Systems Pastoral Care

Abstract

Contemporary pastoral care has been more clinical than pastoral with a resulting deflation of parish-based pastoral functioning. Social psychiatry confronts pastoral care with a general system theory, a model of preventive medicine and functional skills that begin with group and family therapy and proceed to the skills of organizing new social systems, gaining entry into existing social systems and doing rehabilitation via ecological or social system psychotherapy. Were pastoral care to be designed on the model of preventive medicine it would become systems pastoral care. Leaders would be trained to deal with social systems at many levels and to function as enablers — enabling the church to become a center of moral enquiry, a center for personal learning and growth, for human sustenance and nourishment and for human reparation. The pastor would not do all this himself but would craft a social system that functions preventively at many levels.