Pastoral care and chronic disaster victims: the Buffalo Creek experience.

Abstract

A concern for the demands of the Law and for the message of the forgiveness of sins does not characterize the way most modern, progressive, clinically educated pastors tend to view or practice their ministry with troubled persons. But if our pastoral care is to become more fully responsive and responsible to our theological heritage, and more profoundly related in a Christian way to the persons we serve, it will be necessary to recover the centrality of the doctrine of Law and Gospel in pastoral care and counseling. This article attempts to show why and how it might be done. This article focuses on the threefold nature of chronic disaster trauma in the Buffalo Creek context and the pastoral care response to it. The introduction sketches the events of the disaster and the living conditions of the past years. Attention is then centered on unresolved grief, disaster trauma, and loss of community. Case material is used to portray features of these various forms of disaster hurt and to show the interrelatedness of psychic, social, and religious issues. The paper then portrays the pastoral care response to disaster victims. The style of ministry is described, and the assumptions of the ministry are listed. Conclusions are then made on the basis of the experience of the past two years. These conclusions emphasize the need for a comprehensive pastoral care effort which is attentive to social issues in disaster as well as intrapsychic ones and is sensitive to the cultural and religious setting.