Jim:

Thank you for this. I was interested in the quotation that directed members back to worship as a main goal of pastoral care. As I have reflected upon this often, it struck me recently that in my pastoral care I want members to do three things: Remember, Return, and Renew (three r's, I know, a little too much, but that is how it occurred to me). 

I want members to remember their baptism and profession of faith. What did they profess and what does that mean now? Actively remember these things.

Second, I want them to return to public worship and to personal worship if they have lapsed. Return, as in turn your feet toward public worship and toward personal worship at home.

And finally I want them to renew, which is to say to be renewed by God's Spirit, an active and passive thing.  Actively I want them actively to employ the means of grace--Bible, Sacraments and Prayer--, and passively I want them to be renewed, or seek renewal, by the power of God's Holy Spirit.

I am frustrated by our culture, and even by the U.S. Constitution. We have great freedoms, but we use them to ignore and to become complacent about the practices of the faith. We let people and ourselves off the hook. You and I in the ministry do not have an IRS or police force, as Dr. Leith would say. While it is good we do not have and do not use coercive force, we have been reluctant, or I find I have been reluctant, to encourage (even "rebuke"--oh my!) the lax and absent members. How often should we encourage, or even warn our folks? It is a free country, but we have maybe been too libertine in our approach to pastoral care. Empathy anyone? We are experts at that. But real serious pastoral care--calling people to remember, to return, and to renew--is lacking. I am working at getting better. Thanks for the good words.

Dr. David J. Wood, Pastor

Hebron Presbyterian Church