A tool for developing communities of care
A couple of years ago, one of my coachees introduced me to the work of culture writer Anne Helen Petersen. Petersen helps her readers think about the systems that are often invisible to us but that we all swim in every day. She also shares thoughts about how to live day-to-day in the midst of those (often harmful) systems even as we advocate for their overhaul. (I recommend her Substack here as well as her books on reconfiguring work and on Millennials and burnout.)
One of Petersen’s interests is creating sustainable communities of care. In the United States care infrastructure is piecemeal at best, and caregiving for children and older adults is undervalued and either underpaid or unpaid. That leaves many people - especially those of us in the sandwich generation - scrambling and harried much of the time, with little space to tend to our own needs for rest and relationships beyond work and caregiving, much less room in our schedules for errands or (dare to dream!) play. We need people we can count on for help, but reaching out is so hard. Petersen names some of the barriers as our identities as helpers, our pride in being self-sufficient, our feelings of overwhelm (which of the many pressing to-dos do we ask for assistance with?), and not having a solid friend network or family nearby because of the multiple moves we’ve made for work.
In a recent post Petersen proposes an “emergency/tough times guide” (here’s her template) in which we name the things that would be most helpful to us when we’re feeling stretched too thin. In her piece she also names ways to use the guide. In addition to the options she presents, I want to offer some thoughts on how you could tailor a communal care guide for you or for your church:
Craft the prompts for church staff and possibly even key lay leaders and ask them to fill out the form along with you. What personal or ministry support does each person need? What helps individuals feel seen and appreciated? Decide and communicate before distributing the form who will have access to the repository of responses. Access might be based on how vulnerable the questions ask respondents to be, how much trust there is in the system, what roles those with access play in the church, and how willing those people are to provide the requested assistance.
Develop a form that everyone in your church can fill out on a rolling basis. This equalizes all the participants, makes it ok to ask for help, and reveals the care that would really benefit individuals or family unit so that the church can, well, be the church to each other. You can decide whether the responses will be available to anyone who fills out the form or to a specific team of caregivers committed to meeting needs as they are able.
Develop a form in two parts for everyone in your church. In the first part takers name needs, and in the second part they share ways they could help others (e.g., taking people to appointments, making phone calls to people who are homebound, providing after school care for children of working parents). Everyone can see responses to both parts of the form, so they know whom to contact to give or receive care.
Create a clergyperson-specific form, distribute it among your pastor peers, and give all the takers access to the responses. There are certain personal and professional needs that only another minister can understand and fulfill, and the guide could open up conversation about what mutual support could tangibly look like.
None of the options above is perfect. The forms would have to be designed thoughtfully in order to meet the intended aim of building an organic, sustainable care structure. But I think there’s something in here worth considering, a means of acknowledging our needs and others’ and working toward helping one another in ways that make a real difference.
Pastors are humans, and we minister alongside humans. We talk about our dependence on God and our interdependence with one another. Yet we can be so hesitant to acknowledge what is hard in our lives and request help accordingly. Perhaps this communal care guide can lower our resistance to know and be known by each other more deeply and share our burdens in appropriate and relationship-building ways.
Photo by Clint Adair on Unsplash.