PROCESS AND PASTORAL CARE:
A Ministry of Stature and Beauty
Bruce Epperly
For the past few years, I have focused on writing short texts, aimed at popular audience, to illuminate the resources of process theology for congregational life, ministry, and spiritual formation. Good theology joins vision – a way of looking at the world; promise – the lure to experience what we’re envisioning in daily life and professional responsibilities; and practice – ways that help us more fully experience the dynamic and intimate presence of God in our lives.
In Process and Pastoral Care, I explore the resources of process theology for congregations and their spiritual leaders. Profoundly committed to the universality as well as intimacy of revelation, process theology affirms the “priesthood of all believers” as well as the unique vocational gifts of pastors, rabbis, and other spiritual guides. Pastoral care professor Gordon Jackson once titled a text, “A Theology for Ministry: Creating Something of Beauty,” and Jackson’s understanding of ministry shapes my own vision of ministry from a process perspective. Healthy and empowering ministry adds to the beauty of the earth.
Though cognizant of life’s ambiguities and the limitations and fallibilities of spiritual leaders and their communities, a process vison of ministry supports beauty of experience in all its forms. Ministry is about enlivening, inspiring, healing, and transforming concrete persons in concrete situations. Grounded in a lively and intimate vision of God, process-oriented ministry accents the importance of relationships and interdependence, creativity, freedom, change, possibility, and surprise in ministerial encounters.
Ministry nurtures creativity and aims at the integration of past and future in the Holy Here and Now. Like politics, ministry is local, embedded in particular congregations and particular communities. But, as John Wesley says, and especially true in our ecological and technological age, our parish is the world. Nothing is foreign – there is no “other.” Good ministry combines local and global as it nurtures a priesthood of companions and community of healers to face the difficult – and necessary – challenges of life at the micro and macro levels. Our pastoral care must be aimed at personal growth, and also transforming the world.
Forty years ago, a small cadre of graduate and seminary students met weekly in an Advanced Seminar in Process Theology, taught by Bernard Loomer. Loomer reminded us then – and it’s inspired me for four decades – that “size” or “stature” is at the heart of the theological and spiritual journey. Jesus’ grew in wisdom and stature, and that is our calling, too. Too many popular religious leaders have small theologies and cramped understandings of ethics and spirituality. Their theologies promote wall-building, exclusion, inhospitality, and their political alliances put the planet and its creatures in peril. While often intimate in one-to-one encounters, pastoral ministry must also have “size” – it must be rooted in a community and radiate out into the nation and the planet. This large perspective – the mountain vision of Moses, Jesus, and Martin Luther King – enables us to navigate the complexities, conflict, and chaos of life today, without polarization or incivility.
This text has emerged from my own joining of pulpit and classroom, hospital room and study, contemplation and social action, big thinking and stretched budgets, in over forty years of ministry, teaching, and administrative leadership. While process theology may not provide quick and easy answers to problems of twenty-first century ministry and congregational life, a process vision awakens a sense of possibility, creativity, and change among spiritual leaders. Today’s churches face marginalization, pluralism, negative stereotypes, and a growing non-institutional culture. There is no return to the “good old days.” These realities – and the limitations that go with them - can demoralize pastors and congregations, but they can also invite us to embody new pathways of ministry as God’s companions in healing the world. The limitations – the concreteness of life – is the womb of possibility.
The book concludes with the following affirmation: “Ultimately, process care from a process perspective involves the quest for beauty of experience – for everyone! Beauty involves embracing diversity, welcoming novelty, and affirming possibility. As a sanctuary for the production of beauty, the pastoral ministry of the church is a place of healing and incarnating God’s vision on earth as it is in heaven.”
In Process and Pastoral Care, I explore the resources of process theology for congregations and their spiritual leaders. Profoundly committed to the universality as well as intimacy of revelation, process theology affirms the “priesthood of all believers” as well as the unique vocational gifts of pastors, rabbis, and other spiritual guides. Pastoral care professor Gordon Jackson once titled a text, “A Theology for Ministry: Creating Something of Beauty,” and Jackson’s understanding of ministry shapes my own vision of ministry from a process perspective. Healthy and empowering ministry adds to the beauty of the earth.
Though cognizant of life’s ambiguities and the limitations and fallibilities of spiritual leaders and their communities, a process vison of ministry supports beauty of experience in all its forms. Ministry is about enlivening, inspiring, healing, and transforming concrete persons in concrete situations. Grounded in a lively and intimate vision of God, process-oriented ministry accents the importance of relationships and interdependence, creativity, freedom, change, possibility, and surprise in ministerial encounters.
Ministry nurtures creativity and aims at the integration of past and future in the Holy Here and Now. Like politics, ministry is local, embedded in particular congregations and particular communities. But, as John Wesley says, and especially true in our ecological and technological age, our parish is the world. Nothing is foreign – there is no “other.” Good ministry combines local and global as it nurtures a priesthood of companions and community of healers to face the difficult – and necessary – challenges of life at the micro and macro levels. Our pastoral care must be aimed at personal growth, and also transforming the world.
Forty years ago, a small cadre of graduate and seminary students met weekly in an Advanced Seminar in Process Theology, taught by Bernard Loomer. Loomer reminded us then – and it’s inspired me for four decades – that “size” or “stature” is at the heart of the theological and spiritual journey. Jesus’ grew in wisdom and stature, and that is our calling, too. Too many popular religious leaders have small theologies and cramped understandings of ethics and spirituality. Their theologies promote wall-building, exclusion, inhospitality, and their political alliances put the planet and its creatures in peril. While often intimate in one-to-one encounters, pastoral ministry must also have “size” – it must be rooted in a community and radiate out into the nation and the planet. This large perspective – the mountain vision of Moses, Jesus, and Martin Luther King – enables us to navigate the complexities, conflict, and chaos of life today, without polarization or incivility.
This text has emerged from my own joining of pulpit and classroom, hospital room and study, contemplation and social action, big thinking and stretched budgets, in over forty years of ministry, teaching, and administrative leadership. While process theology may not provide quick and easy answers to problems of twenty-first century ministry and congregational life, a process vision awakens a sense of possibility, creativity, and change among spiritual leaders. Today’s churches face marginalization, pluralism, negative stereotypes, and a growing non-institutional culture. There is no return to the “good old days.” These realities – and the limitations that go with them - can demoralize pastors and congregations, but they can also invite us to embody new pathways of ministry as God’s companions in healing the world. The limitations – the concreteness of life – is the womb of possibility.
The book concludes with the following affirmation: “Ultimately, process care from a process perspective involves the quest for beauty of experience – for everyone! Beauty involves embracing diversity, welcoming novelty, and affirming possibility. As a sanctuary for the production of beauty, the pastoral ministry of the church is a place of healing and incarnating God’s vision on earth as it is in heaven.”