. The clients with whom he was working at the time had in a late-night Friday meeting finally come to an agreement in a complicated deal. When they finished, they asked the lawyers from each side to put the agreement into legal form and have it ready for them to sign first thing Monday morning. Now the work for Howard and the other attorneys began to since it was the weekend, they agreed that they would all return to their home bases and draft contracts proposals, then get together on the telephone Sunday morning to call Howard at his office sometime between nine and ten o'clock—an arrangement that, though he disliked working on Sunday, suited Howard since that would perhaps give him just enough time to finalize the document and maybe make it to church to be with his family for the eleven-o'clock worship service. Howard told me at this point in his telling the story that he realized now that his desire to be with his family at church was probably a vain wish.

But he reiterated, it was also a wish that he felt strongly about. Howard worked until nearly midnight Saturday (one of his usual days at home) and completed his draft of the contract. When he left home at eight-thirty the next morning, he promised his loyal but by this time frustrated wife that he would do his best to make it to church sometime close to eleven and spend the rest of the day with her and the children.

Ten o'clock came, and Howard's counterpart had not called. Eleven came, and still he waited. He fiddled with other work on his desk that had been held in abeyance while he had been preoccupied with this case. He spotted several other pressing matters that demanded his immediate attention.

A virtual parade of his many obligations and relationships, not only in his legal vocation, but also in his private life, passed through his mind. He was worried about his marriage. It had been a shaky, strained relationship for some time.

He thought about his oldest son, with whom he needed to spend more time. Young Howard, Junior., was not doing well in school and neither Howard nor the boy's mother approved of a recent intense relationship with a girl who young Howard's parents thought to be emotionally unstable.

As all this and more flooded its way through his mind, Howard found himself feeling frustrated and angry. Although his anger had been prompted by the silent telephone, his feeling focused not only the Kristmul Kristmul Kristmul CHRI

It was nearly noon before the other attorney called, and the resolution of a number of differences in the wording of the contract took until almost two o'clock. When he finally arrived home in mid-afternoon, his wife would scarcely speak to him and his son had left to take his girlfriend to the movies. Tired and depressed, Howard retreated to his study and settled in to watch the rest of a football game on the television while he ate a sandwich. By midweek, when he came to see me for his regular counseling appointment, he had made several moves that had in a fragile way resolved the situation.

By Monday he and his wife had managed to have a short conversation in which they mutually expressed their frustration with their lifestyle and Howard had apologized for allowing his work to intrude on their sacred time. Howard had also made the decision to bill the client who had set him up to have to spend his weekend on this case the full price for all the hours that he had spent working and waiting for the contract work to be completed. He took some grim satisfaction in knowing that "somebody had been made to pay!"

In a number of important ways, Howard's situation provides a prototype of the problems for pastoral care practice that I want to address in this chapter: the problems of offering guidance to communities of Christians and their individual members as they seek to keep and clarify their faith in a time marked by pluralism, relativism, and competitive cultural confusion.

Clearly, Howard's problems were a multiple, interrelated levels. Some aspects of his struggle to find integrity and balance in his life were undoubtedly grounded in a lifelong individual quest for authentic identity. The only son of an alcoholic father and an insecure, neurotically anxious mother, Howard had from an early age been profoundly insecure about his own selfhood, uncertain as to his abilities, and in need of a role model he had never had.

Thus it may be said that the core of his uncertainty was relational. He rarely felt "at home" with others, and least of all his own immediate family and his closest business colleagues.

Yet Howard had many friends and acquaintances, most of whom would have described him as a very accomplished and talented person who had achieved success worthy of admiration or even envy. He was a good lawyer: hard-working, knowledgeable about the law, and creative in his ability to solve intricate legal problems. Thus it can also be said that Howard, albeit with much pain and anxious worry, had in many ways learned to adapt to a challenging life situation.

He was also quite serious in his efforts to find meaning and coherence in his life. He had worked hard in his counseling relationship with me. After a number of setbacks, he had mastered his drinking problem enough that he had a growing confidence in his ability to remain sober.

