Saying Our Stories: A Guide for Individuals Who Are Story-Listeners

SOS is the culmination of my work since 1966, when my wife, Noel, and I moved from Melbourne, Australia, to Houston, Texas. My initial goal was to begin a four-year clinical pastoral education program (CPE) at the Institute of Religion in the Texas Medical Center. The long-term dream was to develop a parish-based lay pastoral education program to equip laypeople to serve with their ordained pastors in the pastoral ministry of the parish.

Until the midnineteenth century, pastoral care was the province of parish clergy, for which few were adequately equipped. I aimed to change that model by demonstrating that laypeople with the necessary training were integral to the church's ministry. That would entail providing clergy with supervisory skills.

The founder organizations of the newly constituted Association for Clinical Pastoral Education (ACPE) had pioneered clergy pastoral care education in the 1920s. The Equipping Laypeople for Ministry (ELM) program, which I founded in 1979, proved effective in the dual tasks of lay pastoral care training and the preparation of clergy for their necessary function of oversight of lay pastors.

Saying Our Stories is the account of the pioneering effort to undertake those tasks and demonstrate the effectiveness of the new model of parish pastoral ministry. It is a book of stories. The text suggests that pastoral care, at heart, is knowing that when a troubled person casts round for someone to listen to her (or his) story, they need a caring story-listener. Such listening is hard work, but story-listeners know that to listen is to care. If they finish up thinking, "All I did was listen," they know it is such a big all!