A Volley from the Canon, #52

MISSION VS. MAINTENANCE: THE PASTORAL CARE DIVERSION

During a clergy search, many if not most congregations are very clear in stating: “We need pastoral care. We want a priest who visits the sick and the shut-ins.” Often the phrase ends, spoken or unspoken, “unlike that last guy.” Very rarely, it seems, does any church get quite enough clergy visitation to suit the “clergy as pastoral-caregiver” segment of the congregation.

It is quite true that the weaker members of a congregation rate special, caring attention in their time of need. It is also a fact that a congregation that makes attention to the sick and elderly its top priority, particularly for its clergy-person, has set its face toward its own death. One reason is simply statistical: the sick and elderly members, by and large, don’t last very long. Consequently, all that clergy attention, at high cost to the congregation, is being directed toward those who are on their way out of the congregational life. Morale is an issue, too: after a while, the priest realizes that all of her best friends in the congregation are dead! It isn’t easy to bury, year after year, the church members you know best and love most.

But meanwhile, the “pastoral” clergy leader is ignoring the young, the active, and the newly enrolled, many of whom may well look elsewhere for church, precisely because they feel the rector’s lack of interest in them. The congregation is placing maintenance of those it already has ahead of its mission to reach out to those it does not yet fully have! In fact, I’ve heard it said that the church is the only organization that exists for the benefit of those who are not yet its members.

This very situation may well be the key to the decline of the Main Line in Protestantism.

Pastoral care for the sick, the elderly, and for those in “any kind of need or trouble” is the responsibility of the entire congregation, not just the clergy. So are evangelism, formation, and congregational life. Remember the story about the Canada geese, how they share leadership, mate for life, fly in formation, and—when one is injured or sick, one or two stay behind to care for the weak one. We can learn this from those geese: it isn’t always the same one who stays behind to care for the sick.

And meanwhile, the flock flies on to its destination.