New England Chapter of The College of Pastoral Supervision & Psychotherapy

ACPE & CPSP See Improvement in Collegiality

2011-11-23T10:01:00.001-08:00

CPSP & ACPE Possible New Era of Mutual Collegiality:

At this Thanksgiving season we in CPSP have much to be thankful for. We are prospering as a community both in this country and overseas. We have come into our own as a significant community among the many communities that promote clinical pastoral work.

We are also approaching November 30, the first anniversary of the Mediation Agreement signed by the ACPE and CPSP, signed appropriately enough in Philadelphia. This agreement put an end to two decades of animosity that was subverting the high goals of both communities.

We are grateful especially to leaders of the Religious Endorsing Bodies without whom this agreement might ever have come to fruition. We are grateful, and we look forward to a deepening sense of collegiality between the two communities.

The members of the CPSP Mediation Team who, with our ACPE colleagues brought this agreement to pass, are Jim Gebhart, Perry Miller, George Hankins-Hull, and me.

In February a subcommittee was appointed to undertake the detailed discussions with our ACPE colleagues as they implemented the Agreement. This sub-committee has had one face to face meeting and numerous phone meetings. Jim Gebhart chairs this committee, which includes Annari Griesel and John deVelder. They have addressed and are continuing to address several complaints that have been presented from our side to ACPE of possible violations of the Mediation Agreement.

We have every hope that this dialogue group will continue its work in the positive and cooperative spirit in which it began.

We believe we are entering a new era in which the ACPE and CPSP will be more fully colleagues in our common work. And for that anticipation we can all be very thankful.

Given our progress together we are thankful that we seem to have entered a new era of mutual collegiality as becomes our common calling.

I wish you all a blessed Thanksgiving.

-Raymond J. Lawrence, CPSP General Secretary

Read the Pastoral Report the on-line Journal of the College of Pastoral Supervision & Psychotherapy

The 2012 CPSP Plenary March 25th-March 28th 2012 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

2011-09-30T08:12:00.000-07:00

The 2012 CPSP Plenary gathering will take place at Doubletree Hotel & Suites Pittsburgh City Center. The hotel is situated in a prime location, which is right in the middle of Pittsburgh’s vibrant downtown. A block of rooms have been reserved March 24, 2012-March 28, 2012. The special room rate, $119.00, will be available until March 4th or until the room block is sold out.

You can reserve your room by clicking on the following link:
Doubletree Hotel & Suites Pittsburgh City Center

We look forward to seeing you in Pittsburg March 25th-March 28th 2012.

Visit the Pastoral Report for more information about CPSP: Pastoral Report

CPSP is committed to making Clinical Pastoral Training affordable

George Hankins Hull
CPSP Plenary Secretary

CPSP 2011 Plenary Speaker Professor John Patton

2010-12-17T08:33:00.001-08:00

The 2011 Plenary of the College of Pastoral Supervision & Psychotherapy will be held March 27-30, 2011 at the Sheraton Oceanfront Hotel Virginia Beach VA.

We are pleased to announce John Patton as the Plenary speaker.

CPSP has a tradition of honoring and listening to the living patriarchs of the clinical pastoral community. John Patton is one of those living patriarchs. This will be his first time on the platform at a CPSP Plenary. We are honored to have him.

John is Professor Emeritus of Pastoral Theology at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia and a retired ACPE Supervisor. He has practiced as marriage and family therapist is the author of many books including: Is Human Forgiveness Possible, Pastoral Care in Context, Pastoral Care: An Essential Guide and From Ministry to Theology, Pastoral Action & Reflection. John is also an associate Editor of Abingdon’s Dictionary of Pastoral Care and Counseling and a retired United Methodist minister.

