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TRENDS IN PASTORAL CARE

How to minister to the cocooned, overextended, and fractured people of the nineties.

In 1960, the proportion of children living with a single parent was a mere 10 percent. Now their ranks have risen to 25 percent.

Seventy-seven percent of all middle-level executives spend 50 or more hours per week on their jobs. And 26 percent of executives spend more than 60 hours per week.

Nearly half (46 percent) of all marriages today are remarriages for one or both partners.

Each day pastors read in their newspapers statistics such as these. And in their offices, they see some of the people represented by them. In the midst of such turbulent social change, how can a minister provide pastoral care? What does it mean to shepherd a congregation in the nineties?

To find out, LEADERSHIP went to a well-known church consultant and three pastors from differing regions. Here they offer their thoughts, first, on how the very role of the care-giving pastor has changed, and then on how they have adapted their pastoral care to these changing times.

The Changing Caregiver

by Lyle Schaller

Many changes ...

April
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