Learn basic information about common mental-health conditions and experiences and recognize changes that may warrant further attention. Signs and symptoms can inform questions; they do not establish a diagnosis.

Consider the person's experience in context. The person's culture, relationships, faith, stressors, supports, and previous experiences with care can shape how distress is understood and addressed.

Provide pastoral support within your training, role, authority, and established AFFINITY™ policies. When needs exceed that scope, connect appropriately.

Religious coping is the way a person uses their religious or spiritual beliefs, practices, relationships, or community to understand and respond to stress, loss, uncertainty, or other difficult experiences.

Religious coping is not automatically helpful or harmful. The pastoral leader's job is to understand how faith is functioning in this person's experience.

• Supportive religious coping can include prayer, meaning-making, hope, connection with a faith community, spiritual practices, forgiveness, or seeking wise counsel. These practices may help a person experience support, resilience, or a sense of purpose.
• Maladaptive religious coping occurs when religious beliefs or practices contribute to greater distress or interfere with healthy functioning, relationships, problem-solving, or appropriate help-seeking. Examples may include believing that a person is being punished by God for being mentally ill, experiencing intense spiritual blame or shame, withdrawing from needed support, or using religious activity to avoid addressing serious concerns.

Scripture: “The purposes of a person’s heart are deep waters, but one who has insight draws them out.” — Proverbs 20:5

Culture includes the values, beliefs, traditions, language, family patterns, community experiences, history, and social realities that influence how a person understands themselves and the world around them.

Faith is one part of that context. For some people, faith is central to identity, relationships, meaning, decision-making, and coping. For others, faith may be complicated, distant, changing, or connected to previous experiences of harm.

Context means paying attention to what is happening around the person—not just what is happening inside the person. Family relationships, community, work, finances, discrimination, trauma, housing, social support, and previous experiences with churches or helping professionals can all shape how distress is experienced and expressed.

• Do not assume that every person from the same cultural or faith community understands distress in the same way.
• Ask the person how they understand what is happening before deciding what their experience means.
• Consider both strengths and stressors within the person's culture, faith, family, and community.
• Let the person's own explanation of their experience inform the pastoral conversation.

Scripture: “Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn.” — Romans 12:15

Identify the person, team, or leadership body responsible for oversight of pastoral care. This role provides accountability for the ministry as a whole and ensures that the established policies and processes are maintained.

Four pieces should be clear: primary responsibility identifies who oversees the function; accountability identifies who reviews or supports that responsibility; backup responsibility identifies who provides necessary oversight when the primary owner is unavailable; and higher-level authority identifies who can make decisions that exceed the owner's authority.

Different people may have different responsibilities. One person may receive an initial request for care, another may provide pastoral support, another may coordinate a referral, and another may provide leadership oversight.

For each responsibility, the church should distinguish between the primary role responsible for carrying the work and any supporting role that assists with it. The goal is not to give everyone the same job. The goal is to make sure every important responsibility has an identified owner and support structure.

Your team should know who has authority to approve, escalate, consult, refer, document, or otherwise act when a care situation requires a decision.

Teach the distinction between decide, consult, and escalate: a provider may make decisions within assigned authority; a provider should consult when another person's guidance is needed; and a provider should escalate when the situation requires authority, oversight, or action beyond the provider's role.

Clear authority reduces confusion when a situation moves beyond one person's role or when several people are involved in the same person's care.

Each role should have a clear purpose, defined responsibilities, and appropriate boundaries. People should understand what they are expected to do, what they are not expected to do, and when another role or professional should become involved.

In a working pastoral-care system, boundaries can involve authority, responsibility and scope, competency, safety or crisis response, professional care, confidentiality, complexity, duration or frequency of care, and the provider's capacity or availability. These categories help the team recognize when a situation has reached the limit of a role.

Your pastoral-care policies are not separate documents that sit on a shelf. Together, they establish the standards that guide how the ministry operates. A policy establishes the standard or rule; a protocol or process translates that standard into what leaders do in practice.

Eligibility, ethics, privacy and confidentiality, pastoral-care scope, crisis response, referral, documentation, and other policies should support one another rather than operate as isolated rules.

A functioning care ministry needs more than people. Leaders need access to the forms, policies, referral information, documentation tools, training resources, communication pathways, and other materials required to perform their responsibilities.

AFFINITY™ provides the professional structure. Your church determines the people, local resources, contacts, approvals, and other details that fit your context.

Documentation creates continuity and accountability. Your church should establish where care records are maintained, who is authorized to access them, how information is handled, and who is responsible for reviewing the ministry's operation.

Accountability also means periodically reviewing whether the ministry is following its established policies and whether leaders have what they need to provide care responsibly. Team members should also understand who is responsible for documenting care, following the established documentation procedure, protecting confidential information, and completing agreed follow-through.

Pastoral-care leaders should provide care within the limits of their role, training, experience, competence, and authority. Identifying a Care Pathway does not mean the church must personally provide every service associated with that need.

The team should ask:

• What need or needs were identified?
• Which Care Pathway or Care Pathways are involved?
• Is this need appropriate for pastoral care?
• Is the person receiving the level of care the situation requires?
• Is the assigned leader equipped and authorized to provide the care?
• Does the situation require another professional, provider, ministry, or community resource?

The team should consider both what is appropriate and what is actually available. A church may have a ministry or service in place but lack the personnel, availability, resources, or current capacity to meet a particular need.

This is why Step 4 connects the assessment to the church's established resource and capacity information.

The church needs a current picture of the pastoral-care resources and services it actually provides across the five Care Pathways. That information helps the team determine whether the identified need can be met internally or whether the next step requires connection outside the church.

AFFINITY™ provides the structure. The church determines the actual resources, people, availability, requirements, and local context.

If the church cannot appropriately provide the needed service or support, the team considers whether another Care Pathway, outside resource, collaboration, or referral is appropriate.

Eligibility for one church resource is not the same thing as eligibility for pastoral care as a whole. The person should not simply be dismissed because a particular internal resource is unavailable.

A referral becomes part of a pastoral-care system when the church knows why the connection is being made, who is responsible for making it, what information may appropriately be shared, what the person can expect, and what pastoral support continues.

• Identify the need that requires additional support.
• Identify the appropriate professional, organization, or community resource.
• Explain the reason for the connection in plain language.
• Obtain any permission or authorization required for communication or information sharing.
• Clarify what the pastoral-care team will continue to provide.
• Document the connection according to the church's established process.

AFFINITY™ cannot determine which organizations your church should refer to because those relationships depend on your community, population, geography, existing partnerships, organizational requirements, and leadership decisions.

Your team should identify the professionals, agencies, ministries, and community resources that the church is actually able and willing to use. Keep that information current and review it periodically.

C5 gives the team a structured way to consider the whole picture before choosing a pathway:

• COLLECT — gather the relevant information.
• CONSIDER — consider mental health, life circumstances, faith and theology, support, treatment, culture, relationships, trauma, and other relevant context.
• CLARIFY — identify what is known, what remains unclear, and what the team needs to understand before deciding.
• CHOOSE PATHWAY — Continue Within Scope, Collaborate Across the Gap, or Refer to Appropriate Professional.
• PLAN WHAT HAPPENS NEXT — determine the next action, coordination, communication, and appropriate pastoral follow-through.

C5 does not replace the church's policies. It helps the team apply the decision pathways more intentionally when counseling integration or cross-role care is involved.