The room rate for the event is $99 per night. Contact the Sheraton:

888-627 8231 or
757-425-9000

Visit the Pastoral Report

the online Journal of the College of Pastoral Supervision & Psychotherapy

ACPE & CPSP Issue Joint Statement Following Successful Mediation Process

2010-12-14T08:46:00.000-08:00

Representatives from the ACPE and CPSP met in Philadelphia on November 30, in an attempt to mediate their twenty-one year conflict. They used the services of JAMS, and in particular, retired federal court judge Diane Welsh who served as mediator.

The results of this mediation exceeded our expectations, as you can see in the joint statement below. I want to thank the members of our delegation and to praise them for their wisdom and conciliatory posture. Our team consisted of Jim Gebhart and George Hankins-Hull who with me were mediators, as well as Perry Miller and Charles R. Hicks, our attorney, were also present and participated in the decision. (Our original six-person team of mediators and consultants was reduced to five with the death of John Edgerton.) On the ACPE side were Teresa Snorton, Sally Schwab, and Tim Thorstenson.

If we succeed in living up to this agreement we will have marked a sea change in the clinical pastoral community. This will mean that ACPE and CPSP will continue in their respective missions without mutual disparagement of the other’s programs or procedures.

We owe a special thanks to the leaders of the Religious Endorsing Bodies (REBS) who last year made a public call for an end to hostilities. I believe that this prophetic witness played a large role in bringing the parties to the table.Mediation requires give and take on both sides.

We appreciate the willingness of the representatives of ACPE to have engaged fully and responsibly in this vigorous and spirited process.

Let us all resolve to implement faithfully this historic agreement and ensure that its spirit is maintained into the future.

Raymond J. Lawrence, CPSP General Secretarylawarence@cpsp.org

Download ACPE CPSP Joint Statement

Rift Between ACPE & CPSP A Pastoral Response The Only Answer

2010-05-06T07:07:00.000-07:00

I welcome the letter from the Association of Religious Endorsing Bodies that challenges the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education and the College of Pastoral Supervision & Psychotherapy to work collegially together in the best interests of those they train. The Religious Endorsers are quite rightly concerned for their constituents who are caught in the middle of the rift between ACPE and CPSP.

Challenging the ACPE & CPSP to put the professional wellbeing of those they train above the politics of self-interest is not only the right thing to do it would also be the best possible pastoral response.

George Hankins Hull

Read the Pastoral Report the online Journal of the College of Pastoral Supervision & Psychotherapy

Raymond Lawrence Comments on Rift Between ACPE & CPSP

2010-05-06T06:57:00.000-07:00

A MESSAGE TO THE CPSP COMMUNITY FROM RAYMOND J. LAWRENCE

We are heartened by this public expression of concern by the Religious Endorsing Body representatives (REBS) meeting in Nashville last fall. They have the interest in the wider religious and therapeutic community at heart in this call to reconciliation.

There is plenty of work to be done in the field of clinical pastoral supervision, chaplaincy, pastoral counseling and psychotherapy. No one organization can respond to the current public needs. The expenditure of time and money in efforts to undermine each other is wasteful and disgraceful.

We in CPSP hope that this letter from the REBS signals the end of hostility between the various clinical pastoral organizations, and the end of triumphalism on the part of any one organization or group of organizations.

Raymond J. Lawrence,

CPSP General Secretary

This letter was published on the Pastoral Report the online Journal of the College of Pastoral Supervision & Psychotherapy

Rift Between ACPE & CPSP A Growning Concern

2010-05-06T06:43:00.000-07:00

AN OPEN LETTER to CPSP and ACPE Association of Religious Endorsing BodiesP.O. Box 340007, Nashville, TN 37203-007January 11, 2010To:

CPSP and ACPE From: Association of Religious Endorsing Bodies (AREBS)

Dear Colleagues in Pastoral Care Ministry,We have been fortunate to be in conversation with all of the cognate groups in Nashville.These meetings have helped us to clarify our identity as endorsers. That search for identity continues to drive us to more clarity and to deepen our relationships with all the cognate groups. We thank you for your patience with us as we have learned about your organizations, your organizational requirements, and also, your help in clarifying our understanding of your identity.

