From Analysis to Presence:

A Researcher’s Journey into Pastoral Care

It’s still early days – but the privilege of providing pastoral care at Flora McDonald has, over the past two months, become an unexpectedly rich extension of my previous life as a qualitative academic researcher. In both spaces, I’m invited into people’s lives at moments of vulnerability, transition, and meaning‑making. The skills I relied on in research – deep listening, attentiveness to nuance, capturing lived experience – naturally carry into this ministry. Yet the means and ends of each could not be more different.

As a researcher, the means were methodological: observe, interpret, analyse. The end was understanding – to illuminate patterns, capture stories, and make sense of human experience with a degree of professional distance. In pastoral care, the means appear to me to be more relational: presence, gentleness, shared silence, and unlike research, the end is not insight but accompaniment. Instead of asking questions and seeking meaning and significance, I’m offering presence – meeting others not with curiosity but with companionship, not with inquiry but with care. The encounter becomes less about interpreting and more about honouring faith, connecting with memories, and sometimes acknowledging pain in a way that can be confronting and sad, yet deeply sacred.

Volunteering at Flora McDonald has made this distinction even clearer. Walking the corridors, stepping into rooms where time has softened or slowed, I’m reminded that the means of ministry are often small and quiet – a shared smile, a name remembered, a prayer whispered. But the end is something larger: contributing to a community where no one is forgotten, where presence itself becomes a form of care. It feels like participating in a mission of being for others not through grand gestures, but through steady, ordinary acts that affirm dignity and belonging.

Still, the parallels remain. Both research and pastoral care require humility, patience, and an openness to whatever emerges in the moment. Both ask me to honour the wisdom embedded in each person’s story, and in both, I’m reminded that every individual carries a lifetime of meaning that deserves to be approached gently.

But the heart of the difference lies in the orientation. If research is oriented toward advancement, ministry is oriented toward presence. Research uses its means to seek insight. Ministry uses its means to seek connection. Research aims to illuminate; pastoral care aims to console, to bring Christ’s presence into rooms where mobility, memory, or health may have faded but faith endures, and indeed often appears to be gaining strength.

Here, the analytical gaze becomes a gentler, way of seeing, enabling me to find a way of serving that feels both deeply human and quietly spiritual – a place where the habits of careful listening I cultivated in academia become something softer, more relational, and more grace‑filled. In these encounters, the analytical means give way to the pastoral ends, and presence becomes its own kind of ministry. And in that quiet space where understanding meets accompaniment, I’m reminded of how profoundly sacred it is, and how privileged I am to simply be present for another person.

Early days, yes – but already deeply meaningful ones…

• Dr Basil Tucker, March 2026

Dr Basil Tucker is Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Accounting & Finance, Adelaide University, St John the Baptist Catholic Parish, Plympton, Pastoral Care volunteer at Calvary Flora McDonald residential aged care home.

Dr Tucker is a close colleague and co-author of Prof Lee D. Parker’s

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