Howard had enrolled in his church's intensive theological course for laypeople and actively engaged in searching discussions with his fellow class members as they sought together to relate their religious studies to the activities and problems of their daily lives. In short, he was a serious Christian, although one who admitted to equally serious doubts.

The pastor who keeps her or his caring eyes and ears alert to what is going on with members of the community of faith will see and hear many stories not unlike Howard's. Differing in detail, to be sure, these stories will be about personal, interpersonal, and relational problems of varying severity, intermixed with problems that are rooted in the practices of a time and place (that is, cultural and societal problems). Furthermore, inextricably intertwined with these human dilemmas are themes of the human quest for meaning and that ingredient of life that we generally think of as religious faith.

In chapter 1, I introduced a quadrilateral schema for pastoral ministry, involving four dimensions of care: care for the Christian tradition, (2) care for individuals and their families, (3) care for the community of Christians, and (4) care in relationship to the sociocultural situation in which the Christian community finds itself.

Taking all four of these practices in the past, there is no change in the general practice of taking an approach to pastoral care. How can the past or the present be effectively implemented as a general practice? How can the past or the present be effectively implemented as a general practice? How can the past or the present be effectively implemented as a general practice?

Reflections like Howard, most pastors have difficulty holding all the forces that play on their lives in the kind of creative tension that nurtures authentic selfhood. To paraphrase Howard, "How are we to know when to be faithful to what?"

For Howard this dilemma was sharply focused in his divided loyalty to home and family, on the one hand, and the demands of his legal practice, on the other. This focus, however, was symptomatic of profound splits that cut across virtually every aspect of Howard's life. Divided loyalties was a condition that pervaded his character, making it difficult for him to feel satisfied with any area of his life's activity.

In order to understand Howard's situation deeply enough to offer him pastoral guidance, I needed to give attention to all four dimensions of the quadrilateral schema. To define his problem simply as one rooted in his childhood background and psychological development, important as it is to understand him from that perspective, would be to settle for a shallow understanding of Howard's situation. Furthermore, such an explanation would focus on his weaknesses rather than invoke his strengths.

The search Howard was undertaking in his counseling relationship with me, although it was not spoken of in these terms, contained all four of the elements of the quadrilateral. He certainly sought help in understanding himself as an individual. By the time of the interview described here, Howard had made considerable gains in his self-awareness and some significant gains in self-acceptance, although he still was often plagued by self-doubt. He also sought my help in understanding his relationships with the various communities to which he belonged. He was trying to understand his role in his marriage, as a parent, in the legal profession, and, significantly, in the church.

The limits on Howard's ability to act freely and creatively in his situation are not simply psychological; they are to a significant extent culturally systemic. They are endemic to the society in which his life is located. Our society has structured how the legal profession is to be practiced and assigned a high priority and value to work, relative to family responsibilities and leisure activities. Howard's problem reflects the relatively low priority his society has given to participation in a faith community.

Theological Reflection in Pastoral Practice

If pastoral care is to be truly pastoral, it must focus on more than individual and societal concerns. Pastoral care must focus serious attention on the norms that emanate from the biblical and theological tradition. How and when are these norms to guide the pastoral relationship and how do they offer guidance to help persons such as Howard understand the tradition as it relates to their decisions and actions?

It is at this point that both young, inexperienced pastors and pastoral care veterans may often find themselves caught between two horns of a dilemma. Shall I respond to an apparent invitation to share my pertinent biblical or theological wisdom and thus risk seeming to give authoritative or even authoritarian advice? Or shall I follow the admonitions of nondirective counseling and simply try to help the person clarify his or her own feelings, desires, and judgments about his or her possible courses of action? Should I be implicit or explicit in my representation of the faith tradition? Somewhere between those two extremes lies the ground, undergirded by empathy and trust, where pastor and parishioner can search together for solutions that consider the multiple facets of both the faith tradition that brings them together and the unique needs of the person who seeks help.