What we have discovered is that we share one thing in common and that is our dedication to the goal of providing the best in pastoral care. We all strive for excellence in that process and we understand your dedication in training and certifying our constituents. We have ironed out some of the difficulties and removed some of the obstacles to provide excellence in pastoral care.

One of the public issues that deeply concerns us is the chasm between CPSP and ACPE. We are working to understand the history of each of your organizations so that we can understand some of the identity issues that you face. As Miroslov Volf says in his early work, “Exclusion and Embrace”, the establishment of identity gives a kind of confidence that allows us to look at otherness and at others without the fear of losing our own identity. Volf says that an exploration of identity issues and otherness issues are prerequisite of reconciliation. We have prayed that reconciliation might happen between your two organizations because we feel that some of our constituents are suffering due to the rift between your organizations. We are troubled when our people become vulnerable to this rift. We are also concerned about the face of pastoral care that is presented to our institutions and endorsees.

We confess to being somewhat protective of our constituents, but our major concern is that we remove barriers to a pursuit of our shared goal of excellence in pastoral care. It is important that we find ways to be transparent and to seek each others’ healing. In the meanwhile, we, as endorsers have covenanted to be in prayer for reconciliation.

Prayerfully Yours,
Susan GalassoAREB Chairperson

This Letter was published in the Pastoral Report the online Journal of the College of Pastoral Supervision & Pschotherapy

Chaplaincy & Recent Changes to HIPAA

2009-12-14T09:07:00.000-08:00

Recent changes strengths the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and are designed to ease the public’s overall comfort with electronic medical recording keeping. One of the most significant changes to the HIPAA regulations is the new rules concerning the breach of protected health information (PHI).

What is a Breach?

A breach is, generally, an impermissible use or disclosure under the Privacy Rule that compromises the security or privacy of the protected health information such that the use or disclosure poses a significant risk of financial, reputational, or other harm to the affected individual.

What is an example of a breach PHI?

An employee accesses the record of a patient outside the performance of their job duties.
An unencrypted laptop containing PHI is lost or stolen.
PHI is sent to the wrong fax, mailing address, an email address or printer.

What happens if a breach occurs?

Generally speaking, your institution’s HIPAA compliance officer will need to be notified of all suspected breaches immediately upon discovery of the breach.
The HIPAA officer determines if there exists a reportable breach.
If a reportable breach of PHI has occurred your institution’s HIPAA compliance office handles the notification.
Every individual whose unsecured PHI has been breached must be notified in writing as soon as feasible and within a 60 day period.
Breaches are required to be reported to Health and Human Services (HHS).
If less than 500 individuals are affected: log and report annually.
If more than 500 individuals are affected: HHS must be notified at the same time the patient is notified. The media must also be notified.

How can Clinical Chaplains help prevent breaches of PHI?

Be alert about your responsibilities to protect PHI while carrying out your tasks. Take special care in these situations:

When faxing be sure to always use your institution’s official fax cover sheet and reconfirm the recipient’s fax number before transmittal.
Do not put PHI, including patient stickers and medication labels, in regular trash. Shred or place in privacy bins for special disposal.
When retrieving information from the printer or faxing PHI determine each page corresponds to the correct patient
Double check the name of the patient before you put information in the envelopes for mailing.
Log off your computer prior to stepping away from it.
Use password protection and encryption features for your Blackberry, cell phone and other mobile devices such as thumb drives and CDs.
Only store PHI on mobile devices when absolutely necessary for your institution’s business purposes and delete as soon as feasible.
Encrypt any email containing PHI sent outside your institution.
Never share your password or use someone else’s sign on information as this could lead to you being disciplined by your institution.

