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The Context and Consequences of Care

As pastoral care and counseling approach the half-century mark as a subspecialty of ministry, we have cause to believe that a needed midcourse correction is being made. Social psychiatry is as valuable a troubler and ally today as psychoanalysis was a few decades ago. Social psychiatry presents itself as a third alternative an alternative distinct from organic and psychoanalytic schools and all of their derivatives. For the pastor this means heightening his awareness of the context and the consequences of care. It means learning new skills of leadership that take seriously the systems in which ministry occurs and the consequences of that systemic context. Ministry at the crisis of birth may be done ever so well, but be offered within a system that is oppressive of children because it perpetuates authoritarian patterns of education. Ministry to the aged may involve scores of lay volunteers but have the net effect of reinforcing a system of warehousing old people. Ego-oriented preaching may prevail over superego oriented preaching as Dearing hopes in his article in this issue. But suppose a minister delivers only ego-oriented sermons to a congregation in which the systemic forces of the denomination as a whole reinforce tyrannical conscience. What will be the result? We suspect that the healthy effects of ego-oriented preaching will be swallowed up and lost in a service that is locked into a superego-oriented liturgy and in a system that promotes activities dominated by superego-driven persons. No strategy of pastoral care or counseling is sound, therefore, until it has been considered from the perspectives of context and of consequences. Context requires a wholistic stance and consequences a political stance. Both are needed as we see it and we hope that the pages that follow will increase awareness of the why and how of such a stance. E.E.T