Larry Kent Graham has written cogently about this matter of the use of pastoral authority in his book Care of Persons, Care of Worlds:

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The ministry of care is a particular context in which the suffering connected with symptomatic crises may be contained, their causes and meanings explored, and new patterns of relatedness fashioned. The ministry of care seeks to promote change. In general terms, change is understood as an effective increase of love, justice, and ecological partnership throughout the psychosystemic matrix.

More particularly, the ministry of care seeks to promote a creative modification of the power arrangements in the existing structure of things. It attempts to reorder the values that are contributing to symptomatic behaviors. It identifies destructive outcomes. Thus, for the pastoral caretaker, symptomatic crises are an invitation to be a participant in changing the fundamental fabric of personal and social reality, and to reconstruct the environment.

Pastors will find that people vary widely in the extent to which they are self-conscious in their efforts to govern their lives according to Christian norms, values, and meanings. Some, like Howard, will express these concerns quite openly and conscientiously. Some will appear to be obsessed with questions about the rightness or wrongness of their actions as judged by the way in which they have appropriated some interpretation of moral or religious norms.

Others will appear to give little thought to such questions, rather making decisions and acting in a manner that seems quite unself-conscious. The care the pastor offers must be adapted to these concerns, while at the same time remaining faithful to the role of differences, while the same relative of the tradition of the church.

As figure 3 in chapter 4 depicts, pastoral care exists in the space between the story of the Christian community and the particular stories of individuals within the community. In the one-to-one relationships of pastoral care, the amount and variety of talk about explicitly Christian matters will vary widely. At times and with some people, conversing about the norms that govern or should govern the behavior of the parishioner will be the focus of the relationship.

At other times such explicit concern with religion and theological norms will be very much in the background. At no time should careful attention to these concerns be totally absent from the pastor's own reflections about the situation.

As I have emphasized throughout this book, the realities of life in the modern world require that all people, including pastors, muddle their way through life, making decisions and carrying on relationships while living with a complex web of story-constructed activities, communities of relationships, and value-laden ways of life. Our lives are structured not within one narrative, one story that shapes who we are or want to be, but many often congruent, but sometimes conflicting stories.

Howard strove to live up to the demands and values inherent in the ongoing story of the legal profession while yet attempting (and often failing) to fulfill the expectations inherent in the story of marital and family life he had inherited from his culture and his forebears, as well as the story of his own marriage. Just as Howard had to live within many stories, so it is with all of us.

Here we encounter the pervasive pluralism that increasingly characterizes twentieth-century corporate and individual life. As the social psychologist Kenneth J. Gergen has said:

The stage is set. We play out our lives largely within the languages of romanticism and modernism. These modes of understanding ourselves and others are built into the fabric of our daily relationships, without them daily life would be unlivable. Yet we are bombarded with ever-increasing intensity by the images and actions of others, our range of social participation is expanding exponentially. As we absorb the views, values, and visions of others, and live out the multiple plots in which we are enmeshed, we enter a postmodern consciousness. It is a world in which we no longer experience a secure sense of self, and in which doubt is increasingly placed on the very assumption of a bounded identity with palpable attributes.

Although Gergen's book speaks primarily about what is most clearly seen in middle-and upper-class Western culture, in his judgments about the "saturation of the self" in contemporary life, Gergen has identified a process that has profound implications for pastoral care by and within the Christian community. Again, we see Howard's situation as prototypical of a more pervasive problem.

As interpreter of both the Christian tradition and the contemporary situation, the pastor offers a broad range of guidance to individuals and families, as well as to the faith community as a whole. In sermons and stories, religious celebrations and crisis care, the pastor offers assistance to persons in their attempts to place all the Kristeeun Communities of many Communities aspects of contemporary life within the meaning framework of Christian language and imagery.