For further information on the new HIPAA standards follow the link below:

US Department of Health and Human Services

Troubling Trend in Anti Obama Religious Political Rhetoric

2009-11-18T14:13:00.000-08:00

Growing up in Northern Ireland in the 1970’s I know firsthand how dangerous it is when religious dysfunction underpins political dysfunction in a way that creates a space for sectarian violence. I see something similar happening here in the US as certain religious and political groups oppose President Obama. The most recent anti Obama political religious rhetoric comes in the form of a prayer taken from Psalm 109 verse 8 which reads “May his days be few, may another take over his position.” The next verse in the Psalm reads “May his children be orphans and his wife a widow.” Rabbi Brad Hirschfield is right when he comments “The issue is not the scripture quoted or the name by which God is called by those doing the praying. The issue is invoking the God in whom any of us believe, to act as executioner of those with whom we disagree.” This is a troubling trend in anti-Obama political religious rhetoric which must be opposed by all people of faith and goodwill.

To read Rabbi Hirschfield’s comment select the link below:

Psalms 109:8, An Ugly Prayer for President Obama

A Chance to Finish the Business of Living

2009-08-27T17:55:00.000-07:00

Sometime ago Don Berwick, MD spoke about 20 improvements that doctors could make in the end of life care of their patients that begins in a simple conversation. Berwick recommended the following considerations as his top three suggestions:

1.Ask yourself as you see patients, "Would I be surprised if this patient died in the next few months?" For those "sick enough to die," prioritize the patient's concerns - often symptom relief, family support, continuity, advance planning, or spirituality.

2.To eliminate anxiety and fear, chronically ill patients must understand what is likely to happen. When you see a patient who is "sick enough to die" - tell the patient, and start counseling and planning around that possibility.

3.To understand your patients, ask (1) "What do you hope for, as you live with this condition,"

(2) "What do you fear?," (3) It is usually hard to know when death is close. If you were to die soon, what would be left undone in your life?," and (4) "How are things going for you and your family?" Document and arrange care to meet each patient's priorities.

All too often the task of finishing the business of living gets left undone because the end of life conversation has never taken place for whatever reason. I strongly recommend reading Dr. Berwick’s 20 recommendations and sharing them widely.

You can find Berwick’s the full article on the website Americans for Better Care of the Dying at the link below:
http://www.abcd-caring.org/tools/intern.ht

Parish Based CPSP CPE Residency Position

2009-08-13T08:27:00.001-07:00

PARISH-BASED CPE RESIDENCY POSITION:

Stipend $40,000. Rural Parish with Recreation Ministry; Contracted with the South Carolina Department of Corrections and the Midlands Area Pastoral Counseling Services, Inc.
Program Accredited by the College of Pastoral Supervision and Psychotherapy (January 4 – December 31, 2010).

Inquire at Liberty Hill Presbyterian Church, Box 170, Liberty Hill, SC 29074
Telephone: 803-273-9191

lhpc@comporium.net Gene Rollins, Supervisor.

For more information about CPSP visit the link below:http://www.cpsp.org/.

The Uniqueness of the CPSP Plenary

2009-07-14T15:20:00.000-07:00

Many meetings and conferences fail because they follow an agenda which places the conference speaker at the heart of the event and the attendee as observer. The structure of the CPSP plenary stands in sharp contrast to the linear model of many conferences which place an exclusive emphasis on an individual speaker.

We avoid this in CPSP by placing the emphasis on the small group process in which the plenary presenters take part in the consultative process of the small group experience. CPSP is unique in our field in how we structure our gathering in a way that wisdom is shared, consultation is sought and community is fostered in terms of accountability.

Getting to Know Yourself

2009-02-06T19:06:00.000-08:00

Getting to Know Yourself by George Hankins Hull, Dip.Th., Th.M

Self-awareness as a pastoral care giver is essential to good pastoral care. Issues of transference and counter-transference loom large in pastoral encounters. Therefore, it’s of vital importance for the pastoral care giver to understand the use of the Self in the pastoral role.

