Small on Purpose by Parks Lewis A.;

Author:Parks, Lewis A.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abingdon Press
Published: 2017-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

Soul Care with Excellence

The small church is the natural setting for soul care, the most favorable climate to engage persons whose life stories have been disrupted and now seek God’s presence and leads as they dwell among a community of persons who share a common worship, Bible, sacraments, religious calendar, building, and assorted projects of discipleship. Soul care is the work of both the pastor and the congregation in the small-church setting, but each brings distinct strengths that must be exercised with relational intelligence and from spiritual depth.

The pastor has the power of immediate access. By office and by accrued reputation the pastor does not have to wait to be invited, does not delay for the administrative assistant to arrange an appointment (there probably isn’t an administrative assistant anyway), and does not overly worry about looking presentable. The pastor goes! Writers on small-church ministry sometimes talk about the charismatic nature of pastoral visitation in their settings, the freedom to set out in a car and follow the Spirit’s leads as if there were some divine GPS looking out for the souls of the congregation and the community most in need of a visit.

The pastor brings a scripturally informed mind to the encounter of soul care. The pastor knows when to sit in silence and listen like Job’s friends (Job 2:13) and when to enter into persons’ attempts to make sense of their narrative collapses. The pastor responds in face and word, offers alternative scenarios, coaxes and cheers as the persons rewrite their life stories. And when the occasion calls for it, the pastor offers the sacramental and ritual elements of the church as tangible comfort: the bread, the cup, the oil of anointing.

The pastor remains the pastoral leader during the seasons of soul care, and that is important. In a church of ninety, sixty, or thirty, one or two serious and prolonged crises of health, finance, or family can threaten the vitality of the congregation as a corporate entity. The weight of soul care wears on the collective spirit.

One of the most important things leaders do is to help persons transcend their personal agendas for a common good. Pastoral leaders must counterbalance the weight of soul care on the congregation. They will do it first by keeping themselves as healthy and buoyant personalities. They will do it second by placing before the congregation its joys and celebrations as well as its trials and sorrows, the panoply of human experience not just one dimension (Rom 12:15). And they will do it third by weaving together in front of the congregation an interesting corporate story, The Story of Us, an ongoing subject that mitigates the isolating tendencies that cling to an individual in narrative collapse.

Members of the congregation have even more immediate access to those in need of soul care. It is worth remembering that most of the New Testament exhortations to soul care and instructions for doing it (e.g., Matt 25:31-46; James 5:13-15) are written to the members of the household of faith.

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