The Indispensable Guide to Pastoral Care

The Indispensable Guide series offers tightly focused, relatively brief, accessible, and practical books for students in seminary, alternate paths to ministry groups, and lay ministry programs. Each book introduces core concepts, provides ample illustrations, and includes a helpful resource list.

Peterson recognizes that as students learn more about specific areas of care-facilitating pastoral conversations, making hospital visits and planning funerals, offering bereavement care, and celebrating weddings and births-they also learn to draw connections to care and its theological foundations.

To help link these elements, she: offers a basic description of both the theological and practical dimensions of pastoral care-what makes care distinctly "pastoral," as compared to other kinds of caregiving; encourages students to explore the basic concepts that are important for understanding each area of care; demonstrates how they can use both traditional and contemporary resources in order to improve the care they offer.

About the Author:
Sharyl B. Peterson, senior minister at First Congregational United Church of Christ in Grand Junction, Colorado