What Are The 7 Functions Of Pastoral Care?

The seven functions of pastoral care are healing, sustaining, guiding, reconciling, nurturing, liberating and empowering. The list is not from the Bible, and no single author wrote it. Four of the seven come from a 1964 history of pastoral care. Howard Clinebell added a fifth. The last two come from intercultural pastoral theology published in 2003. Most pages that hand you these seven never say where they came from.

The seven functions and what each one means

1. Healing. Restoring a person to a wholeness they had lost. Clebsch and Jaekle tie it to active, responsive and open listening.
2. Sustaining. Helping a person hold steady when the situation itself cannot be changed, or cannot be changed yet.
3. Guiding. Walking with people while they make choices. Emmanuel Lartey describes it as journeying with people towards confident and truthful choices.
4. Reconciling. Repairing broken relationships, both between people and between a person and God.
5. Nurturing. Helping people and communities grow. Clinebell allows confrontation as part of it, not only comfort.
6. Liberating. Helping people see the sources and causes of their own oppression.
7. Empowering. Helping a community recognise its own capabilities and talents.

How the list grew from three to seven

1. 1958. Three functions. Seward Hiltner, in Preface to Pastoral Theology (Abingdon Press), organised pastoral work around healing, sustaining and guiding. Those three are the chapter structure of the book.
2. 1964. A fourth. William Clebsch and Charles Jaekle added reconciling in Pastoral Care in Historical Perspective. The Internet Archive catalogue record gives the publisher of that first edition as Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, in 1964.
3. A fifth. Howard Clinebell added nurturing, which he framed as promoting the growth of people and society.
4. 2003. A sixth and seventh. Emmanuel Lartey added liberating and empowering in the second edition of In Living Color (Jessica Kingsley Publishers).

A 2018 article by Sinenhlanhla Chisale in Verbum et Ecclesia states the full set plainly. It credits the list to Lartey: healing, sustaining, guiding, reconciling, nurturing, liberating and empowering.

The published accounts do not agree on who added what

This is the part almost no page tells you. Three respectable accounts give three different lineages for the same seven words. Each row below names who that account credits with each of the last three functions.

Account	Nurturing	Liberating	Empowering
Chisale, 2018, HTS Teologiese Studies	Clinebell, 1984	Lartey, 2003	Lartey, 2003
Chaplaincy.pro, a chaplaincy training site	Clinebell, 1966	Andrew Lester, 1995	Lartey, 2003
Watkins Ali, 1999, via the St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology	Watkins Ali, 1999	Watkins Ali, 1999	Watkins Ali, 1999

Watkins Ali matters here. Her 1999 book Survival and Liberation proposed nurturing, empowering, liberating and reconciling for the African American context. That is four years before the Lartey edition usually credited with the last two.

So the honest answer is that the seven functions are a consolidation, not one scholar’s list. If your course or textbook gives you seven, ask it which lineage it is following. If you have to pick one citation, use Lartey 2003 for the full set of seven. Cite Clebsch and Jaekle 1964 for the first four.

What the seven functions are not

• Not a Bible passage. No book of scripture lists seven functions of pastoral care. Every function on this list was named in a work of twentieth or twenty-first century pastoral theology.
• Not a chaplaincy certification standard. The Common Qualifications and Competencies for Professional Chaplains does not use the seven functions at all. Five bodies affirmed it in 2016 and 2017, among them the Association of Professional Chaplains. It sets out four sections: integration of theory and practice, professional identity and conduct, professional practice skills, and organisational leadership. If you are preparing for board certification, that document is your standard, not this list.
• Not the same list everywhere online. The page ranking first on Google for this question gives a completely different seven. It includes sacramental duties and advocacy. It names no source for any of them.

How to cite the seven functions

Cite the books, not a web page that repeats the list. These are the primary works behind each function.

1. Hiltner, Seward. Preface to Pastoral Theology. Abingdon Press, 1958. For healing, sustaining and guiding.
2. Clebsch, William A., and Charles R. Jaekle. Pastoral Care in Historical Perspective. Prentice-Hall, 1964. For the four classical functions.
3. Clinebell, Howard. Basic Types of Pastoral Care and Counseling. Abingdon Press. For nurturing. Chisale cites the 1984 edition, page 19. A later edition, revised with Bridget Clare McKeever, was issued by Abingdon in 2011.
4. Lartey, Emmanuel Y. In Living Color: An Intercultural Approach to Pastoral Care and Counselling. 2nd edition, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2003. For liberating and empowering. Chisale cites pages 65 to 68.
5. Watkins Ali, Carroll A. Survival and Liberation: Pastoral Theology in African American Context. Chalice Press, 1999. For the earlier African American framing of nurturing, empowering and liberating.

Three of the sources used here are free to read, and they quote the page numbers directly. They help if you cannot get hold of the books. They are Chisale in HTS Teologiese Studies, Stephan van der Watt in the Stellenbosch Theological Journal, and Xolisa Jibiliza in the Pharos Journal of Theology.

One caution on page numbers. The references to Clinebell and Lartey above are given as Chisale cites them. Check them against the printed books before you rely on them in graded work.