For over 300 years Friends have had Ministry and Oversight committees or just Oversight or just Pastoral Care, or Care and Concerns. Recently Friends have begun to shed the term oversight for its cultural insensitivity. Really the purpose of the committee however named is to do pastoral care. But what does that mean in a setting where we have no pastor? It would seem it means how do we care for each other?
Pastoral Care committees (or substitute other name your Meeting uses) traditionally handle membership applications, weddings, clearness committees of all kinds, the creation of the annual state of the meeting report, etc. Since the AIDs crisis brought the death and dying of many members who often did not have close family, Meeting has also created Care committees for those in poor health or in some stage of dying and those are typically managed by the Pastoral Care committee (or in some very large Meetings by a seperate Care Committee that manages the care committees.) Many other churches do have the casserole brigade that brings food in the case of a death or illness....mostly in my experience we don't do this so well.
But what kind of care do we need? It has been my observation that many older friends are fiercely self sufficient and while willing to help others would be mortified at receiving "help" from others. This stands in contradiction to the reports from folks who have served on care committees that talk about it being deeply meaningful, and being spiritually enriched by the opportunity to give. Are we willing to give the gift of receiving?
I also note that our original pastoral care practices were developed when Friends lived and farmed in the same community, often having many other daily paths of intersection: as neighbors, business owners/patrons, mid-wife, social relations, etc. So they knew if someone was sick or dying, they knew if someone suffered a financial loss, or lost a job or suffered in various ways. Now Friends are often spread out, seeing each other only on Sunday and mostly in silence. How then do we learn of each others spiritual and physical needs? Some meetings do some version of sharing joys and concerns (that may happen once a month or weekly). Some meeting take prayer requests (which only some are brave enough to participate in) and some meetings have worship sharing with some kind of frequency which may fill in some details about people's lives...but for the most part we are often in the dark about each others needs which is why we struggle to do pastoral care well.
Recently a F/friend of mine who belongs to two Meetings broke her foot and was in a foot cast and confined to her house with orders to walk as little as possible for two weeks. She later confided to me that no one from either Meeting had reached out to her or asked what she might need. This is what I mean about how do we do Pastoral Care? In other churches the pastor might have checked in on her.
Years ago a member of the Meeting I then belonged to who was a very active member, clerk of various committees over the years, weekly attender, etc began to report her mother was dying. She was absent flying across the country to be with her mother several times. We said prayers for her and waited for her return to give her hugs and sympathy. Her mother died. But she did not return. We thought she was taking time to grieve. After about 3 months Pastoral Care called, to discover that she was mad, quite angry with us. No one had called her during that time, Pastoral care had called once, and she had received no cards or emails. She felt abandoned and uncared for by her spiritual community and had begun to question what kind of community was it really?
For me it raised many questions about our assumption that we would do all our pastoral care when we see each other. What does it mean to be in a spiritual community?
