African American Pastoral Care

The main idea of African American Pastoral Care is that the custom and practice of storytelling that has been embedded for centuries into the culture of African peoples and African Americans can profitably be adapted, and indeed for optimum results must be adapted, along with certain modern theories and practices of developmental humanistic psychology, to the purpose of counseling and guiding parishioners and others seeking spiritual and secular help as they confront life crises and transitions. Using examples from his own and others' pastoral experience as a minister, Wimberly develops the view that the use of narrative, from the perspective of the Bible, from the perspective of the minister, and from the perspective of those who are being counseled, can result in satisfactory pastoral encounters and can most fully integrate the human experience with that of what he terms God's narrative, or plan, for man. No less significant is Wimberly's view that African American narrative traditions conform with and indeed actually prefigure certain diagnostic and treatme

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ility and input into the problems being faced by others as they construct and transform their own "narratives" of life experience into resolution. As he puts it: "[W]e assume that storytelling is the basic method of learning within the black culture" (82). For that reason, the pastor must learn to make use of stories, either from the bible or from the experience of resolving crisis issues for himself, that will allow the person or persons in crisis to reflect on their situation. Stories help people compare their situation to the situation of characters in a story, whether in ordinary life or in the biblical text, in a way that will help them heal. In this regard, Wimberly focuses on developing a "conflict- and anxiety-free source of narrative" (81). To drive home that point in reference to black culture, Wimberly devotes another chapter to what he terms "indigenous pastoral care," in which he shows the similarities between the oral traditions of Africa and African Americans and theories of psychology an personality that emphasize empathetic and intuitive responses to client narratives of conflict and crisis. In an important lengthy passage (100ff) that uses alternative readings of the story of Joseph in Genesis, Wimberly mak
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Approximate Word count = 1752
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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