Would you bring a personal issue to the Pastoral Care Committee at your meeting?  The question came up in a workshop I attended at Illinois Yearly Meeting Annual Sessions. 

This question made me wonder about our expectations of the Pastoral Care Committee at Lake Forest meeting.  We ask this committee to take care of formal membership matters such as clearness committees for membership or marriage.  We expect the committee to keep track of our members and attenders and hopefully to notice if a member has wandered away from the meeting.  Our Pastoral Care Committee is very willing to provide clearness committees at the request of an individual seeking clearness on an issue.  We may unfairly expect the committee to solve all of the meeting’s conflicts or individual personal problems. 

The workshop also brought up the idea of the meeting as a family.  This is a family of choice rather than a family of origin.  I have heard many newcomers say, “When I came into meeting, I felt like I was home.”  I don’t personally have much training in pastoral care and the idea of family sounds complicated because we all have a different sense of family.  My own sense is that there is a difference between a spiritual family and a secular one. 

Many years ago, Janet Means Underhill collected some pastoral care newsletters from Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and arranged them in binders at the meetinghouse.  There are topics such as aging, mental health, as well as membership and marriage.  The Pastoral Care Committee has pulled them out and hopes to review some basics in the coming months.  However, everyone at the meeting has some responsibility for pastoral care towards each other.  We need to always recognize that we are not here to solve someone else’s problem but to listen carefully and try to understand how God is working in that person. 

Meanwhile, I wonder…  Would you bring a personal issue to the meeting or to the Pastoral Care Committee?  I don’t know that there is a right answer to this question though reasons why and why not may be revealing to your own relationship with the meeting.