Pastoral Care • Mentoring for Spiritual Seekers • Marriage Visioning • Hospitality
The purpose of Heritage Work is to make pastoral care, mentorship, marriage vision, and spiritual friendship available through organic relationship and neighborly hospitality to THE local community, outside the organized church.
Pastoral Care
Below is a selected quote that has informed our approach to pastoral care.
"More and more, the desire grows in me simply to walk around, greet people, enter their homes, sit on their doorsteps, play ball, throw water, and be known as someone who wants to live with them. It is a privilege to have the time to practice this simple ministry of presence.
Still, it is not as simple as it seems. My own desire to be useful, to do something significant, or to be part of some impressive project is so strong that soon my time is taken up by meetings, conferences, study groups, and workshops that prevent me from walking the streets. It is difficult not to have plans, not to organize people around an urgent cause, and not to feel that you are working directly for social progress.
But I wonder more and more if the first thing shouldn't be to know people by name, to eat and drink with them, to listen to their stories and tell your own, and to let them know with words, handshakes, and hugs that you do not simply like them, but you truly love them."
By Henri Nouwen from Gracias (pg. 147-148)
Mentoring spiritual seekers
our philosophy on mentorship can be illustrated by the quotes below.
“Mentoring is a relationship initiated by a spiritual seeker who finds a mature person of faith willing to pray and respond with wisdom and understanding to his or her questions about how to live spiritually in a world of ambiguity and distraction.”
Henri Nouwen
“The whole purpose of mentoring is to penetrate beneath the surface of a [person’s] life, to get behind the facade of conventional gestures and attitudes which they present to the world, and to bring out their inner spiritual freedom, their inmost truth”.
Thomas Merton
Marriage Visioning
Your marriage is the birthplace of a new creation the world hasn’t seen before. It is not a copy of any former marriage or even family of origin — you are brand new.
This new creation is a mystery unfolding. You can’t discover its mystery from your own earnestness, effort, or even a book about marriage. It is revealed in how you enter into love & receive love. It accesses deeper places of selfless love you didn’t know about.
It is two becoming one, a unique new spiritual & relational DNA; It isn’t merely the sum of 2 parts. Not a 50/50 or 60/40 relationship of constant compromise, defining roles, negotiating, and score-keeping. Life is full, but when we reduce marriage to roles, formulas or ‘rightness’, we diminish the mystery. In marriage, we don’t become less of who we are individually, but rather something new is being born. This is the foundational core of your marital identity.
Hospitality
The selected quote below is descriptive of how we seek to embody hospitality in our life and work.
“We all know people who are guests wherever they are. They do not take the responsibility of a host for people's feelings, comfort, hospitality, needs, or concerns. They are in the world to be served, not to serve. Someone else is always responsible to take care of them. When they come into a room they say, ‘Well, I'm here’, instead of saying, ‘Well, look who's here. I'm glad to see you! How are you?’
“That's what communicating the faith is all about. When the forgiving love of God has healed us at the core, our abiding concern is for the guests that God puts in our lives. If conversation, sharing of experience, inquiring into another person's need, patient listening, and liberating empathy are seen in the context of joyous listening, we will come across as a person whom others cannot resist. They will want to be with us and know our Source.”
Author unknown
