The Challenge to Pastoral Caregivers in the Event of Sudden Death: Pastoral Care in the Context of Stress

Death, and in special ways, sudden death has struck the church and various families at different times in our lives. The grief in the bereaved has challenged the church, in numerous ways including having to deal with people who are out of possibility with regard to the competencies of the church due to stress disorders. This has asked serious theological questions about the pastoral care of the church who is expected to be the custodian of healing through faith. Sudden death as a stressor, has grown to be more common in recent years, and having checked a number of church registers and finding out that there are more funerals than baptisms the church has to conduct, one looks and evaluate the effectiveness of the counseling done through funerals that the church has had to handle---whether there is still meaning accorded to such services or not---whether there is any attempt to engage the bereaved during their mourning in the sound theological reflection on to the questions: ?Where, o death, is your victory? ?Where, o death, is your sting? (1 Cor. 15: 55). Paul puts it in his address to the Corinthians ?the sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.