17.04.05 - Pastoral Matters

Some of the earliest Christian artistic representations of Jesus that have been found come from the catacombs in Rome, where the Roman Christians worshipped during times of persecution, and where they placed their dead. Dating from some time in the third century, they depict Jesus as the ?´Good Shepherd??. Jesus is portrayed as a beardless youth, carrying a sheep across his shoulders. In one depiction he is holding all four of the sheep??s legs clasped in one hand at chest level; in another he is using both hands, one holding front legs and the other back legs. I suspect first century Middle Eastern and Roman sheep were somewhat thinner and less woolly, and therefore lighter than a 21^st century New Zealand Romney or Merino.

The pastoral imagery of the Good Shepherd has had appeal across the centuries, and pastoral language has always had a place within any description of what a church or The Church is all about. In our own times the word that describes one of the functions of a clergyperson, ?´pastor??, has increasingly become the title or description of the person. It is a hallmark of newer and charismatic churches that their leader is known as ?´the pastor?? and is called ?´Pastor So and So??. It was trendy in some Presbyterian and Methodist churches not so long ago to have on their notice board and letterhead, "Ministers ?± all the congregation; Pastor ?± George Smith?? (or whoever it was). I was never quite sure what that was trying to prove, and would have put it the other way around anyway. A feature of the pontificate of the late Pope John Paul II was the description of and almost a new title for him of ?´Universal Pastor??.

This language hasn??t escaped even us at St Lukes. Some of the youth group, inspired by Andrew Colgan and thanks to a character on TV in the now-finished "That Sixties Show", call me ?´Pastor Dave?? (pronounced ?´Pasta?? Dave). I commented that it made me sound like an Italian dish. Of course, in the not-too-distant past, especially in the American West, those who these days are called ?´pastors?? were known by another of their functions ?± preacher. If I had to choose between the two, I think I would prefer ?´Pastor Dave?? to ?´Preacher Dave??.

An agenda item towards the beginning of every St Lukes parish council meeting is entitled ?´pastoral matters??. During this time there is news on pastoral concerns that have arisen since the previous meeting. Usually it covers matters to do with illness or hospitalisation. It is a time for the elders to catch up with some of the health concerns of members. Very occasionally it includes matters such as a significant birthday or wedding anniversary, or the birth of children. To most people, this is what ?´pastoral care?? is primarily about. ?´Pastoral care?? is responding to the needs, especially the crises, of individuals.

In a book published in the nineteen eighties(1), Michael Wilson, a medical doctor, Anglican priest, and lecturer in Pastoral Studies at the University of Birmingham, describes this as the ?´medicalisation?? of pastoral care. It assumes that pastoral care means a ministry to men and women in trouble ?± a ministry to casualties like doctors attend to casualties. Wilson points out that while pastoral care does include care for those in crisis or distress, to describe it as that gives only a partial picture. He attributes this tendency to the strong influence of medical modes of thought in modern society.

Wilson recounts conducting a survey of the work which hospital chaplains do, and compiled an impressive list of the problems patients raise with chaplains. It covered a wide range of human problems from anxiety to the loss of a loved one. Then he interviewed a chaplain in a maternity hospital who replied, "No problems at all. Just hundreds of happy mums feeding their babies." Wilson realised how easily we weep with those who weep, and forget to rejoice with those who rejoice. Of course that chaplain encountered occasional serious crises, but he put abnormality firmly in the context of normality. Normally, most people, most of the time, are not in crisis. But that doesn??t mean there is no role for pastoral care.

So then, what is pastoral care? If the biblical image of the shepherd is the jumping off point, then clearly it is more than personal crisis response. In the popular imagery of Psalm 23 the pastoral role of the shepherd includes ensuring provision of those things which give the sheep fullness, or abundance, of life ?± good pasture, adequate water, and direction and purpose leading to personal (for each sheep) and communal (for the flock) safety and confidence.

Michael Wilson sees two distinct styles of pastoral care in two distinct areas. The first is within the congregation and is overtly Christian. It makes use of worship, prayer, counselling, healing, forgiveness and theological language to build a congregation whose members are equipped to carry out the Christian mission in the world. The second is when the congregation is scattered in the world when they, like anyone else religious or non-religious, are called to share with others in building local community through families, neighbourhood, local school, politics ?± anything in which they are involved.

In both these areas, he says, pastoral care has two thrusts. The first is promoting health and wellbeing, a struggle for excellence in the quality of communal life together ?± both in the congregation and in the common life of society. Within this context, the second thrust is that of caring ?± rescue, healing, reconciliation and so on. Wilson gives an analogy from his earlier work as a medical doctor working in West Africa. The curative approach to disease failed to build up the health of local communities until a revolution in outlook in the nineteen sixties changed the medical emphasis towards preventive and community development work. Pastoral care is not just about ?´fixing?? people, it is about building healthy community life, in the broadest sense of the word healthy. "?ñto describe pastoral care," Wilson writes, "as primarily concerned with ?´the science and art of building groups of normal people?? for their particular task (whether in the church or the world or both) is to recover the Old Testament vision of shalom and to root pastoral care in the New Testament promise of the kingdom of God.(2)" Pastoral care, he points out, "is influenced by long-term questions which shape its context, such as, ?´What kind of world do we hope for? What kind of society do we want to be in this country???"(3)

If we are to take the breadth of understanding of pastoral care that Michael Wilson suggests then the parish council slot for ?´pastoral matters??, meaning what??s going on in the lives of our people, is dealing with only one aspect of pastoral care. When our parish council tries to develop a more effective pastoral caring process within this community, as we are going to be trying to do, reactivating elders?? connections with members and so on, we are still dealing with only one aspect of pastoral care. In Michael Wilson??s understanding, we could rename the parish council as the ?´pastoral council??, for it is responsible for the total ?´shepherding?? role in the imagery of Psalm 23. Proposals from the social justice team, decisions about worship, creation of Community programmes and courses, supporting the work of the youth leaders, our relationship with the wider Presbyterian church, managing the finances and property of the church, all are pastoral inasmuch as they relate to feeding and strengthening, inspiring and challenging and equipping each of us for whatever it is we do in the communities of our daily lives and the society in which we live.

