Summary Of African American Pastoral Counseling

This paper addresses the concerns explored in Wimberly’s book, “African American Pastoral Care and Counseling”. It is a personal reflection and interpretation of counseling as a political process, as it relates to liberation from oppressive conversations. In addition, this paper exhibits my understanding of pastoral care and counseling as an integral part of public theology. I understand counseling as a political process, as it relates to liberation from oppressive conversations, in the African American congregation, as a process that edifies the individuals needs to facilitate, and enables them to fully participate in society. Through this process, the people learn to alter the way they have been recruited into identities that are oppressive and self-destructive. It is a process that helps individuals to remove the negativity of the past, and create a future that empowers growth and development. This process allows individuals to acquire real power, political power, which comes from the ability to control the practices …show more content…
Understanding the importance of pastoral care and counseling is essential, not only to the church congregation, but to the community. I agree that if the African American is to survive in the world, we must revise our way of thinking, which is somewhat based on an oppressive history and use our knowledge of this history to create a positive progressive future. But I also feel that our White Americans must also change their way of thinking and their actions which cause African Americans to focus on past history. One time I had the opportunity to attend a revival in a congregation in my church community that had a visiting minister who found it very easy to identify the blacks not as Negro or blacks but as “N’s”. Good pastoral care and counseling as public theology was carried out in its