Saturday, November 24, 2012

"On Call" mini-pastoral-experience


I’ve been helping out at Christ Church for the last few weeks as the “on call” go to pastoral resource person.

It’s been an interesting three weeks.

I got a call from the Altar Guild about someone leaving the candles burn down, a couple of email notices about parishioners who were in surgery or who were in the emergency room and a raft of calls and emails about a pretty serious “interpersonal problem” with a person who is new to the church and is “crossing boundaries” all over the place.

There was some good response to the issues on the part of some individuals, including me but there wasn’t a structural response by the community. The Rector not being there must have had something to do with that but my feeling is that if she had been there, there may have been even less of a “community response” and more of a “clergy response”. I think this is an area where our faith communities need to improve. There needs to be a better networking of members and better structures in place to help rally the members, or at least to keep the members informed when they need to be.

It was a good experience and confirmed to me that I’m on the right track and following God’s call.

No comments:

Post a Comment