If we start with informed consent instead of appreciation, then the interaction feels cold and impersonal. When people do hard, wise things, a proper pastoral response is to affirm them. Asking for help is not easy, but it is good. The first thing that should be communicated is appreciation and affirmation.
Here we will pick up with where that conversation should resume in the first formal meeting by looking at five key elements in this conversation. In Lesson One we left off with the level of informed consent that should be provided prior to a first meeting. The same values that resulted in the creation of deacons in Acts 6 are relevant to expectation management for pastoral counseling. Pastors are finite people therefore, how they manage their time with respect to their various roles is important. In order to balance the care of an individual (sheep) with the care of the congregation (flock) a pastor (shepherd) will have to clarify the expectations around counseling.
#Ministry grid professional
The lack of monetary expense, proximity of the church, and flexibility of scheduling remove common inconveniences that limit the duration of professional counseling relationships.
#Ministry grid free
There are two qualities of pastoral counseling that can allow it to go on for an indefinite duration of time: it’s free and convenient. We will address these questions under two headings: (a) expectation management and (b) understanding confidentiality.
In ministry contexts, the legal term for confidentiality would more accurately be called pastor-parishioner privilege. Based on what we learned in the previous lesson, the accelerated rate of disclosure and imbalance of power (i.e., giving additional weight to our words) means that confidentiality is relevant to these conversations. Pastoral Counseling is ministry done in response to a member’s request that is focused on giving guidance to a particular need.Pastoral Care is ministry at the pastor’s initiative with individuals or families: visiting the sick and homebound, reaching out to families during seasons of grief or tragedy, praying for church members, encouraging volunteer leaders, and enacting church discipline.Pastoral Ministry is what pastors do for the congregation as a whole or with subgroups of the congregation: preaching (including sermon prep), teaching, leading worship, leading committees or workgroups, leading ministry teams, advising small group leaders, and other equipping tasks.If we wanted to define each aspect of a pastor’s role, we could do so like this: David Benner provides a three-fold distinction between pastoral ministry, pastoral care, and pastoral counseling that can help us begin to develop this clarity (Strategic Pastoral Counseling, pages 14-15). Helping you have these conversations well is what this lesson is about.īefore we can explain something well, we must understand it clearly. (b) meeting with a married couple to talk about conflict resolution. (a) visiting a church member in the hospital as compared to (b) meeting with someone to talk about their experience of depression or (a) praying with a church member about grief after a service as compared to If it is hard for you, as the pastor, then it is likely also difficult for the church member seeking counseling.Īs the helper in the relationship, it is a pastor’s responsibility to explain what the difference between: You may find it intuitively appropriate to make this distinction, but difficult to articulate the difference. In the first lesson, we began to make a distinction between general pastoral care and formal pastoral counseling.