ABSTRACT
The church is both a spiritual living organism and a social entity. As a spiritual body, it survives by feeding on spiritual food- the word of God. As a social organization, it requires effective leadership and direction. The pastor lays a very crucial role in feeding the church not only spiritually as its shepherd, but also providing the requisite leadership and direction necessary for the church to achieve its primary mission and mandate. Pastoral care and counseling represent one means by which the shepherd and leader of the church (the pastor), fulfills his spiritual and social obligation to the church who are his flock. Pastoral care and counseling are therefore critical ingredients in the life of the church. Without them, there is no real bond between the church leadership and memberships. Without pastoral counseling and care, the problems of members cannot be known and addressed. For churches to grow, pastors and pastoral teams need to ensure that they care for their sheep. This is certainly a critical aspect of the pastoral ministry.
1.1 Introduction and Background
The church, as revealed in the Pauline epistles is usually analogous with a bride, body, temple or living organism[1]. Growth is a necessary component of all living organisms. From a biological perspective, the features of adaptive significance that distinguish living from non-living entities is the ability to carry out life processes including movement, respiration, sensitivity to stimuli, reproduction, excretion, nutrition and growth[2]. An organism that is not experiencing growth is certainly malfunctioning and this may be the result of mal-nutrition, diseases or inherent biological disorder or unfavorable environmental circumstances.
As a living organism, the church of Jesus Christ needs to experience growth and there is no question that the command of God and the major concern of churches are quantitative and qualitative church growth[3]. This fact has been reflected on various kinds of books or dissertations including the Bible. Church leaders, especially missionaries or pastors have reported strategies, principles, perspectives or experiences from their ministry fields through books or dissertations. No wonder almost every resource in theology is connected to church growth directly or indirectly.
As the body of Christ, meaning that the Church could be construed as a social organization that comprises people coming from divergent backgrounds, problems are inevitable. Problems people face in life are myriad but may be classified generally under spiritual, psychological, emotional, physical, material, financial or social. Spiritual problems might include people under demonic oppression or attacks. Psychological problems might include people suffering from various forms of addictions. Emotional problems often relate to relationships including dating, marriage, divorce etc. Physical problems include presence of sickness, diseases and disorders in the body. Material problems include lack of some material necessities in life including shelter, clothing etc. Financial problems include lack of money but could be stretched to encapsulate financial difficulties that affect people’s personal businesses and plague their households. Social problems might involve children or spouses who are exhibiting deviant behavior such as engaging in marital unfaithfulness, prostitution, or armed robbery. While these classifications may not be exhaustive, they help in properly conceptualizing the various categories of problems that people in general, and church congregations, in particular face. It must be noted, however, that these areas are interdependentand may have some relationships with each other and should in no way be treated as separate completely unrelated entities.
People join the church congregation for several reasons. In a National Survey of Mega church attenders[1] which was conducted from January to August 2008 at 12 mega churches across the United States,18-year-old and older attenders of these churches at all their campuses and services during one weekend’s worship services was surveyed. From this effort, the research collected usable responses from 24,900 attenders out of a possible total of 47,516 people, for a 58% response rate. Additionally, the researchers supplemented the survey at these churches with site visits, interviews, surveys of staff and other data collection efforts.
The survey asked mega church attenders to score a series of 10 items on a 1 (not at all) to 5 (a lot) scale on how influential each factor was in initially attracting them to come to the church. The worship style, senior pastor and reputation of the church were most strongly influential in initially bringing people into the mega churches. A secondary level of influence was attributed to music and arts, the presence of one’s family and friends and the church’s social and community outreach. An exception to this general pattern was if the person was a visitor or a recent attender of 1 year or less. In that case, the friends and family characteristic is an equal primary initial attraction, but it still doesn’t have a greater influence than the three most influential items. It is interesting that an often-stated reason for switching churches – that of the children’s and youth programs – rated very low even though most mega churches, including the 12 churches researched, had excellent youth programs. These programs were more attractive for couples and single parents with children, yet even for these groups youth programs were not the draw one might expect.
Although the above study was conducted in the U.S., the findings may be replicable within the Ghana context subject to empirical verification.
Figure 1: Factors that attract new people to Mega churches
Source: Thumma, S. & Bird, W. (June, 2009). Not Who You think they are: The Real Story of People Who Attend America’s Mega churches. Hartfod Institute for Religion Research and Leadership Network.
