From developmental and training perspectives, previous studies have defined pastoral identity as an individual property of pastoral practitioners. Grounded on an empirical study of interviewing 20 pastoral counselors and chaplains, this paper presents pastoral identity as a social construction between pastoral caregivers and seekers (and God in the midst). Informed by a recent social-psychological approach to identity, the paper explores one possibility for an interactional, intersubjective, and constructive paradigm of pastoral identity.
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