ABSTRACT
The shift from pastoral supervision understood as the supervision of pastoral workers who do pastoral things to an attitudinal commitment to seeing things holistically and working for the wellbeing of all dimensions of the system marks the biggest shift in understanding the emerging discipline of pastoral supervision. The careful definition of professional supervision as a practice emerging from the clinical helping professions clarifies false premises and presumptions. The term supervision continues to be problematic for the pastoral context. Many clergy, ministry workers, and students of supervision training desire to simply ‘abandon the term and substitute it with something more palatable’, first noted by Pohly, then many others. In the United Kingdom, the deep heritage of pastoral care and chaplaincy is evident in the development of pastoral supervision. Pastoral supervision is now embedded in several major Christian denominations but is, at the time of writing, not widespread in the free church tradition of Christianity.