In her book, When Helping You is Hurting Me, Carmen Berry addresses the detrimental aspects of a lack of self-awareness in the person of the care giver in what she calls the “Messiah trap.” The “Messiah trap”, is defined as continued circumstances in which individuals are persistently putting their own needs aside in order to help others.

Berry offers an important caution to all in the helping professions against becoming addicted to helping and then, like an addict, seeking out supplies for their fix. Further complicating the issue is what Berry calls the double-sided trap of helping: ‘If I don’t do it, it won’t get done’ and ‘Every one else’s needs come before mine’. In addition, she demonstrates how falling into this trap can hurt the person of the care giver as well as the one in need of care.

Individuals addicted to caring have a deep need for approval and engage in caring for others as a means of self-care.

Berry identifies the following as Messiah characteristics:

One who tries to earn a sense of worth by "acting" worthy.
One who lets others determine his or her actions
One who needs to over achieve.
One who is attracted to helping those with similar pain.
One who experiences difficulty in establishing peer and intimate relationships.
One who is caught in a cycle of isolation.
One who is driven to endless activity.
One who stops only when they drop .

The following are Berry’s seven distinct types of the ‘Helping Messiah’:

The Pleaser: This individual tries to earn a sense of self-worth by acting worthy. This is someone who doubts his or her own self-worth.

The Rescuer: Lets others determine their actions. This is someone who needs a response from others to feel self-worth.

The Giver: This person is driven to overachieve in an attempt to earn self-worth.

The Counselor: Is attracted to helping others with similar issues, hurts and pains. It’s easier to deal with others hurts than one’s own.

The Protector: Is an individual who finds difficulty in establishing peer and intimate relationships that are equal. This person is someone who always has to be helping and looking out for others.

The Teacher: Is someone who is caught in a cycle of isolation. The teacher is one who needs to feel special in the midst of others and sense that they are needed. This person cannot feel both part of a group and special at the same time.

The Crusader: Is one who is driven to endless activity and stops when they drop. This person takes on too much in a crazy attempt to earn a sense of self-worth and value

Published twenty years ago When Helping You is Hurting Me is a useful book to read for anyone entering the caring professions because in the end there is no short cut to self-awareness.

The perfect man of old looked after himself first before looking to help others.
-Chuang Tzu
_________
When Helping You is Hurting Me: Escaping the Messiah Trap, Carmen Renee Berry, Harper & Row Publishers, San Francisco, 1988

George Hankins Hull

CPSP Dipliomate in Clinical Pastoral Education

College of Pastoral Supervision & Psychotherapy

2009-01-09T07:43:00.000-08:00

2009 Plenary of The College of Pastoral Supervision And psychotherapy

2009-01-07T12:58:00.000-08:00

Invitation...

Come join us in Virginia Beach, Virginia
at the Gathering of the Community for the
Nineteenth Plenary Meeting

March 29th-April 1, 2009
Sheraton Oceanfront Hotel
Virginia Beach, Virginia

Hotel Registration...
Sheraton Oceanfront Hotel, 36th Street and Atlantic Avenue,
Virginia Beach, VA 23451 Tel: 800.521.5635 -or- 757.425.9000
Registrants must contact the hotel, at the telephone numbers
listed above, to reserve sleeping rooms.

Special Conference Rate: $109-$119 +tax. This rate is guaranteed
only though February 26, 2009, and for a limited number of rooms,
on a first-come basis. The price of the room will vary according to
the view. The hotel rooms are quite spacious and will accommodate
three or four persons comfortably. You are urged to register as early
as possible if you intend to stay at the Sheraton.

Please Note:
Registration Rate after February 26, 2009: $245. Meals/Refreshments for Non-Registered Companion or Spouse: $75.

For additional information please go to our web sites; www.pastoralreport.com, www.cpsp.org, or email the Registrar, Krista Argiropolis, at: jarg@metrocast.net

All Registrants are Requested to Bring a Clinical Paper or Case for Presentation:

This is a working conference. The heart of the program is the mutual sharing of our work and our lives. Thus each registrant is expected to come prepared to share something from his or her life or work in a small group context. There are no ground
rules about what particular individuals may decide to share.

