Pastoral care consists of helping acts, directed towards the healing, sustaining, guiding, reconciling and nurturing of persons whose troubles and concerns arise in the context of daily interactions and ultimate means and concerns.
Healing
A pastoral function that aims to overcome some impairment by restoring the person to wholeness and by leading them to advance beyond their previous condition.
Sustaining
Helping a hurting person to endure and to transcend a circumstance in which restoration to their former condition or recuperation from their malady is either impossible or so remote as to seem improbable.
Guiding
Assisting perplexed persons to make confident choices between alternative courses of thought and action, when such choices are viewed as affecting the present and the future state of human wholeness.
Reconciling
Seeking to re-establish broken relationships between man (sic) and fellow man and between man and God. Historically, reconciling has employed two modes – forgiveness and discipline.
Nurturing
Enable people to develop their potentialities, throughout the life journey with all its valleys, peaks, and plateaus. Nurturing and guiding are the pastoral care functions in which education and counseling are most intertwined. Many teachers and parents in schools see this function as critical in the achievement of their community’s educational mission.