"To put the growing of healthy community life first," writes Wilson, "is not to deny that people and their relationships are often sick, sinful and broken, and that healing, confrontation and forgiveness are required. But it is to resist the take-over of values, language and patterns of work which secular humanism and professional expertise have already stamped upon the giving of care in the modern world." (4) And he quotes Matthew 6:33 ?± "?ñstrive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well."

From talking about pastoral care in an abstract, general sense, I want to move to a specific, because it kept playing on my mind during the week as I was thinking about the pastoral theme of the readings for today. I thought about the parable of the Good Shepherd in the Gospels. The thrust of that parable of a shepherd with a flock of 100 sheep, you will recall, is that the shepherd leaves the 99 and goes off in search of the one sheep that has gone astray and brings it home. The Roman catacomb images of Christ with the sheep slung across his shoulders is drawn from that parable. It is a familiar and comfortable image, one which possibly you, like me, don??t really give much thought to apart from some vague nod of approval. That is, until something unbidden comes into the mind, as it came into mine this week, and asks, what if that lost sheep is Graham Capill?

On the day that his name suppression was lifted, someone asked me if I was surprised to hear that it was Graham Capill who had pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a young girl. After a brief pause, I said "No".

It is not that I think that people who proclaim the narrow and judgemental values he proclaimed as leader of the Christian Heritage Party are all potential sexual abusers. Nor is it that I have an essentially pessimistic view of the human being as a fallen creature, as a sinner. As I made clear in the first sermon of the series during Lent, as a ?´post-Darwinian?? Christian I find the Biblical myth of the Fall, and the consequent notion of ?´original sin??, a flawed and inadequate, indeed unhelpful, theory about human nature. Rather, it is that we all are neither perfect nor fallen; like the universe, like the planet we are incomplete, we are ?´a work in progress?? and need to be empowered to grow more and more into the fullness of our humanity, the ideal of which we see in Jesus of Nazareth. Graham Capill has clearly demonstrated the degree of his incompleteness.

I don??t want to appear to be asking for any sympathy for him. I don??t know the man, and through his media statements and so on while he was Christian Heritage Party leader have never liked him. But I wonder what it is like being Graham Capill, lost sheep, today? And I wonder if there is any chance of him finding any degree of wholeness. I remember some years ago when a Presbyterian minister, something of a hero in the charismatic, evangelical section of our church, had an affair with a woman parishioner and had to resign. That is, of course, a very different level of offence from Graham Capill??s, but it was appalling enough to conservative Christians for this minister to find that the only people who would speak to him were the liberals. They had a far more realistic and far less narrow view of the human condition. As a result that man??s theology did something of a turn-around, and today he is a more whole person ?± still incomplete like the rest of us, but perhaps a bit less incomplete.

So, what it is like being Graham Capill today? Does he feel remorse because of what he did? Or does he feel remorse because he was found out? What kind of turmoil was going on within him when these offences were taking place and he knew he was living the contradiction of what he publicly proclaimed? Or was he so split within himself that Graham Capill the moraliser had no concept of Graham Capill the child sexual abuser? If he was or is so split into two selves ?± what psychiatrist Robert Lifton after studies of vile, merciless doctors in Nazi concentration camps who were charming and urbane people when at home calls ?´doubling??, that is having two separate autonomous selves ?± if he was or is so split, is there any chance of reintegration, of wholeness? How does pastoral care respond to Graham Capill?

You might well ask, what about the pastoral response to the little girl and her family? That is a fair enough question, and I trust that it is being properly attended to. But I raise this matter and these questions in respect of the perpetrator rather than the victim because if we are to talk about pastoral care as wholeness and healing, whether of individuals or of society, then it is a test of our commitment to that, to the degree to which we are able to objectively ask questions like these about someone who in the current climate of thinking has committed the worst imaginable offence. I have no answers, just the questions.

?´Pastoral care?? sounds nice. The image of the Good Shepherd with the sheep slung across his shoulders is warm and comforting and ?± ?´nice??. But pastoral care, whether at the macro, societal level or the micro, personal level, is sometimes far from easy, full of ambiguities and contradictions, and asks difficult questions with hard or even no immediate answers. I do not know how I would respond if I were in the improbable position of being Graham Capill??s pastor. But I hope and pray that I would resist reacting so much to the offence that he has committed that I would be unable to be an agent of challenge, of grace, of mercy, of renewal and of restoration. In the end, pastorally speaking, nothing has any point unless I am motivated and act on the conviction of what we shortly shall sing ?± "Nothing is lost on the breath of God." Nothing is lost, not even the Graham Capills of our churches and our society.

(1) A Coat of Many Colours - Pastoral Studies of the Christian Way of Life, Epworth Press, London, 1988, esp pp 103-112

(2) Pg 109

(3) Pg 111

(4) Pg 112