Our threefold vision for pastoral care encompasses:
- Hospitality – welcoming and engaging with newcomers
- Compassion – responding immediately and in ongoing ways to practical, spiritual and emotional needs and pastoral crises
- Community – sustaining and building connections, providing oversight of and support for all the different ways we gather
Read our Three fold vision for Pastoral Care (2014) for more information.
Read the Pastoral Care Review report (2020).
As a community we are all involved on “Pastoral Care” with each other, however it is always valuable to stop and reflect upon how that is going, and how we are “living” that care.
What makes care “Pastoral”? Caring in the name of the incarnate God, a God embodied in a particular person, at a particular time and in a particular place… God with skin on!
- Being Present – is more important than what we do.
- Being silent – listening is more important than what we say.
- Being open to respond – engaging in conversation is more important than our own agenda
At the recent Congregational meeting it was valuable to be questioned and reflect upon the importance of how we Pastorally care for each other in our ever changing diverse community.
The model of Pastoral Care that Brunswick Uniting initially implemented in 2014 after several months of wonderful seminars and planning sessions, and which was then reviewed in 2020/21 affirmed BUC’s desire to offer care in meaningful ways that reflect in the saving work of the Good Shepherd through:
- extending Jesus Christ’s hospitality,
- living out his compassion
- and building up his community.
Our current Pastoral Care structure creates both a shape for our caring and an accountability to one another to enable our Pastoral Care desire to be actively lived. The principles of our caring are:
- Hospitality – pastoral care that welcomes people into community,
- Compassion – the care of people in times of challenge,
- Community – sustaining and building Christian community where we can each fully live out who we are.
- Oversight – offers pastoral care to the above teams through mainly an administrative role, holding the teams together and providing a conduit of communication between the teams, to other BUC committees and to Church Council.
We thank everyone who is involved in the pastoral care teams but especially all those in our community who offer care in a myriad of ways
If you have any questions or wish to reflect upon BUC Pastoral Care at any time please feel free to contact/ chat with Ian (0438 547 842), Jane Allardice (0419 385 544), Lyn Anderson (0407 748 271) or Gwen Arnold (0413 047 938) from the Oversight Team at any time. We also encourage to read the Pastoral Care reports, see links at the top of this page.