PASTORAL CARE REVIEW:

RATING: 5 Stars

REVIEW:

I have learnt a lot about Pastoral Care in this course that I did not know before. The task of Pastoral Care is to help people re-frame their lives, in the light of God’s story for the sake of greater freedom and responsibility, the stories we tell whether humorous or divine, mythic or parabolic, order experience, construct meaning and build community. I really love this quote by Herbert Anderson, and I feel it sums up what Pastoral Care truly is. I found it interesting that Pastoral Care backdates to the old testament. I was told within my church environment that a Pastor is a function, but its more than just being a function in a church, it is a role and a gift. We should be equipping, building up, unifying and maturing our groups and the congregation in the church that we oversee. The gift of a Pastor is a special ability that God gives to certain members of the body of Christ to assume a long term personal responsibility for the spiritual welfare of a group of believers. I have learnt that oversight, authority and responsibility comes with the role of Pastoral Care. Pastoral Care within the church always focuses on people, their health, growth, maturity and relationship with God. Our attitude should be compassion, compassion is a response to seeing a need and inner compulsion of care and concern that motivates us to render assistance when we see the suffering of others. Within Pastoral Care it is fundamental to have people skills, be able to understand who they are as well as help them understand who God created them to be, and understand their needs and what is required of them to reach their full potential.

From my experience versus what I have learnt in this course are completely different. I had no idea about the legislation side of things or the to mandatory reporting and the record keeping principles. Communication skills and understanding a persons characteristics in Pastoral Care is vitally important.

COUNSELLING BASICS – PART 1:

RATING: 5 Stars

REVIEW:

I am really enjoying the course, I find it refreshing and eye opening, I am truly learning a lot. I have learnt that counselling is about facilitating changing people, as their attitudes their decisions their behaviour feelings and values. Mentoring and developing skills, strength building, spiritual growth. I have learnt that we are not there to fix people, preach or convert people, delegate. We must always be aware of the immense responsibility and privilege we have to journey with another and not use this to our or others advantage, and in doing so abuse or position our clients. Counselling comes under the mandate of the church, which falls under discipleship and spiritual transformation as Christian counsellors we should always incarnate Christ. Our priorities should always be to care and connect. As counsellors we must resist the desire to offer advise to early if at all, the real heart behind the need often takes a while to surface, so the journey of counselling requires time. I found this quiet interesting that recent studies have concluded that relationships make up for 75% of a persons emotional healing and the counselling relationship only accounts for a small amount of the therapeutic success. I think as counsellors the below statement sums up what counselling is about “The church as a healing community, a place of connection, a place of grace and forgiveness, a place of acceptance, a place of encouragement and support, a place where the Trinity is present in all aspects of life, a place of continued accountability and love.” As Christian counsellors we are not there purely for the change of mind and action, we are part of the disciplining process. I found it interesting learning about the God’s purpose in salvation, the counselling theories: Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Humanistic Approaches; Existential – Humanistic Approaches; Strength Based Approaches and the different Christian Approaches. I enjoyed learning about the emotional aspects of counselling, the ABC sequence as we as the ABCDE approach, mental illness and depression, the causes of depression. This course has taught me pastoral counselling we should love and respect the person, ask questions about what and how sever the problem/feelings are, listening is extremely important, we should not make assumptions about the person or their circumstances, we should never stigmatize the issue, we should seek information about their support network, we should refer to other people if we feel we cannot help and we should pray for them.

COUNSELLING BASICS – PART 2:

RATING: 5 Stars

REVIEW:

I enjoyed this second part of the course, learning the theology of emotions. Learning more in depth about the Christian mis-beliefs about emotions – falsie of Christians not getting sad, anxious or depressed. I loved the quote in the course from Thomas Oden “Christian teaching is not primarily focused upon an analysis of human feelings.”

I found the teaching of “The formation of Christian character could determine which emotion is aroused in certain circumstances” the best way to summarize this course and its teachings. Learning about the different aspects of anger, aggression, passive aggression, its causes and triggers, anxiety especially learning that many struggle because they cannot understand what is going on or what to do about it. Learning that the word anxiety is one word in the English language, but that one word has many different meanings. What are the different triggers and symptoms of anxiety. By doing this course I loved learning about the behavioural strategies on how to best support people and their emotions. It was really refreshing and interesting in learning about the six different role plays – really enjoyed the grief and loss lecturers as I have studied that before in my current church, but to get a different perspective on it and more in a pastoral manner was enlightening – the causes of grief, complicated grief, chronic grief, delayed grief, masked grief, exaggerated grief, how to go about client care in grief and how to apply biblical scripture into it as well. Learning about guilt and shame – personal guilt, false guilt, legal guilt, subjective guilt, learning how to show understanding through the guilt not shaming them or being judgmental loving the person and helping them analyse the problem and the situation. Identifying the shame and the shame process through all of this. Learning about conflict, causes of conflict, data conflict, interest conflicts, value conflicts, structural conflicts, dance of conflicts, conflict management, conflict resolutions.

Learning about solution focused therapy. Group dynamics within the counselling environment. Learning about the inner healing process and what are the important things to consider.

I loved this course and found it to be refreshing and so informative which I believe everyone who wants to do any form of counselling would need to understand, so much so that I am looking at further studies into counselling to get a better understanding of it all.

I have learnt a lot about Pastoral Care in this course that I did not know before. The task of Pastoral Care is to help people re-frame their lives, in the light of God’s story for the sake of greater freedom and responsibility, the stories we tell whether humorous or divine, mythic or parabolic, order experience, construct meaning and build community. I really love this quote by Herbert Anderson, and I feel it sums up what Pastoral Care truly is. I found it interesting that Pastoral Care backdates to the old testament. I was told within my church environment that a Pastor is a function, but its more than just being a function in a church, it is a role and a gift. We should be equipping, building up, unifying and maturing our groups and the congregation in the church that we oversee. The gift of a Pastor is a special ability that God gives to certain members of the body of Christ to assume a long term personal responsibility for the spiritual welfare of a group of believers. I have learnt that oversight, authority and responsibility comes with the role of Pastoral Care. Pastoral Care within the church always focuses on people, their health, growth, maturity and relationship with God. Our attitude should be compassion, compassion is a response to seeing a need and inner compulsion of care and concern that motivates us to render assistance when we see the suffering of others. Within Pastoral Care it is fundamental to have people skills, be able to understand who they are as well as help them understand who God created them to be, and understand their needs and what is required of them to reach their full potential.

From my experience versus what I have learnt in this course are completely different. I had no idea about the legislation side of things or the to mandatory reporting and the record keeping principles. Communication skills and understanding a persons characteristics in Pastoral Care is vitally important.