Guide for Friends Seeking Assistance from the Pastoral Care Committee

The aim of the Pastoral Care Committee is to support individuals in thinking about and solving life challenges. These challenges can be spiritual or practical in nature. Spiritual and practical challenges require different types of support, hence these will be addressed separately. Members and attenders of Bloomington Friends Meeting are welcome to contact any member of the PCC to discuss a spiritual or practical concern. Sometimes a conversation will be enough; at other times, the matter may require bringing it to the committee as a whole. In either case, the PCC and its members maintain total confidentiality.

Support in Spiritual Concerns

Spiritual concerns are usually addressed by creating a clearness committee. Applications for membership or marriage should be made to the Ministry and Counsel Committee. Other requests for a clearness committee may be made to Ministry and Counsel or to the PCC. Any member or attender of Bloomington Friends Meeting may ask Ministry and Counsel or PCC to form a clearness committee and may, if they so choose, ask for certain Friends to be part of it. As Faith and Practice of Ohio Valley Yearly Meeting says on p. 9, Clearness is a collective process of discerning the leadings of the Inward Light. The process is simple. Members of the committee ask questions that might help the seeker’s own discernment—without offering advice, sharing personal anecdotes, or counseling. Testing for clearness is a spiritual exercise. It requires a spirit of openness and trust in the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

Support in Practical Issues

The PCC is available to help address practical concerns and provide counsel and assistance to the extent we are able. As members and attenders of the Bloomington Friends Meeting are not able to provide long-term assistance, the PCC is focused on helping individual Friends develop their own support networks. For this reason, members are encouraged to think about the following questions as they approach the PCC for help, and the PCC may use these as queries to help Friends address the challenges they face:

1. What specifically is the difficulty or concern?

2. How have you tried to address this difficulty before coming to the PCC? What were the outcomes of these efforts?

3. Who else can you approach to help in this regard? Are there friends or family who live close to you? Do you know your neighbors? What other community resources might be of help?

4. What can we do to be proactive in addressing this problem in the future?

Forming a clearness committee may be appropriate for some practical concerns, especially those that raise spiritual concerns or directly affect the Meeting community.