“Pastoral care is a person-centred, holistic approach to care that complements the care offered by other helping disciplines while paying particular attention to spiritual care. The focus of pastoral care is upon the healing, guiding, supporting, reconciling, nurturing, liberating, and empowering of people in whatever situation they find themselves.”
Bruce Rumbold, La Trobe University School of Public Health
Every tradition and culture in the world has it’s own version of pastoral care. This ancient and trusted discipline provides a positive framework for exploring issues such as identity, motivation, values, grief and loss, loneliness, meaning, relationships and resilience.
Converge International has more than 50 years of experience in providing pastoral care in the workplace. Our on-site pastoral care model provides support, counselling, resources and crisis response.
Our Pastoral counsellors fill the role of an unbiased and accepting person in the workplace who can help with emotional, physical, mental and spiritual challenges. Pastoral care focuses on developing long-term relationships between employees and the pastoral counsellor; this allows for early intervention for people with personal and work related issues. All conversations are confidential and pastoral counsellors work closely with the other support services in an organisation, for example employee assistance programs, to refer workers on when required.
Having a pastoral counsellor on-site helps to build community within an organisation and adds to organisational resilience. When issues are addresses early on, problems don’t have the chance to fester and this makes for more productive and happy employees. In turn, these people have a greater capacity to deal with more change and bigger external issues because the smaller issues are dealt with proactively.
72% of Australian workers are searching for meaning and purpose through their work.
(Source: Reventure research for “A Future that Works”)