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Providing Christian care in our time: Seven trends in pastoral care today

Lynne Baab • Friday August 10 2018

In my post last week, I described a community dinner and a prayer support group as examples of patterns of Christian caring that are now being recognized as pastoral care. Those two stories illustrate several of the trends in pastoral care that I identify in my new book, Nurturing Hope: Christian Pastoral Care in the Twenty-First Century.

Here are the seven trends I think need to be in the front of our minds today in the area of Christian care today:

1. Pastoral care has many models. The model of pastoral care from 50 years ago, a minister sitting in an office having a...

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Providing Christian Care in Our Time

Lynne Baab • Thursday August 2 2018

For more than 20 years, a church in Seattle has offered dinner on Wednesday nights to anyone who wants to come. Numerous homeless people and others on the margins attend.

Members of the congregation are encouraged to attend, in order to build relationships with the people who come to the dinner. Over the years a great deal of caring has gone back and forth between the congregation members and the homeless and low income people who attend the dinner. For many years, the church hired a part time social worker to help people in the Wednesday Night Dinner community with housing and...

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My new book on Christian caring: How I came to write it

Lynne Baab • Thursday July 26 2018

In mid January 2017, I was enjoying summer in New Zealand and slowly working through closets and drawers in preparation for our upcoming move back to Seattle in June. I was glad we hadn’t planned much travel for the summer, because I find it overwhelming to sort through possessions, and I was making very slow progress.

My friend Beth Gaede contacted me that January. Beth served as editor for five of my books, and over the course of working on those books, she and I became friends. In 2016, she had taken on the editor role for a series of books on...

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