The Congregational Setting of Pastoral Counseling: A Study of Pastoral Counseling Theorists from 1949–1999

Abstract

Examines, through content analysis, the major authors in the field of pastoral counseling since 1949 with the goal to determine the degree to which pastoral counseling theory in the second half of the twentieth century attended to the context of parish ministry. Reports on trends in the field's orientation and notes that a particular viewpoint, or range of viewpoints, has driven the core of pastoral counseling theory and methodology. Attempts to answer the question, Does the literature of pastoral counseling address the counseling situations typically encountered by congregational pastors and provide an adequate methodology suited to the context of parish ministry?

The Ministry of Care in Twenty-First-Century Protestant Congregations

“…Pastoral theologian Howard Stone (2001) has written about the congregational setting in relation to books on pastoral counseling. Having examined pastoral counseling books from 1949 through the latter half of the twentieth century, he concludes that "the pastoral counseling literature of the last five decades primarily treats congregational ministry with superficiality and silence" (p. 3).…”

An Anthropology of Singularity? Pastoral Perspectives for an Embodied Spirituality in the Annus virtualis and Beyond

“…Research indicates that many new developments have taken place in recent decades within the field of practical theology (Dreyer, 1998) and in the formulation of pastoral theory (Ganzevoort, 2001;Louw, 1999;Louw, 2003), with particular emphasis on pastoral therapy (Immink, 2003;Scholtz, 2005;Stone, 2001). During the twentieth century, pastoral care began to undergo particular evolutionary developments.…”

Stewardship Models of Pastoral Care, Counselling and Supervision: The Commonians Meet Ricoeur at Worship

“…Answering the "why" of Stone's (2001) research discovery: the congregational context is largely unaddressed in the pastoral counselling literature because the public, corporate encounter with God is not readily contained by the Jamesean economy. Pastoral counselling in the worshipping community illustrates Ricoeur's (1992) notion of inchoate universals: the ethos of the congregation-where the varieties of encounter with God derive from public, corporate conversations-is put to the test in the dialectic of pastoral and psychology.…”