The small consultation groups have become a highly significant part of the Plenary Meeting. They represent this community’s commitment to hearing and responding to each voice in the community. They also have become educational events as we come to give both care and consultation to each other.

George Hankins Hull
Plenary Secretary

The Sine Qua Non of The Clinical Pastoral Care & Training Movement

2008-07-22T14:12:00.000-07:00

No pastoral care and certifying organization can be compelled to adopt a posture of critical self-reflection. However, one would expect that one of the marks of an organization standing within the historical clinical pastoral care and training movement would be a posture of critical self-reflection. Given this tradition of self-critical reflection this would not negate the critique of one cognate group by another rather it would promote it. The self-critical faculty is the sine qua non of the pastoral care and training movement. The movement is best safeguarded when all the serious voices of critique are validated and none are censored. In contrast to movements seeking to speak with one voice the clinical pastoral care and training movement speaks with many voices and is best represented by the voice of many.

Spiritual Care Collaborative-Failure To Collaborate

2008-07-22T14:02:00.000-07:00

The Spiritual Care Collaborative has recently had to acknowledge to the College of Pastoral Supervision & Psychotherapy that the SCC has failed to develop a means of including other clinical pastoral training and certifying bodies as members of the SCC. Sadly the admission of the SCC to CPSP that the SCC does not know how to revise its founding documents or whether it should reveals that it is more of a political power block than a truly collaborative organization.

FROM THE College ofPastoral Supervision And Psychotherapy GENERAL SECRETARY:

The SCC Unable to Act On Question of Whether to Invite CPSP

We applaud the Board of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors (AAPC) that last month unanimously voted in the affirmative to invite CPSP to join the Spiritual Care Collaborative.

We also applaud the National Association of Jewish Chaplains (NAJC) for taking the same action.

However, neither CPSP nor any other organization should hold its breath waiting for an invitation to join the SCC. The SCC Board reported on June 16 that it was unable to reach a consensus because it does not know how to revise its founding documents in order to include new groups such as CPSP. It seems that the SCC has built a monster, an organization unable to act on such critical issues. It crows about its inclusivity but has no process for including anyone. It is an organization muscle bound, unable to make a decision. The decision-making process they have created is dysfunctional.

The SCC decision-making process goes like this: All important questions are first presented to the individual boards of member organizations for a decision. After all the individual boards have met (a process of many months), representatives of the respective boards hold a phone conference. Unless there is total unanimity there is hardly any way for a decision to come out of such a phone conference. The SCC appears to have created itself in such a way as to make tough or controversial decisions impossible.

On Feb 23, 2003 in Toronto, George Hanzo famously said of the formation of the embryonic SCC (at that time called the Council on Collaboration):"Ten years from now, you won’t recognize the face of professional chaplaincy, and it’s because of the incredible work we’ve done here today."

Well, more than five years have past now since that date and the SCC can’t figure out how to make decisions. We hope that’s not what it means by changing the face of pastoral care and counseling in this country. We’re terribly afraid George might be right.

We wish the SCC well. We certainly need more honest dialogue and more inclusivity in the pastoral care and counseling world. Perhaps when the SCC gathers for its much-touted summit in Orlando next February, it can figure out how to reconstitute itself in a way that decisions can be made.

Raymond Lawrence, General Secretary

To Email Raymond Lawrence, click here.

