Leonard Theological College
Class: BD II
Course Code: BMC01
Subject: Principles and Practices of Pastoral Care and Counselling
Introduction and Functions of Pastoral Care
Introduction:
Rev. Anton Boisen, the father of Clinical Pastoral Education/ Training movement in the 1920s.
He initiated Clinical Pastoral Education when he saw the need for pastoral care in mental
hospitals after being a patient there himself. He placed theological students in supervised
contact with patients in mental hospitals. He gave a strong emphasis on the role of theology in
pastoral care – faith and mental health theology and psychology.
Pastor comes from a Latin word meaning “shepherd” which is related to pastus which mean
“feeding” just as how the shepherd sees to the feeding, well being, and growth of the flock so
also does the pastor. Moreover, the word “pastor” in its adjective form “pastoral” refers to the
life and work centring around tending and caring in general.
Pastoral psychotherapist Margret Zipse Kornfeld elaborates on a gardening image comparing to
the importance of pastoral care and counselling:
Counsellors in (the religious) community assist God’s children as they grow in the natural cycle
of life. A gardener must observe Nature to find how plants grow and develop. The counsellor,
too, must learn how God’s children grow to become themselves to thrive, blossom, die, and be
transformed. This knowledge helps the counsellor know how to support the natural process in
our many beginnings. Counsellor in community do not make these new beginnings – birth,
maturation, independence, falling in love, new families, vision quest, meaning making- happen.
Like the gardener, they are present at these times of beginning and are in awe.
The mission is to be innovative and proactive in helping mend the shattered sense of
community in the neighbourhoods and society around them. However, they must first find
healing for the brokenness in themselves and then reach out as healing catalyst in their own
families, congregations, and wider community. Even Jesus as a caretaker went beyond his
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healing ministry with sick and troubled individuals. He also inspired and taught people how to
grow in complete wholeness.
Wayne Oates pointed out that pastor, whatever their training; do not enjoy the privilege of
deciding whether to counsel with people. Their “choice is not between counselling or not
counselling but between counselling in a discipline and skilled way and counselling in an
undisciplined and unskilled way.” This ministry through the pastor can be a catalyst for
individual and congregational healing by strengthening the ability of people to give and receive
love in the community hence making the church people be the church, a community where
God’s love and justice are experienced realities bringing healing, enlivening, and growth.
Holistic pastoral care involves the use of religious resources for the purpose of empowering
people, families, and congregations to heal their brokenness and to grow toward wholeness in
their lives.
Three equally significant channels of ministry are pastoral care, pastoral counselling, and
pastoral psychotherapy. Which form of care giving should be made available depends on the
unique needs, resources, and desires of each individual or family.
Pastoral care: The basic purpose is to enable the people in faith to live life with the maximum
possible wholeness in and through both hard and joyful times. Holistic care giving starts with
the care of individuals, their families, and other close relationships. It also involves enabling
people to create care giving community in their congregations. To reach out even more
holistically involves caring about God’s wounded natural world. The need for pastoral care is
highlighted during the times of personal crises and losses, including social chaos and natural
disasters.
Pastoral counselling: It is focused form of pastoral care geared toward enabling individuals,
couples, and families to cope more constructively with crises, losses, difficult decisions, and
other anxiety-laden experience. It often involves enabling burdened people to learn how to
wrestle constructively with crisis-induced psychological, physical, spiritual, and/or relational
problems. It aims at enabling troubled people to make constructive choices and changes as well
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as to learn new skills that will improve the quality of their lifestyles, strengthen their
relationships, and help them handle stressful situations more effectively. It is usually time
limited and relatively brief with an agreement between the counsellors and counselled to work
together for a certain time to address particular life problems.
Counsellor seeks to enable people to help themselves by learning how to mobilize their
strengths and make changes that will improve the quality of their personal lives and
relationships. Pastoral counselling is needed when severe problem strikes and previous learned
coping skills do not suffice or when their behaviour becomes self-defeating. Ideally it should
continue long enough to enable people to se their problems and crises as opportunities for
psychological, spiritual, and coping growth.
Pastoral therapy: It usually is a more extended form of pastoral counselling that involves
exploring complex emotional and relationship issues. The therapeutic goal is to facilitate
reconstructive healing and growth that make the very foundations of people’s lives stronger,
more satisfying, and more productive.
The four classical functions of pastoral care was stated by William A. Clebsch and Charles R.
Jaekle:
Healing: a pastoral function that aims to overcome some impairment by restoring the person
to w holeness and by leading them to advance beyond their previous condition.
Sustaining: helping a hurting person to endure and to transcend a circumstance in which
restoration to their former condition of recuperation from their malady is either impossible or
so remote as to seem improbable.
Guiding care: assisting perplexed persons to make confident choices between alternative
courses of thought an action, when such choices are viewed as affecting the present and the
future state of human wholeness.
Reconciling: seeking to re-established broken relationships between man and God. Historically
reconciling has employed two models- forgiveness and discipline.
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Two functions were added later, they are:
Nurturing : enable people to develop their potentialities, throughout the life journey with all its
valleys, peaks, and plateaus. Nurturing and guiding are the pastoral care functions in which
education and counselling are most intertwined.
Prophetic care- the aim of this function is to give care to and through the social system that
profoundly influenced people’s lives. The ultimate aim of prophetic caregiving is to motivate
and equip care recipients to be agents of constructive change in the wider social and natural
pathologies that are among the causes and contexts of their need for care.
