Response To Group Reflection

This class has served to enlighten and increase my understanding of the distinctions between Pastoral Care, Counseling and Crisis. Before taking this class, I lumped these categories all together as pastoral care. As such, my reactions towards what I deemed pastoral care was very negative in that I felt ill-equipped and was way too intimidated to handle what potentially seemed to be a day to day pastoral care overload. The first eye opener came when I read about the distinctions between pastoral care and pastoral counseling. In Response to Group three’s Module 1 Summary, Instructor Gatobu’s provided a more succinct definition of Pastoral Care as “the wider spectrum of everything that the pastor does with Parishioners” and Pastoral Counseling as …show more content…
Now, I really don’t feel the intense pressure, I once did. It’s as if a way of escape has been presented to me for those matters which are conflictual, outside of the realm of my expertise or for establishing greater boundaries to safeguard and protect my pastoral relationships, integrity and prevent inappropriate crossing over of them.
I hate to admit that week two left me wounded. Before, it was easy for me to skirt around the issue of self-care. However, the readings left me with feelings of remorse and sadness as I considered how ineffective I had become not because of what I was doing but because of what I was failing to do - that is - take care of me. In moving from the legal field into the work of ministry, it never dawned on me how I had taken that same workaholic mentality into the pursuit of pastoral ministry. It seemed so natural but reflecting back, I can see how it has been so wrong. Not training others to share the load,