FROM THE EDITORS
Marshall Shelley
October 1, 1989
Recently I was in Ohio, sitting with a small group of pastors, when the conversation turned to pastoral care.
All of them were confronted regularly by staggering issues within their congregations: cancer, disintegrating marriages, unemployment, tragic accidents, suicides, sexual abuse, chemical dependency, business failures, runaway or rebellious children. The list seemed endless.
"As a pastor," said one, "when someone in the church comes to me, I want to enfold that person with attention until the problem is resolved. After all, we're family!"
Others around the table agreed but immediately pointed out the tension they felt.
"You can spend most of your week on three or four people's problems. Do you focus on the needy few or the needs of the body as a whole?"
"Churches pastored by 'pastoral-care types' generally don't grow, and yet you can't grow unless you're caring for people."
"If the church becomes a spiritual hospital, focused primarily on bandaging wounds, it tends not to develop the muscular faith necessary to engage the increasingly secular world with the gospel."
Sometimes it seems as if pastoral care and visionary leadership are incompatible.
I was reminded of an observation made by Gil Beers, former editor of Christianity Today: "When Moses was leading Israel through the wilderness, he had to move at the speed of the slowest sheep." With slow lambs, you have three choices: (1) abandon them, (2) pick them up and carry them, or (3) move at their speed. Since they couldn't carry them all, they moved slowly.
Some churches choose not to lose any sheep, and thus allow the hurting lambs to determine the pace and sometimes the direction of the whole flock. Other churches feel that the direction and destination of the flock is ...
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