Pastoral Identity as Social Construction

How do chaplains and counselors form their identities as ""pastoral"" caregivers in challenging clinical contexts such as institutional, interdisciplinary, postmodern, inter-cultural, and multi-faith work environments? This book is a product of the fifteen-year-long journey towards answering a well-known but hardly answered question about pastoral identity. Based on narratives of many pastoral practitioners who work in hospitals or counseling settings, the author puzzles through ways for helping professionals to form their identities in bewildering work environments.

Previous studies on pastoral identity have focused on an individual interiority of pastoral practitioners and have emphasized mainly the caregivers' perceptions and practices from a developmental and training perspective. Grounded in an empirical study of active pastoral care providers, this book presents pastoral identity as a relational and interactional property, socially constructed among pastoral care partners, culture, and God. Findings of the empirical study support contemporary theological and social psychological discourses: identity is embedded in and embodied by relationships.

This book will guide you through confusions, worries, insights, and woes you have experienced while helping others in order to envision yourself more clearly as a spiritually-embodied and pastorally-tending caregiver. You will find yourself to be more who you are and engage more with others as they become who they are.

""Park's original research employs grounded theory to discover an emphasis on relational and inter-subjective self-descriptions . . . This book will be of great service in seminary classes as students struggle to integrate their theology and practice of pastoral care, and come to know themselves as flexible and open caregivers, firmly rooted in the divine love.""
--Mary Clark Moschella, Yale Divinity School
 
""Park's grounded theory study constructs a vision of pastoral identity that moves beyond individually 'owned' pastoral identity and toward identity that rests in a rich set of collaborative partnerships and perichoretic interactions. With this text, Park has made a substantial contribution to the empirical foundation of pastoral care and counseling.""
--Loren L. Townsend, Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary
 
""Clinically precise, theoretically and ecclesially grounded, and theologically rich, this text offers a perceptive view of incarnational ministry, while honoring the role of the one receiving care. It is an important advance in the field of pastoral theology, especially given the multicultural sensitivity of the author.""
--Molly T. Marshall, Central Seminary
 
""This is a much-needed textbook for pastoral care courses and chaplaincy training programs that help practitioners form authentic pastoral identities that are both grounded in their faith traditions and open to the co-creative possibilities of each pastoral encounter with the other."" 
--Carrie Doehring,Iliff School of Theology


Samuel Park is Assistant Professor of Practical Theology and Contextual Ministry Education and Director of Korean Missional Church Programs at Central Seminary, Shawnee, Kansas. He is the author of several articles on pastoral identity and the history and methodology of pastoral care, counseling, and theology. His articles have been published in a range of scholarly peer-reviewed journals, including Pastoral Psychology, Journal of Pastoral Care and Counseling, and Journal of Spirituality in Mental Health.