In addition, the pastor helps to process of coordinating the demands of the various communities to which persons belong. Each community, with its unique story and its unique values, vies for the fidelity of its members. How does one adjudicate between the demands of the competing communities to which she or he belongs? Here is encountered the problem of relativism and the attraction of ideological monism—the desire for the simplicity of one way of seeing and experiencing the world versus the nihilism of existing in a world where all things have been made so relative as to lose all sense of what is normative. In contemporary pastoral practice, finding ways to assist persons to ground their lives in the Christian narrative while yet remaining open to and participating in other communities shaped by other ways of seeing the world becomes a major and sometimes overwhelming task.

The Pastor's Own Experience of Pluralism and Relativism

Many pastors experience divisions of loyalty similar to Howard's. Not only do pastors often feel caught between loyalty to family and loyalty to the demands of pastoral practice, they also live with a more or less constant set of tensions among various aspects of their ministry practice itself. Which of the various practices of ministry claims priority upon their time and talents? By what criteria are they to decide what is most important to do today? This week? This year?

I believe that we can extend the analogy between Howard's situation and that of the typical parish pastor. The extended analogy will be illuminating for our search for ways in which the quadrilateral schema for pastoral care can become operational in the ordinary, day-to-day practice of ministry in a time of pluralism and relativism.

Although there are numerous ways in which the dominant presence of pluralism and relativism in Western culture affects the caring ministry of the congregation and its pastoral leader, I will confine my discussion in this chapter to two ways that affect the work of pastoral care most directly. First, as pastors go about their work—visiting the sick, counseling individual parishioners, intervening in marital and family conflicts, and the like—they will encounter a profusion of differing ways in which parishioners have approached the culture's changing methods of understanding and evaluating human behavior and relationships. Differences between parishioners' perceptions

Some differences between parishioner's perceptions have their roots in conflicts of generational loyalties. Each passing generation tends to have its own dominant way of creating and coping with the way of life that characterizes its time. In everything from tastes in music and speech to modes of structuring relationships with inmates or strangers, each generation sets its cultural standards. In very general, social-psychological terms, we may say that people in a given generation tend to resist the cultural practices of the following generation, while yet consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, attempting to alter the values, practices, and ways of thinking of the preceding generation.

From a more individual-psychological perspective, we can see a multiplicity of ways in which a given individual may either resist, passively conform to, or enthusiastically endorse the emerging way of life of their own generation or even the succeeding generation. The popular notion that older people tend to be “conservative,” while the young can be counted on to be “liberal” or even “radical” turns out to be nothing more than a cliché.

Because pastors, like parishioners, are embedded in their cultural surroundings, they are as subject as anyone else to the influences of popular culture. Unless the pastor appropriates modes of critical thinking provided by theology and other disciplines, the pastor will consciously or unconsciously fall prey to popular cultural meanings and practices. That being the case, the pastor may find himself or herself the unwitting representative not of the theological tradition, but rather of the ebbs and flows of popular culture.

Good pastoral care necessitates careful exercise of the pastor's interpretive skills. As we saw in our discussion of earlier historical epochs, a critical approach to pastoral interpretation, which respects both the authority of the faith community's tradition and the movement of the historical process, is essential for adequate pastoral interpretation.

This brings us directly to a second way in which the work of pastoral care confronts the impact of pluralism and relativism on the cultural situation of our time: namely, the pluralism of theories, both the Krist theological/ethical and social-scientific/psychotherapeutic, that vie for the pastor's loyalty and practical application to the ministry of care. I delved into important aspects of that problem in chapter 4, there emphasizing the pluralism of approaches to theological con- duction and interpretation.

In the day-to-day practice of pastoral care, however, theological pluralism is not the only way in which the pastor is confronted with the forces of pluralism and relativism. Since the rise of psychology and psychotherapeutic approaches to understanding human behavior and the helping relationship, pastors have been confronted with the need to select from a broad range of "secular" theories about human relationships and behavior that can be utilized in their pas- voral work.

