Pastoral Care

Pastoral care is the help Christians offer to people in need, whether the need is physical, emotional, mental or spiritual. The person in need may be a Christian, a seeker or a person currently committed to another faith. One does not earn pastoral care. A gracious God moves and empowers Christians to offer care to persons in need.

Jesus as a Model for Pastoral Care

The Gospels indicate that Jesus intended to model pastoral care in his own ministry. He charged the Twelve on their mission, “Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received, freely give” (Matthew 10:8). They were to carry out the same caring ministries they had seen in him.

In John 3 Jesus meets Nicodemus, who holds a position of great power in the Judaism of his day, and demonstrates how confrontation can be an appropriate act of caring love. In John 4 Jesus encounters a woman who has no inherent claim on Jesus because she represents an alien people, the Samaritans. She fails to meet the moral expectations of her day or ours, having been divorced five times and in a current live-in relationship. Jesus models a care that accurately perceives the needs and attitudes of this woman, demonstrating the power of acceptance for those who have known only rejection. In John 5 Jesus selects the one man at the pool of Bethesda who had been sick for so long that he had given up any hope of ever getting well. Jesus forces him to explore his feelings and values on his way to wholeness. John 8:1-11 centers on a woman caught in the act of adultery who was being used as a test case to entrap Jesus. Jesus restores her personhood and worth as a human being as he models accurate empathy. In John 9 Jesus is at the center of a conflict with the Pharisees about a man born blind. The Pharisees cannot celebrate the restoration of his sight. Instead they intensify the conflict by excommunication. In this encounter Jesus models the positive use of conflict to achieve a just end. These representative examples show Jesus as a model of pastoral care, meeting each person at the point of a specific need, respecting the dignity and worth of every person, honoring each person’s individuality and tailoring a specific response to the needs of the person before him. He intended that all Christians would follow his example and become caregivers, a matter explored in the New Testament letters.

Pastoral Care in the Epistles

Most of the letters of the New Testament were addressed to churches, not solely to church leaders. Even a casual reading reveals that all Christians were responsible for pastoral care.

All Christians were to “love one another deeply, from the heart” (1 Peter 1:22), “bear with each other and forgive” (Col. 3:13) and “serve one another in love” (Galatians 5:13). All Christians receive the comfort of God “in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God” (2 Cor. 1:4). While acts of healing seem to be attributed primarily to apostles, it is clear that all Christians have a specific responsibility to offer care to people in need. The apostolic church could not draw any distinction between the care offered by all Christians and the care that was the distinct responsibility of those holding a pastoral office.

The Beginnings of Pastoral Offices

The newly forming church discovered a need for a fair and just distribution of food and appointed the Seven to this specific task. The earliest church planters formed the first believers in any city into a church under the care of appointed elders (Acts 14:23). By the end of their ministries the apostles had recognized the need for the emerging pastoral offices of bishop or overseer, elder, deacon and widow. The care that was exercised by all Christians in discerning and meeting human needs became a designated responsibility of these emerging servant leaders.

This movement to concentrate pastoral care in the hands of those holding pastoral offices, discernible in the Pastoral Epistles, becomes the dominant understanding of ministry in the second and third centuries. What had been the expectation and responsibility of every Christian in the apostolic church became the focused responsibility of pastoral leaders within a century.

Two factors accelerated this trajectory: the abuse of power by some and the requirement for an ordered approach to ministry to exercise church discipline. Thomas Oden documents this transfer of responsibility in the Constitutions of the Holy Apostles, Cyprian, Origen, Ignatius of Antioch and John Chrysostom (Oden, pp. 41-53). By the fourth century pastoral care had become the specific responsibility of those holding pastoral offices, to the exclusion of the ministry of the whole people of God. The development of the church in both its Eastern and Western divisions reinforced the principle that pastoral care was the responsibility and ministry of those holding pastoral or priestly office. At no point in the history of the church prior to the sixteenth century was there any significant movement to broaden pastoral care to include all Christians as caregivers.

