Renovating Pastoral Care

Yesterday, Tuesday 24th, I went down to Waverley Abbey House for the third workshop on pastoral care. Once again the drive was long and slow for the most part thanks to roadworks and traffic. Certainly no sign that rising fuel costs are taking many vehicles off the roads! 

These workshops have all followed the same pattern of interactive dialogue. The value of this approach is that you can listen to and learn from the practices and questions of others. The disadvantage is that the focus constantly shifts and tangents become the main line of the discussion. It takes quite a lot of effort therefore to try and stay on topic and relate what's being shared to the focus of the day.

Having said that, I think I've learned a lot since the first workshop. I found that first outing quite difficult because I felt we strayed too far too often from the topic, but I realised that I could play a part in keeping to topic by asking good questions when appropriate.

What was interesting about yesterday was the way the discussion about pastoral care opened up. No one seemed phased by the thought of moving pastoral care away from simply focusing on the needs of church members and attendees, into a broader concept of caring within a wider community. Soon there was much talk about programmes and projects that would normally have been assigned to the mission committee but that now find their home within a pastoral care framework. This raises an important question about the role of pastoral care in mission.

Maybe John Stott was right when he said that everything the church does is mission (something I remember from an essay I wrote in my college days).

This question about pastoral care and mission drew me back towards the "high grace, low risk" concept in servant evangelism. Isn't it also true to say that to care for someone with the compassion of Jesus is to incarnate that compassion. In other words, pastoral care, when broadened to include those things we do for others in our wider community are an expression of the incarnational church which, in turn, is a truly missional church in action.

So, lots to think about, lots still to process. I suspect that there is some bigger picture that is emerging here about how we do church and how we do mission and relationships. It's probably less programme driven and much more relationally driven, organic rather than mechanical.

More to come I'm sure.