Why Track Pastoral Care in Your Church?

By Jacob Gerber — a pastor and the founder of Shepherding Tools.

An up-front summary of this article:

• In spite of how busy pastors are, tracking pastoral care is an extra step that pays dividends in the long-run.
• Track the dates of contacts (phone calls, visits, cards) with individuals, so that you know how long it has been since you had a quality interaction with them.
• Be diligent in checking in proactively with your members. God's providence leads diligent pastors to pastoral needs through proactive check-ins.
• Take notes about your conversations with people so that you can remember the details when you pray for them and the next time you talk with them.
• Good pastoral care that remembers the details of conversations helps to build trust with people so that you can lead them better toward trusting in the Lord.

And now the rest of the details.

Why is it so hard to track pastoral care?

Pastors are busy with people. With some people, you have regular contact. Some of those are close to you relationally, while others might be the proverbial "squeaky wheels" who need a lot of time, care, and attention. Then, in a given week, all kinds of crises might arise with other people with whom you normally don't spend a lot of time: a crisis in someone's extended family, a hospitalization, or a sudden death.

More, all of those visits you make, phone calls you place, text messages you send, and cards you mail come on top of the normal rhythm of preaching and worship leadership, staff meetings, and session meetings!

Even so, I want to encourage you in this article to add a little extra time to each of those interactions. I know personally how much other work you have to do, but there are tremendous blessings in making this simple discipline a habit in your ministry: to track pastoral care.

Within the whirlwind of activity with everything you are doing through the week, tracking pastoral care becomes essential for two reasons. First, tracking pastoral care will help you to shepherd all the members of the church. Second, tracking pastoral care will help you to shepherd the sheep well to gain their trust—especially so that you can help them to put their trust in the Lord. A small, extra step to what you are already doing in pastoral ministry has extraordinary potential to amplify the effectiveness of that ministry.

Shepherding all the members of the church

First, there are a lot of quiet people in the church who deal with their own crises and tragedies, but they never tell pastors or elders about what they are going through. There have probably always been stoic, stiff-upper-lip people in the history of the church; however, one of the effects of our post-Christian culture is that many of these people don't realize that they should (or can!) reach out to their pastors, elders, and deacons for help when they actually need it.

When we fail to track our pastoral care, it becomes difficult (impossible?) to identify the people we haven't contacted. As pastors, our lives are lived week-to-week, from Lord's Day to Lord's Day. We might keenly remember what happened on a Tuesday, since we might associate the event with our normal Tuesday activities. But, we might have a harder time remembering how many months ago it has been since we last met with a particular individual. ("Was it one month ago I had that conversation with him? Or two months? Wait—that was six months ago?!") It is only by tracking the pastoral care contacts we have with our people that we can see the gaps in the people we haven't contacted recently.

Finding people in need of pastoral care

A few weeks ago, I called an individual I hadn't spoken much with. During the check-in conversation, she mentioned to me that her sister would be having cancer surgery in two days. Two days! If she hadn't been on my proactive calling list that week, that surgery would have come and gone, and no pastor or elder would have so much as prayed with her about her sister.

Then, last week, I called someone else on my proactive calling list for the week. When she called back, she told me she was laughing that I would call her that day, since she had just had a major employment crisis arise the day before, leading her to consider whether she should look for a new job. If I hadn't called her, I wouldn't know to pray about a really important moment in her life.

God's providential timing in our pastoral care

I have come to realize that the frequency of these events points to something significant: people need shepherding far more than we realize. The question isn't whether people are going through significant events. The question is whether the pastor will know which significant events people are going through.

People always need pastoral care. When we call to check in, stumbling upon needs is not surprising. It's only a matter of which needs we will discover.

It is here that we get to enjoy the privilege of the front-row seat we have to witness God's providential timing in our pastoral ministry. As we are diligent to care for the people under our care, God gives us opportunities to learn about major events that are happening in their lives at that moment. Then, when I learn about those events, I can pray for, encourage, or counsel them. Those moments are incredibly encouraging reminders of why exactly God placed me to care for the flock that I serve.

Gaining the trust of the sheep

Second, tracking pastoral care gives us opportunities to build trust with our people. When we take good notes from our conversations with people, they will feel cared for when we can pick up the next conversation as though that person were the only individual we had spoken with. With that trust, we have the ability to continue to prod them with God's Word to trust the Lord in the specific context of their circumstances.

On the other hand, when we don't track our pastoral care by taking good notes from the conversations we have with people, we will likely lose credibility with them the next time we talk with them. A bad memory is not seen as a human weakness but a lack of care for them.

I can't speak for everyone, but my own memory works well enough for me to trust my memory too much, but not well enough for my memory alone to keep all the details of pastoral ministry in place. Far too often, I have leaned on my own memory and failed to serve my people in major ways.

The mistakes I have made in these areas—missing the "quiet" people and forgetting sensitive details—have made me passionate about tracking pastoral care. (I built Shepherding Tracker precisely so that I could stop dropping so many balls in care for the people in my church.)

Pastoral care tracking as a part of our care

I fully understand why most pastors aren't excited about adding one more task to each of their pastoral contacts with people. It's hard to write things down, and it's especially hard to build a habit of writing everything down from your ministry. I always feel the lure of letting the discipline slip, but I have learned how valuable it is to develop a system for tracking pastoral care.

One of the most tempting justifications for failing to track pastoral care is that our memories often work pretty well. Certainly, we remember some of our conversations with people. The problem is that we don't remember all of the conversations, and we don't remember all that we talked about in conversations that we do remember.

This point becomes especially important when we consider how pastors, elders, and deacons must share records in pastoral care. I will deal with that question in a future article.

FAQ

Why take the extra time to track pastoral care when I'm so busy already?

As the saying goes, a stitch in time saves nine. By taking just an extra moment to jot down a few quick notes about a conversation with someone in your church, your pastoral care becomes stronger overall. You will have a better sense of who hasn't been contacted for a long time, and you will better remember what you talked about in a previous conversation. The small amount of extra time makes your ministry much more effective.

What do I need to track from a pastoral contact?

At a minimum, record the dates of pastoral care for an individual, the kind of contact (phone call, visit, card, email), and some notes about what happened in the contact. Those details are important to remember in order to calculate how long it has been since contacting an individual and to remember important things a person said to you. I will answer this question in more detail in How to Make a Pastoral Check-in (and What to Write Down After).

Isn't my memory good enough that I don't need to write some of these things down?

I can only speak for myself, but my memory misleads me because it is almost good enough to keep track of those details. Inevitably, though, I forget crucial details that would have been easy to remember if I had just written them down. It's such a simple solution when there is so much at stake in caring well for the sheep whom the Lord has committed to our oversight.

I built Shepherding Tracker to help me stay organized in my shepherding contacts with individuals in the church I serve. It reminds me when I last talked with someone and what we talked about. Even more importantly, it helps me find the people I haven't talked with recently. Learn more about the software or try it free.