The Unfulfilled Promise of the Reformation

The three central themes of the Reformation in the writings of Martin Luther were faith alone as the basis for salvation, Scripture alone as the supreme authority for faith and practice, and the priesthood of all believers. For one shining moment in history it appeared that all Christians would, once again, be recognized as caregivers. All Christians were encouraged to exercise their priestly ministries. Unfortunately, in the most radical expressions of the Reformation, chaos reigned in this experimental church without orders. By 1526 Luther had restored the offices of priest and pastor (Oden, pp. 85-86). In 1530 he wrote,

It does not help their case to say that all Christians are priests. It is true that all Christians are priests, but not all are pastors. For to be a pastor one not only must be a Christian and a priest but must have an office and a field of work committed to him. This call and command make pastors and preachers. (Oden, p. 95)

Calvin divided the work of ministry into three orders: minister, elder and deacon. All were set apart by ordination, but the latter two were designated lay offices. Elements of pastoral care were assigned to all three offices. The effect of this broadening of ministry to include some laypersons was to exclude all others from the ministry of caregiving.

The Radical Reformation of the Anabaptists presented a perfect opportunity to extend the caregiving ministries to the whole people of God. Nevertheless, Menno Simons strongly resisted the extension of the ministry of admonition beyond those ordained: “No one is to undertake of himself to preach or admonish from church to church unless he be sent or ordained thereto by the congregation or the elders” (Oden, p. 86).

By the time Richard Baxter codified pastoral expectations, the caregiving ministry had been limited to pastors only. He admonishes,

Flocks must ordinarily be no greater than we are capable of overseeing. . . . If the pastoral office consists in overseeing all the flock, then surely the number of souls under the care of each pastor must not be greater than he is able to take such heed to as is here required. (Oden, p. 88)

As the Protestant churches entered the twentieth century, pastoral care was assigned almost exclusively to pastors. While the Reformed Churches ordained laypersons to the offices of elder and deacon, in practice their duties were limited and primary care became a pastoral expectation.

The Professionalization of Ministry in the Twentieth Century

Parallel to the movement to raise standards in all of the professions, pastoral ministry succumbed to the pressure to “professionalize” early in the century. Theological seminaries, once the precinct for seasoned pastors to pass on rich experiences in ministry to a new generation, became graduate schools of religion, especially university divinity schools, yearning for a legitimate credentialing process and controlled by the academe and the quest for the Ph.D. Pastoral care became an area of specialization under the influence of Anton Boisen (1876-1965), founder of the “Chicago School,” and his disciple, Seward Hiltner, who shaped two generations of ministers in mainline churches. Another of Boisen’s students, Wayne Oates, carried this “professionalization” approach into the Southern Baptist seminaries and churches. Pastoral care became a specialty that required several quarters of highly structured clinical pastoral education (CPE) before one could be certified as professionally qualified. The net result of this movement was to remove the ministry of caregiving even further away for the ordinary Christian. Pastoral care became the province of a very few credentialed specialists.

Recovering Pastoral Care for the Whole People of God

At this point in history Hendrik Kraemer and J. C. Hoekendijk began to tell the broader church about the discoveries of the Dutch during World War II, when pastors were forcibly removed from their churches and the people of God were required to rediscover the truth that all ministry belongs to the whole church. In the recognition that God would never leave the church without essential ministries empowered by the Spirit, the Dutch recovered a more biblical view of ministry. Once the laity were liberated, the church discovered how limiting was every definition of pastoral care that confined this essential ministry solely to pastors. This liberation is a process that has not yet been completed.

Only in recent years could pastoral care have been defined as the care Christians offer to people in need. Simultaneous with this theological recovery was the development of the small group movement throughout the North American churches. As groups multiplied, the equipping of lay leaders became essential. Pastors began to see themselves not as the primary deliverers of pastoral care but as equippers of lay leaders, who became the primary caregivers. In thousands of churches organized around some form of the small group model, primary care is the responsibility of the members of the small group as they care for each other, their families and the people in their primary circles. The responsibility for the quality and continuity of this care is vested in the small group leader, who is designated the primary caregiver. Baptism has been reinstated as the ordination to this ministry. Effective care throughout the whole church has been multiplied exponentially.

» See also: Equipping

» See also: Laity

» See also: Ministry

» See also: Spiritual Formation

References and Resources

R. Baxter, The Reformed Pastor (Portland, Ore.: Multnomah, 1982); G. Bernados, The Diary of a Country Priest, trans. P. Morris (London: Fontana, 1956); T. C. Oden, Classical Pastoral Care, vol. 1, Becoming a Minister (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1987); M. J. Steinbron, Can the Pastor Do It Alone? A Model for Preparing Lay People for Lay Pastoring (Ventura, Calif.: Regal, 1987); R. P. Stevens, The Equipper’s Guide to Every-Member Ministry (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1992); H. W. Stone, The Caring Church: A Guide for Lay Pastoral Care (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983).

—John C. Zimmerman