Spiritual Pastoral Care
January 13, 2022 § 2 Comments
A while ago, a member of my meeting approached a member of our pastoral care committee seeking help with a general malaise of spirit. This was not a request for secular counseling, but for spiritual counseling.
When our committee member brought the matter to the committee, no one on the committee remembered ever receiving such a request. I’m pretty sure that some of the committee members did not actually recognize that this was the nature of the request. We were not prepared. Someone on the committee agreed to talk to this person and I don’t know what the outcome was.
The same thing happened during New York Yearly Meeting sessions some years ago: someone came to a member of yearly meeting Ministry and Counsel Committe seeking spiritual pastoral care right then during the week-long sessions—help with their spiritual life—and the committee did not know right away what to do about it. It had never happened before in anyone’s memory, and there was no established infrastructure for answering the call.
I suspect that these meetings and committees are not the exception among us. This says several things:
- First, that many of our members do not have spiritual lives that are deep enough and sustained enough to encounter obstacles that need pastoral care.
- Also, that perhaps those who do have deep and sustained spiritual lives and experience crises in their spiritual lives do not come to their meetings for help. Why not?
- That most meetings do not see the spiritual formation and nurture, support, and pastoral care of their members’ spiritual lives as a core charge of the meeting or of any of its committees, either pastoral care or ministry and worship, and/or that they have not created an infrastructure for it.
- That most meetings do not proactively “advertise” their eldering services to their members, even if they have people and processes ready.
- That most meetings have not inventoried their resources in this area. They don’t know who among them has an active prayer, meditation, or devotional life, and so has the spiritual experience necessary for such pastoral care; or who might actually have a spiritual gift for such care or even a calling to such a ministry, whose service therefore lies fallow in disuse by the meeting.
I therefore think that our pastoral care committees and our worship and ministry committees should:
- conduct such an inventory;
- inquire of such elders whether they feel a call to such ministry, and if they don’t or haven’t thought about it, to encourage them to do so;
- prepare for requests like this from the members—know who will respond; and,
- once this is in place, proactively
- ask members to share their spiritual lives,
- publicly and periodically provide and announce resources and other supports for the spiritual life, including programs on Quaker spirituality, various spiritual “technologies” (meditation techniques, Bible study guides, breathing exercises, etc.); and
- periodically advertise the service/ministry.
The goal would be to build the spiritual maturity of the members and of the meeting, so that enough of us are so deep into the life of the spirit that one might on occasion need the help of the community, and the community would recognize the call and be ready to answer.
Through the Flaming Sword 
God bless you, Steve, for this posting! Yes, serious Friends need mature, loving elders with the gift of discernment, and not just in the form of an elders’ ambulance that shows up for 911 calls! I’m blessed to have such elders myself: a Church of the Brethren pastor who serves as my spiritual director (who calls me monthly), and also a Meeting-appointed Committee of Oversight and Spiritual Support, which meets monthly. True, I laid down self-will and asked to be guided only by Christ’s will some years ago, and I’ve heard His voice and otherwise experienced His guidance directly since then, many times, but life presents so many challenges! Like, Does living by the Gospel mean literally “giving to everyone who asks of me” (Matt 5:42, Luke 6:30)? Does living by the Gospel mean abstention from paying taxes, from serving on juries, from voting, from buying products of sweatshop labor, from calling the police? What about letting oneself be “mismated with unbelievers” (in the sense that yoking a draft horse with an ox is “mismating” them)? Does this forbid collaborating with “unbelieving” co-workers on… parenting a child? writing a scholarly article? working on a road-repair crew? sitting on a board of trustees? working at a telephone bank to get out the vote? sitting on a Quaker committee with a non-Theist Friend?
Thank you so much for this post.
I am a Friend who went outside of the Society to get trained as a spiritual director. Note: There is a difference between pastoral care and spiritual direction/companionship. Simply stated, the former helps people to address their needs and concerns as a result of a specific outward event, while the latter helps people with their spiritual needs more broadly.
While I have much to say on on this topic, I will make only a brief comment here. I believe the lack of awareness and resources that you have identified are fundamentally due to a systemic denial of the transforming power of God — a denial of Christ and the Spirit. This is very sad indeed, because it is our true inheritance and the bedrock of our tradition.