Ministry Groups Tend to Pastors' Needs
Pastoral care makes up a large part of ministries, according to one who works with pastors and oftentimes counsels them on a telephone hotline.
Wednesday, Aug. 10, 2005 Posted: 7:20:47AM EST

Pastoral care makes up a large part of ministries, according to one who works with pastors and oftentimes counsels them on a telephone hotline.

Roger Charman is on staff with Parsonage.org, a ministry of Focus on the Family. He says "A number of years ago, we realized that a lot of the crisis mail that we were receiving here at Focus on the Family were from pastors and their families, and we realized that we may need to do something to help them."

"Contemporary pastors are caught in frightening spiritual and social tornadoes which are now raging through home, church, community and culture," wrote H.B. London & Neil B. Wiseman in their book, Pastors at Risk, just published in 2003.

"Something has to be done. Overwork, low pay and desperation take a terrible toll as pastors struggle to make sense of crammed calendars, hectic homes, splintered dreams, starved intimacy and shriveled purpose.

"A number of pastoral care ministries have sprung up in Church over the past decade or so as churches realized the stress and burnout that pastors suffered from.

The rest