College of Pastoral supervision And psychotherapy

2008-03-19T19:44:00.000-07:00

Professor Arthur W. Frank in Conversation with the College of Pastoral Supervision And Psychotherapy

2008-02-26T18:10:00.000-08:00

We are pleased to announce that Professor Arthur W. Frank will be the Keynote speaker at the at the 2008 Plenary Gathering of The College of Pastoral Supervision & Psychotherapy.Arthur W. Frank is professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Calgary, Alberta Canada. Dr. Frank received his undergraduate degree in English from Princeton University (High Honours, 1968), his M.A. in Communications from the University of Pennsylvania, and his M.Phil. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Yale University (1975). He has taught at the University of Calgary since 1975. In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of The Hastings Center, the preeminent U.S. bioethics institute, and also elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, which is the highest honor that Canadian academics can receive.

He is the author of At the Will of the Body: Reflections on Illness (Houghton Mifflin, 1991), the story of his 1985 heart attack and subsequent testicular cancer. The book has been translated into four languages and won the 1996 Natalie Davis Spingarn Writer's Award from the National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship, Washington, D.C. A new edition was published in 2002 with a new Afterword. In 1995 he published The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics (University of Chicago Press), a study of first-person accounts of illness. Both of his books have had excerpts reprinted in multiple anthologies in medical sociology, social medicine, and the meaning of illness.

His most recent book, The Renewal of Generosity: Illness, Medicine, and How to Live, was published by The University of Chicago Press in 2004. The review in the New England Journal of Medicine describes the book: “Frank rightly understands that communication gains its importance not in achieving a technical mastery…but in educating one to face difference, frailty, and limitation. Through a rich telling of stories and reflection on them, Frank conducts a symphony of ideas about medicine…” (Dec 30, 2004).

His recent journal publications have appeared in Qualitative Health Research, Qualitative Sociology, Health, Families, Systems & Health, health:, The Hastings Center Report, BioSocieties, and Literature and Medicine.

Dr. Frank is on the editorial boards of Body & Society, Families, Systems & Health, Qualitative Health Research, Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, and International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Health and Well-being. In 2002 he became book review editor of the British journal Health.

He is a corresponding editor of Literature and Medicine.
In 1998 Dr. Frank was William Evans Fellow in the Bioethics Research Programme, University of Otago, New Zealand. In July-August 1999 he was Visiting Professor at the Centre for Values, Ethics, and the Law in Medicine, University of Sydney, Australia. In 2000 he delivered the R.A. Goodling Lectures at Duke Divinity School.

His most recent invited lectures include delivering the 2007 Carl Moore Lecture at McMaster University’s Department of Family Medicine. He has given workshops on narrative analysis in Canada, Korea, South Africa, Britain, and Australia.His national research awards include a Killam Resident Fellowship and a three-year project, funded by Social Science and Research Council of Canada, titled “Survivorship as moral choice.”

He has been a participant in two working groups at The Hastings Center: “The Role of the Clinician-Patient Relationship in Cancer Care and Research” and “Surgically Shaping Children.” He is currently a collaborator on “The Experience and Resolution of Moral Distress in Pediatric Intensive Care Teams: A Canadian Perspective”, funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.participant in two working groups at The Hastings Center: “The Role of the Clinician-Patient Relationship in Cancer Care and Research” and “Surgically Shaping Children.” He is currently a collaborator on “The Experience and Resolution of Moral Distress in Pediatric Intensive Care Teams: A Canadian Perspective”, funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

The 2008 Plenary of the College of Pastoral Supervision & Psychotherapy will be held March 31 through April 2, 2008, at the Wyndham Riverfront in North Little Rock Arkansas

For more information about the 2008 CPSP Plenary click here to visit the Pastoral Report

The College of Pastoral Supervision And Psychotherapy Keeping The Costs Of Clinical Pastoral Education Affordable

2008-01-17T18:46:00.000-08:00

An organizations philosophy of how it organizes itself can cost a community when it comes to conference time in terms of dollars. Organizations with a top down corporate structure have higher over head costs for staff and buildings. In contrast to the corporate model the College of Pastoral Supervision & Psychotherapy is a grass roots organization bound together by its covenant to travel light.

