“Pastoral care aids preaching by giving the preacher a respect for listeners in their individual struggles. In counseling troubled parishioners, preachers are with their people in intimate, personal, face-to-face encounters. The preacher who is also a pastor is therefore less likely to make sweeping, generalized, universal judgments about ‘the human condition.’ Before making pronouncements from on high about human problems, the pastor will see specific human faces, the lives of individual members of the congregation who are struggling with these problems. Thus pastoral care provides a necessary context for faithful preaching.”
–William Willimon, Preaching Master Class (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2010), 55.