In the past several decades, during the heyday of the psychotherapeutic paradigm for pastoral care, a plethora of psychotherapeutic models for pastoral care practice—everything from Rogerian “nondirective” or “client-centered” counseling to family systems theory—have been brought forward as models for pastoral work. Many of these adaptations of so-called secular methods for intervention into human problems may well be found to be, in the practical sense, useful to pastoral who are searching for disciplined ways to help persons in need of pastoral guidance. Such adaptations can become problematic, however, in a number of ways, all of which involve confronting the problems of pluralism and relativism in contemporary society.

First, if the pastor makes decisions about which method to use in a given situation of need simply on a pragmatic basis, he or she may unwittingly become caught in the loose relativism to which contemporary Western culture is so prone. In the pulpit the pastor may indeed seek to uncover and combat just this kind of slippery relativism, while setting over against it the disciplined life of loyalty to the standards set by biblical or traditional Christian understanding. Simultaneously, in the privacy of the counseling room, there may be little evidence that these standards have been carefully and critically applied either in the choice of counseling methodology or in the manner in which a given method is practiced.

As a so-called generalist discipline that draws upon a wide variety of perspectives, disciplined ministry is not only caught up in the problems

An Introduction to Pastoral Care

of cultural pluralism, it depends on the richness of pluralism for its lively variety of perspectives and methods of caring for people's needs.

Toward a Disciplined Ministry of Care in an Age of Pluralism

We have discussed the problems posed for pastors and parishioners by the prevailing relativistic pluralism of our time, and we have noted the rich variety of resources pluralism brings for understanding and potentially resolving human individual and communal conflicts. Yet one crucial question remains to be asked: How can the caring member of the Christian community, whether lay or ordained, be self-consciously governed by the norms embodied in the Christian tradition while yet participating in and making use of "secular" ways of understanding and working with human problems? Said another way, how can Christians in their life of care in the world be both faithful and worldly-wise?

in response, I offer a fourth schema for pastoral care:

In this schema, which obviously needs to be utilized with imagination and flexibility, every human activity involves certain values and methods for getting things done or making things happen. These methods and values may differ widely from one activity to another. Usually, people exercise their values and methods for Kristeeun Community in A World of many Communities getting things done quite naturally, based on their preconceptions about the task at hand. Thus, without some grounding or arching vision, the many activities in which humans participate can become fragmented.

Within the schema depicted in figure 4, it is the vision provided by the primary narrative understanding of the world, the vision toward which the individual gives his or her ultimate loyalty, that alone gives life coherence and offers a means for making consistent decisions in the flow of life's varying experiences. For Christians, that vision emerges out of continuing participation in the life of a community of faith.

: Figure 4 summary: A diagram mapping the word "VISION" to a series of alternating "Value" and "Method" categories, which then align with the word "ACTIVITY". This layout illustrates a conceptual link between inner vision and outward activity, suggesting that a combination of personal values and methods is what translates an individual's vision into action.

This does not mean that the language of the church. They quite rightly think and speak the many languages of the varying activities of their lives. But the language of faith does provide them with a relatively constant check, a measuring stick by which they can make judgments about the methods and values expressed in any of their activities.

A rather imperfect analogy has often occurred to me in thinking about this matter as it applies specifically to the pastor's use of non-Christian theories and methods of helping people resolve life problems. In certain ways it is like learning to speak a second language. The second language offers a new and different set of nuanced meanings that can be immensely illuminating of one's view of the world. The new language can greatly influence one's relationships and approaches to problems. Nevertheless, there will be times when one is moved to return to one's native language to find one's bearings.

The analogy is apparent. For the Christian pastor (and indeed for the committed layperson) the native language is Christian theological language. One's thinking and acting must meet the test of that way of thinking and behaving. The vision contained in that tradition provides the filter through which all other ways of speaking and acting must finally be tested and appropriated.

This chapter has only begun to plumb the depths of implications for pastoral ministry that the schema of figure 4 contains. Some of these implications will be apparent in the chapters of part 3. Remembering that each human situation that the pastor encounters will ask its own questions of the faith and practice of the people called Christians, readers may be assured that they will encounter in their practice ever new ways to put the schema to the test.