Pastoral Care—Who does it?

Small-group leaders, pastors, or both?

by Dan Lentz

Dale Galloway, former pastor of New Hope Community Church in Portland states "No church with more than 50 members can be effective in pastoral care without enlisting and enabling the lay people to do daily work of pastoral care." That begs the question: What do people really need in the way of pastoral care?

According to a Gallup poll from about four years ago, there are six needs people have:
1. To believe life is meaningful and has purpose
2. To have a sense of community and deeper relationships
3. To be appreciated and respected
4. To be listened to and heard
5. To feel that one is growing in faith
6. To have practical help in developing a mature faith

In the traditional sense of pastoral care, perhaps we can also include a seventh item to the list: "To be cared for and served in a time of crisis or need."

Even with number seven, if you look at this list, it is easy to see how small groups provide a means of meeting these needs. If your small groups aren't meeting these needs and your church has over 50 people, then healthy "pastoral care" probably isn't happening.

But how do you get small groups to embrace pastoral care as part of their ministry? Seeing the small-group leader as pastor and the pastor as small-group leader requires a significant paradigm shift in the way "church" has been done in many cases, both for the staff pastors and for the congregation.

Interestingly, the successful shift to small-group based pastoral care is perhaps one of the most significant indicators of whether a small group ministry has become a sustainable ministry and a core value of any particular local church. However, knowing if you have arrived is difficult because the transition is not clearly defined in most churches. Most small group churches are somewhere in the process of this transition, some of which will never know if they have really arrived.

The solution? (Sorry, no "easy button" here.) Know what paradigm you are striving for, clearly draw the vision, define the key pastoral care activities, and add pastoral care as an important additional training preparation for all small-group leaders and small-group members. Along the way, make sure the plan is known and embraced widely around the congregation as a whole. Then you will know how to gauge progress and whether your small-group leaders are becoming pastors—and whether your pastors are becoming small-group leaders.