Foundations Of Pastoral Care

Introduces both clergy and laity to the ministry skills and personal qualities needed to provide effective care for people inside and outside the church...

Structure your ministry to start with patients’needs, hopes, and resources and to be clear what difference your ministry can make! Hospital chaplains value who they are and what they do as contributions to patients’and families’healing and well-being. And they are continually stretching to enhance their ministries. Hospital administrators and other professionals on the care teams, however, often need help to grasp those same values in outcome oriented, observable, documentable, changes-for-the-better terms. The Discipline for Pastoral Care Giving: Foundations for Outcome Oriented Chaplaincy offers a powerful new paradigm for enhancing supportive, effective spiritual care for patients and families as well as communicating substantive outcomes to leaders and clinicians alike. This is all the more important in these times when every possible resource must be well used for the good of our patients and their families. By evaluating the pastoral care you offer, you can become more aware of the discrete skills you exercise in the assessment, planning, intervention, and reflection process. Such evaluation efforts highlight the discrete differences excellent spiritual care makes. This can help you track contributions you are making in terms of the patient's healing and well-being. Having a sound, replicable way to make the process more conscious also helps you communicate your assessment, strategies, and contributions more clearly to other care team members. Furthermore, consistently using The Discipline over time will enable you to discover patterns of spiritual dynamics in how people live with different health care challenges in their lives. These patterns translate into valuable insights as your care for others. The process discussed in The Discipline for Pastoral Care Giving calls on the chaplain to: identify the patient's spiritual needs, hopes, and resources construct a patient profile through identifying the individual's sense of the holy, sense of meaning, sense of hope, and sense of community design the desired outcome(s) you hope your care will contribute--for example, a person who has suffered a spinal cord injury integrates the effects of their injury in their sense of identity and meaning, a person living with cystic fibrosis healthfully grieves the loss of others in the CF community, a patient 'disabled’by the absence of her support community regains use of her personal resources for coping and self-care develop and share a plan for the patient's spiritual care choose interventions (which may range from facilitating a life review, to compassionate confrontation, to reading Scripture, to active listening, to arranging a family care conference) measure outcomes, identifying and communicating the difference your care has made in terms of the patient's healing and well-being The Discipline for Pastoral Care Giving offers case studies, personal experiences, helpful figures and charts, and suggestions for dealing with patients experiencing unique, complex health care challenges, including adults living with cystic fibrosis and violent victims of violence. The wise advice and practical suggestions in this book will help you recognize and document the solid value of your hospital ministry.

Foundations of Pastoral Counselling offers a completely new approach to its subject, through an integration of philosophical ideas, theological thought, and psychotherapeutic psychology. Using the work of philosophers including Martin Buber, Simone Weil and Søren Kierkegaard to begin the conversation in each chapter the author then draws on relevant theologians and psychotherapeutic thinkers to enrich the dialogue. The result is a rich, multi-faceted, and often surprising round-table discussion about the fundamental issues in pastoral counselling. Introduction 1 Part 1: Fundamental Attitudes and Skills 1 Respect for the Uniqueness of the Counsellee, or Resisting the Totalizing Tendency 2 Empathy and the Body, or the Quest for Participatory Sense-Making 3 Deep Listening, or Being Formed in the Discipline of Attention 4 Conditions for Genuine Dialogue, or It’s the Relationship that Heals 5 ‘Relational Humanness’ and ‘Relational Justice’, or Caring for Two Worlds Part 2: Fundamental Interventions and Strategies 6 Revising Faulty Thinking, or a Socratic Approach to Healing ‘Belief-Sickness’ 7 Facilitating Self-Challenge, or Learning the Art of Indirection 8 Working with Counsellee Images, or Exploring the ‘Metaphors We Live By’ 9 Connecting with a Community of Hope, or Pastoral Rituals that Shine a Light Concluding Reflection: It’s Also about Personal Spirituality

Foundations of Pastoral Counselling adopts a completely new approach to its subject, through an integration of philosophical ideas, theological thought, and psychotherapeutic psychology. The result is a rich, multi-faceted and often surprising discussion about the fundamental issues in pastoral counselling.

Based on her twenty years of teaching and on her own experience in pastoral care, Jeanne Stevenson-Moessner has written a basic pastoral-care text to assist in the emotional and spiritual preparation of pastoral caregivers. Stevenson-Moessner expands on her key notion of pastoral care as seen through the interconnection and interplay of love of God, love of neighbor, and love of self. Her brief book is meant to engender "confidence and caring" in the initiate, and to assuage the fear and anxiety that naturally occur when one accompanies people in life-changing pain and travail. Through skilled use of the parables of the Good Samaritan and the Good Shepherd, along with stories from her own experience, Stevenson-Moessner imparts genuine wisdom and meaningful support to those who courageously dare to offer caregiving ministry in whatever situation or through whatever method or paradigm. Her work unfolds in six chapters: 1. Introduction: The One-Room Schoolhouse 2. Pointers and Precepts: The Grammar of Care 3. The Prism of Pastoral Care: Scripture Refracted 4. Paradigms in Pastoral Care: The Community as Classroom 5. The Open Classroom: Places of Care 6. Conclusion: An Alphabet of Grace

This book offers an account of the moral foundations of pastoral ethics and the underlying interpersonal dynamics that make the practice of ministry powerful--and also morally dangerous, even for those with the best of intentions. Sondra Wheeler examines the personal disciplines and spiritual practices that help sustain safe ministry, including the essential practices of prayer and spiritual accountability. She equips ministers to abide by ethical standards when they come under pressure and offers practical strategies for navigating challenges. The author also stresses personal vulnerability and "unselfish self-care."

In Pastoral Care in the Classical Tradition, Andrew Purves argued that pastoral care and theology has long ignored Scripture and Christian doctrine, and pastoral practice has become secularized in both method and goal, the fiefdom of psychology and the social sciences. He builds further on this idea here, presenting a christological basis for ministry and pastoral theology.