Some Categories of Pastoral Care

The Priest and the Care of Servants

The Priest and the Care of Servants

I would like to speak to you about caring for the servants who themselves care for others. This matter includes many points related to their work, their thinking, and the growth of the service.

Among the aspects of caring for servants is ensuring the Orthodoxy of teaching.

Some servants focus on teaching their own personal concepts, which may contradict the Church’s teaching, or result from being influenced by strange readings. We have indeed seen in previous years famous names of this type, whether in Cairo or in some provinces. Some left the Orthodox faith and joined other denominations. Some formed groups of youth or servants who followed their ideas, became enthusiastic for them, and defended them.

The matter even reached the point where some service branches had their own special character, so that there was no unified spirit bringing everyone together. Each had its own spiritual and intellectual traits as well as its own distinctive activities.

• One of the prominent aspects is the independence of the service and its servants.
  You may find a general secretary of a service branch dismissing and appointing servants as he wishes—naturally to keep those who agree with him and obey him, and to remove anyone with a different opinion. All servants of the branch then become merely his followers, directed as he pleases and molded in his style.
• Some servants have deviated spiritually to the point of attacking the priesthood through leaflets and publications, and they led a whole generation in the same spirit.

Restoring all such persons to the correct spiritual path is the work and responsibility of the Church’s leadership. It is the duty of the fathers, whether bishops or priests.

For truly, who is caring now for the servants and supervising their service? If they are without care and without guidance, this will be dangerous for the Church, for the servants themselves, and for future generations.

• There must be one unified curriculum for teaching, with all its details.
  This curriculum should be followed by all and should include all age stages: from preschool to elementary, preparatory, secondary, and up to university level. Along with it, a curriculum should exist for youth, for workers, and for villages.

The Supreme Committee of the Church Education Schools prepares these curricula. They are printed, published, and distributed to churches. The priests must then supervise the secretaries and servants to ensure their implementation.

• Alongside the curriculum, there should be textbooks.
  It is easy for a servant to stick to the subject title while giving details according to his own concepts and direction. But a textbook obliges him to the correct teaching from which he cannot deviate. The textbook also becomes a means of unifying thought in teaching.

There should also be a curriculum for preparing servants—preparing them spiritually and educationally, and also in religious knowledge. Thus we guarantee that those who teach in the Church are faithful, competent, and capable of delivering the Church’s message to others. In this way, we ensure that all servants of the next generation share one spirit and one mind.

Since most priests today are chosen from among the servants, then by caring for the servants, we are implicitly caring for preparing the priests of the future.

The care of servants is therefore the responsibility of the Church’s general leadership, the General Committee of Church Education, and the blessed bishops—each within his diocese. But what then is the role of each parish priest?

Here we must present some important points:

1. Caring for the church library—its sufficiency and Orthodoxy.
   It is acceptable to review the books it contains, ensuring the soundness of their teaching, and removing unsound books. At the same time, the priest should ensure that the library includes useful material for all age groups.
2. Supervising the private spiritual life of each servant.
   This includes regularity in confession and communion, prayer and fasting, and other means of grace. Also questioning them during confession about what they read, ensuring they are not attached to deviant or questionable writings.
3. Ensuring the servant maintains discipleship, so he does not grow proud in his own eyes.
   I remember that in the late 1940s and early 1950s, in the Sunday School of St. Anthony Church in Shoubra, every servant attended four weekly meetings for discipleship: the family meeting, the general servants’ meeting, the youth meeting every Thursday, and the large class meeting held after 7 pm on Sunday (taught at that time by Dr. Ragheb Abd El-Nour, and later by myself after he was appointed a physician in Luxor and Gaza).
4. Caring about servants’ conferences for unifying the spirit.
   These conferences gather servants from many churches under one leadership (currently supervised by His Grace Bishop Moussa and His Grace Bishop Raphael). Often some metropolitans, bishops, priests, and well-known senior servants participate. Here, thought, curriculum, and types of religious knowledge are unified. There is also opportunity for questions and answers, and to some extent we can ensure the elimination of any foreign ideas by exposing them and responding to them.

It is the duty of parish priests to ensure that the servants of each church are not isolated from the general educational current of the Church represented in these study circles.

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