A Strategy for Equipping the Laity for Pastoral Care in the Wesleyan Church

The average church of 100 is too large for one pastor to care for. The problem is that we are trying to do it, anyway. The rate of discouragement and burnout among pastors is high. Pastors are over-worked generalists, while lay people are under-worked consumers.
Most Wesleyan Churches are operating in the old paradigm where the pastor is the paid profession care-giver and the laity are the expectant care-receivers. This is a far cry from the plan of the New Testament where every believer is a minister and has a ministry. Wesleyan Churches need to rediscover what John Wesley discovered as he began to use and value lay ministry as a viable tool to accomplish the task of ministry.

I have established through literature review and extensive survey of pastor care through the use of lay pastors. This dissertation then presents a model of pastoral care through the use of lay pastors. The model operates on the paradigm that lay persons can be trained to provide excellent pastoral care and that persons in the congregation will accept and value the ministry from a peer. The dissertation seeks to prove these assumptions through use of this model at Desert Hope Wesleyan Church, Phoenix, Arizona.

As lay pastors are trained and empowered for ministry a contagious atmosphere of care begins to permeate the church. This is important because it is very difficult for a church to grow beyond its ability to care for people. As the pastor releases the people for ministry, the churches' capacity to care enlarges and lay people begin to find they can do what they previous thought only the paid professional pastor could do.