the greatest gift we typically can give to another in troubled times is our empathic concern and the promise of companionship through the dark hours. With the support, understanding, insight, and experience of our colleagues and our supervisor, we can come to discern the obstacles in ourselves to becoming effective in our ministries of compassionate care. It is exactly in the formal organization of a lay pastoral care provider program that a safe place is created for us to do our work of introspection and self-care, preparing us to move into the world as healers.
Certainly it is possible to experience spiritual growth outside a faith community, with other than religious influences or teachings to motivate and sustain us. But the opportunity to participate in the good works of our faith community is a gift we should take very seriously. Our conviction that the Golden Rule is fundamental to our humanity and a commitment to its realization through empathic, compassionate acts of kindness to others are the gifts offered to us who respond to the call to a ministry as lay pastoral care providers.
Introduction
In one form or another, it is an oft-repeated scenario: A congregant suffers the loss of a loved one and receives quick and heartfelt attention from the minister and fellow church members. Soon, however, the congregant is left to a very private and often prolonged grief as the pastor and other church members return to the routines of their lives and the attention demanded by the challenges of daily living. Parishioners can fall off the church community’s radar screen, sometimes in pain or distress, and when their church doesn’t maintain contact with them, they may feel compelled to look elsewhere for spiritual healing. Parish ministers are expected to respond to the spiritual needs of each and every parishioner, but, overburdened by other duties and often with little specialized training, they can find themselves in a losing battle.
Three historically unique developments have put enormous pressure on ministers and congregants to maintain pastoral care services beyond the usual short period that constitutes a crisis in a person’s life. First, we live in a time when members of an extended family can no longer be counted on to remain in close proximity. In past generations, people confronting difficult life circumstances could rely on family to provide the support they needed. Today, far-flung vocational opportunities lure people away from their childhood homes to settle not just down the road but across the state or country. Meanwhile, Mom and Pop are moving through the time of life when they are likely to need ongoing attention and care.
Second, we now live with an increasingly aging population. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, approximately 9 percent of adults were over the age of sixty-five in the year 2000; by 2030, that number will rise to more than 20 percent—one in five adults will be a senior citizen. A social science pundit has predicted that it will not be long before we have more adults in day care than children. This trend will have a considerable impact on all aspects of society, none more so than our faith communities. How we have traditionally organized our church lives—governance, mission, polity, and programming—will become less relevant to an ever-increasing number of our congregants. There will be more and more seniors in our congregations whose quality of life, at least in part, will depend on the availability of long-term attention and support from their church community. The active elderly will contribute in new ways and bring new spiritual insight to our church lives, while the frail elderly will require more pastoral care. In my hospice work I have seen the unraveling of families trying—often from a distance—to care for slowly declining loved ones. These elderly loved ones, easily confused and unprepared for the novelty of our fast-paced, technology-driven lifestyles, are especially vulnerable to the complexities of our fractured health care system. If our church communities did nothing but review the current needs of these folks and organize to respond to them, we could substantially improve their lives, especially as community health and social services fall victim to local, state, and federal budget cuts.
The third development is in part responsible for our aging population: People no longer die in great numbers as they once did from acute illness. Through the nineteenth century the leading causes of death were infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, pneumonia, influenza, and syphilis. Today, most folks decline slowly with chronic wasting illnesses. According to U.S. Center for Health statistics, the top killers are heart disease, cancer, stroke, respiratory illnesses, and Alzheimer’s. The medical, social, and pastoral care needs of church members with such illnesses may go on for decades. But it doesn’t have to be a special population that calls us to a more vigorous pastoral care effort in our faith communities. Any one of us may need compassionate attention from someone willing to be present to us as we move through a time of trial and distress.
Parish ministers, even in small churches, cannot keep up with all the pastoral care needs of their congregations. Even if they have the time, their training in this area may not give them an easy confidence in providing pastoral care. I have learned through personal experience that a well-organized, trained, and supervised cadre of lay ministers can ensure that no member of a congregation of any size ever falls through the cracks. This is the hopeful conviction that has prompted me to write this book.
The provision of pastoral care by lay volunteers is one activity among many that falls within the broader category of lay ministry. I will have more to say about this distinction below. Meanwhile, as I have gone around the country doing workshops on lay pastoral care, I’ve encountered many versions of lay ministry in general and lay pastoral care specifically—programs that differed in organization, goals, training, supervision, and effectiveness. In some churches, disparate lay ministry programs operate independently of one another. Such separation represents a lost opportunity to integrate resources, training and supervision, needs assessment, and cross communication concerning pastoral care in the church. In another scenario, there is a small lay ministry team trying to do it all, with lay volunteers bravely calling upon a hodgepodge of competencies to carry out their pastoral care mission in the congregation. It is my experience that many lay pastoral care programs, while well intended, function nowhere near the level that would prove useful to all the congregants and allow the parish minister to feel confident that everyone who needs attention and care is receiving it. My travels have encouraged me to present an expanded model of lay pastoral care that can be adapted by any religious community to create a well-organized and successful program.
This new vision of lay pastoral care is an ambitious one, both in terms of the expectations it places on its volunteer participants and the level of organization, training, and support required for participants to succeed and flourish in their mission. It is grounded in the best practices of pastoral care taught in seminaries and theological schools throughout the country, some simple but profound understandings of modern clinical psychology, the healing wisdom and compassionate care of others that is the central teaching of all the world’s great religions, and the more sophisticated lay pastoral care programs that are the hallmarks of lay ministries in several Christian denominations, notably the thorough and highly successful Stephen Ministry widely employed in many Christian faith communities. Not only do these programs provide a highly competent service to their congregants, they also offer a uniquely enriching spiritual experience for their lay pastoral care volunteers, an experience heightened by the depth and thoroughness of the programs.
Lay ministry encompasses two categories of programs. The first includes any program that provides support to congregants without any expectation of repeated contact with a particular needy person. Providing rides for seniors or meals for convalescing members, helping new members acclimate to the church community, or leading support groups would all fall into this category of activities. The second category encompasses just one activity—provision of pastoral care by one church member to another for as long as circumstances require. We will use the term “pastoral care providers” (PCPs) for parishioners who volunteer for this second category of lay ministry. (Congregations have used a variety of titles for these caregivers, such as chaplains, pastoral care associates, or simply lay ministers; this last title is probably least useful, since it doesn’t distinguish the special calling and role of these church volunteers.) Any lay ministry program can prove critically important to the life of a church, but providing compassionate and effective
