Context and Location
Affect Ministry
For Better Or Worse

Context and location for holy Listening...and other minstry activities...have physical boundaries.

Whether you are doing...

• pastoral counseling...
• spiritual direction...
• or any other kind of ministerial counseling...

Inappropriate contexts lead to behavior that undermine the goals of ministry actions.

At such times...the minister is literally out of bounds.

Unless the minister is visiting someone in a hospital or a prison -- or some other place the person cannot leave -- personal contacts should take place on the minister's turf.

For example, priests and religious sent for treatment were often doing what they thought was ministry in a contradictory setting.

Here's an example of a campus minister violating the context and location boundary by doing spiritual direction in his living room.

You can see the same contradiction between context and ministry activity when a pastor offers spiritual direction to a seminarian out of context over romantic candle lit dinners.

From these examples...and there are many more...it is obvious that the ministry context and location will often determine whether or not the minister is involved in holy listening.

The settings in these examples give double and maybe triple messages.

The poor choices of location and context in these examples of ministerial counseling show that the minister did not define in advance what the counseling was to accomplish.

Our definition mentor... Airstotle ...would remind us that the priest meeting with the seminarian in a restaurant makes the term spiritual direction meaningless by failing to define it properly and defining it with romance.

the priest was adamant that violin music, expensive wine, candles, flowers on the table, clinking of wine glasses, caressing of hands had nothing to do with anything.

He is right as far as spiritual direction is concerned.

But he had no doubt he was giving spiritual direction!

He was really dating.

The context and location made that clear to everyone but him.

The fact that he also had sex with this seminarian made no difference in his thinking and he wound up in residential treatment. Then he lost his pastorate.

In his view spiritual direction is romance and romance is spiritual direction. If you take action on such a contradiction your chances of ruining your life and that of others is excellent.

It is well worth your while to check your own context and location boundaries ...especially if you find someone with whom you are ministering to be madly attractive.

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