Here’s a little prediction for church planters. As your church grows, pastoral care needs will grow too and not just in number but in complexity. If you plant with a core team of 20-30 people, you might expect the occasional situation where someone is suffering and you will be called to walk with them through that suffering. You will know them well as friends and so, it will be natural to walk with them and empathise with them.
However, fast forward five years and picture a church of 80 plus. There are likely to be lots and lots of pastoral cases. Hopefully you will be reaching a diverse range of people and your congregation will experience the challenges that come with the passage of time, they will be looking for counsel about finding jobs, relationships and marriage, long term singleness, understanding their sexuality, raising children, coping with ill health, looking after aging parents, aging themselves and bereavement.
If you are reaching into a needy area, then there will be other pastoral questions, how to bring up children as a single parent, how to battle drug and drink addictions, what to do about violence in the neighbourhood, overcoming debt and so on. You may also have people looking for your help with an asylum case or benefits paperwork and appeals. Indeed, I would expect that as you become more and more rooted into a community that not only will you be picking up pastoral issues as people become Christians and are discipled, rather, the pastoral issues will be the thing that bring you into contact with people in the first place. They will come looking for help. Not only that but they will come to you desperate, like the woman who grabbed hold of Jesus’ cloak, they will already have tried everything else, doctors, social services, therapists.
It is tempting to see these things as a distraction. You are in the business of preaching the Gospel and it will feel like these cares and concerns could overwhelm you and take up your time. You may also be used to the line that you aren’t the expert, you aren’t there as a therapist and so difficult cases can and should be passed to those experts. I’d encourage you to remember a couple of things here. First, they may already have tried the experts, they don’t need encouragement to get help, they need someone who can help. Second, historically, the expectation was that the clergy and pastors were equipped to help in these kinds of cases. So my first bit advice is “tool up.” Be ready to help serve your church and community by offering pastoral care and counselling. This is likely to mean investing in ongoing training to equip you to do this.
My second bit of advice would be to lean into the pastoral care needs. Instead of seeing it as a distraction, see it as a wonderful opportunity. The opportunity is to be proactive in pastoral care so that it becomes a means for discipleship. In fact there are two elements to this opportunity. First, there’s the opportunity to spend time with people applying God’s word from the Sunday teaching 1-1. Secondly, pastoral care can help to inform your preaching and teaching and help you apply God’s Word to your context.
I would encourage church planters to plan ahead so that they are not reacting when the needs begin to mount up. Put good pastoral care systems in place from day one.
Faithroots 