One of the things that I’ve been thinking quite a bit about recently is how a church develops pastoral care as it grows from being a small church plant, a group of young friends that know each other well to being a medium to large sized established multigenerational and multi-cultural church.
You can listen to some of my reflections on this in the following video which is the start of some pastoral care training that I’m putting together.
Some things that start to become apparent are that it is very different when you are caring for lots of people with similar needs to when there are one or two. For example, if you occasionally have someone in the church who gets into financial difficulties who you know well, then you may be inclined to step in individually and give them a lot of intensive support including through personal gifts. Whether or not that is helpful, it becomes unsustainable once you have a sizeable proportion of the congregation who are in dire need and where you have not built up a relationship over time.
So, although we often don’t like the idea of formality, we do need to develop good care systems and processes which enable people to know how to respond in particular situations, keep things transparent, ensure appropriate confidentiality and enable those involved in pastoral care to escalate as appropriate whilst ensuring that one or two leaders are not overwhelmed with every situation.
At its simplest, and the method that many churches use, a good care system is based around small groups (home groups, life groups, community groups or whatever you call them). If this is your pastoral approach, then it is important to make sure that everyone in the church understands this. You probably want to ensure that every member is allocated to a group (rather than opting in to whichever group they choose). You want to get the balance right so that you don’t fall into heavy shepherding. What I’ve tended to encourage is that people are allocated to a group with the message that the group is not just about a midweek meeting. They can then choose whether or not to attend the midweek meeting for their group but they know that those in the group are encouraged at an initial level to look out for each other. This means for example that if someone needs practical help moving home or with meals being cooked after having a baby or a hospital visit that the group take responsibility for this.
It also means that if someone has a pastoral need, that they are encouraged as a first port of call to approach their small group leaders. Group leaders should have a level of pastoral care training that enables them both to proactively look out for warning signs of issues and to respond to requests with a form of pastoral care first aid and triage.
This also means that they should know when there is a need to escalate the issue to leaders/elders. In many medium/small sized churches, there will be an overlap because there will be an elder in/leading each group. As a church grows and groups multiply, this will not always be the case. Now, sometimes it will be obvious when the matter needs flagging up. This will be when it becomes clear that it cannot be resolved by a chat, cuppa and prayer. They are not just looking for someone to offload to. I would expect issues such as a marriage crises, serious sin or terminal illness to be brought quickly to the elders. However, it may not always be clear cut and so the onus needs to be on the elders to check in regularly with small group leaders, whether one to one or at a meeting of small group leaders to see what is going on pastorally. In some churches, one elder/leader will have responsibility for all small group ministry whilst in others, different elders may keep an eye on two or three groups each.
One thing you will begin to pick up on over time is that a church may experience a concentration of particular issues. For example, some churches will have a high number of asylum seekers, others will have a significant number of elderly people, workers in particular professions (often teachers, medics and carers) or students. There are actually two positives about this. First of all, you become more effective at responding to issues. At Bearwood, we were blessed with a multigenerational church from 0-90+. This means a reasonable proportion of the church were elderly but also that there were a good number in their late middle ages so that we could expect a couple of bereavements each year either because one of our own older people went to be with the Lord or because someone’s parent died. This means that we had routines and processes that kicked in as soon as we got a call to say that someone was in hospital and dying or that they had died. We knew instinctively and intuitively what to do and weren’t scrabbling round trying to work it out. This helped people feel safe and it also meant we could keep our focus on the person.
Another advantage is that we can be proactive. We don’t need to wait for a crisis to hit and can do things with groups of people together. For example, if you have a large number of people who work in caring professions, you can get them together from time to time to talk about self -care and joyful sustainability through stressful situations. With people in medical or teaching professions, there may be a case right now to get them together to talk through how to be faithful and live out their faith in the face of specific ethical challenges.
Finally, I would encourage you to include in your pastoral systems links to outside support. This both includes personal support for you (who pastors the pastors) but also people you can go to for help with trickier pastoral cases. That might simply be the pastor of another church, people with responsibility as part of your network (whatever title they are given) or outside agencies with specific expertise. This includes a readiness to link people up with professionals whether that’s legal, medical or therapeutic.
Faithroots 