CPSP's commitment to traveling light, having no paid professional staff and owning no buildings allows us to keep the costs of membership and conferences at a minimum. The cost of registration for the 2008 CPSP Plenary is $195.00 inclusive of meals and banquet and the hotel room will cost you $79.00 with
$10.00 for each additional person. As part of the CPSP covenant of traveling light CPSP does not solicit any corporate sponsorship or endowments.

For More Information About the CPSP Plenary Visit the Link Below:

Pastoral Report

Only 20% of Association of Professional Chaplains Attend Annual Conference

2008-01-17T18:41:00.000-08:00

Executive director, Jo Schrader, indicates APC members complain about high costs of conference.

In the May/June edition of the APC News Jo Schrader, executive director of the APC, indicates that out of the 4000 membership only 800 members attend the annual conference. Schrader relates that equates to only 20% of the total APC membership. The Executive director went on to relate that high costs of the conference are cited by members as to the reason they cannot attend.

Read Schrader's comments at link below: https://www.professionalchaplains.org/uploadedFiles/pdf/APC%20News%20Final%20Proof%20May-June%202007.pdf

Carolyn Cassin Presenter for the 2008 CPSP Plenary

2007-09-07T20:42:00.000-07:00

The 2008 Plenary of the College of Pastoral Supervision & Psychotherapy will be held March 31 through April 2, 2008, at the Wyndham Riverfront in North Little Rock Arkansas.

Carolyn Cassin is an internationally recognized expert in end of life care, organizational management, and the efficient, effective delivery of healthcare services. Long considered a leader in the national healthcare community, in 1983 she helped guide the first Medicare reimbursement for hospice successfully through Congress. Since then, Carolyn has taken on the challenge of advancing both the quality and accessibility of hospice care. She has consulted with many principal healthcare leaders and advocates, including President Bill Clinton, Senator Bob Dole, Governor John Engler, Senator Carl Levin and Representative Leon Panetta.

In 2002, Carolyn joined Continuum Hospice Care in New York City. Almost immediately and for the first time in its history, she led the hospice to profitability. In only four years, average daily census has more than quadrupled to well over 450 patients, and Continuum Hospice Care’s facilities have grown to 2 inpatient units and a hospice residence, with another scheduled to open this fall. Under Carolyn’s leadership, Continuum Hospice Care was recently honored with the prestigious American Hospital Association’s 2006 Circle of Life award. Formerly called Jacob Perlow Hospice, Continuum Hospice Care is now New York City’s largest hospice with a comprehensive program that reaches throughout the City, caring for patients in their homes, nursing homes, hospitals and Continuum Hospice Care’s own facilities.

Before tackling New York, Carolyn accepted a one-year appointment by Governor John Engler to manage Michigan’s $1.5 Billion Medicaid Managed Care program. As Bureau Director, Office of Medicaid Managed Care, she was also responsible for the Medicaid Pharmacy program, Managed Care enrollment, Customer Service Bureau and 15 contracts providing healthcare to over 1 million Medicaid recipients.

Carolyn’s deep experience managing some of the largest hospice programs in the nation, in fact, in the world, prepared her to take on the challenges of elevating hospice services in New York City. As COO of VistaCare, the nation’s second largest hospice program, she created national standards of care, effected annual growth of 25%, improved EBITDA at all sites, and improved profitability basis for the company’s IPO (Nasdaq: VSTA). VistaCare’s 45 programs served over 2,000 patients daily and 10,000+ patients yearly in 15 states.

During her 10 years as President and CEO of Hospice of Michigan in Detroit, Carolyn headed the acquisition of 11 hospice programs and merger into one corporation. She created and ran the nation’s first and largest statewide hospice program, serving 5,000 patients and their families each year.

While overseeing a staff of 800, as well as running a statewide hospice fundraising program, pharmacy, and a hospice computer software company, Carolyn turned around the agency fiscally, balancing the budget and generating operational surplus. Under her leadership, Hospice of Michigan established Hospice Home, the state’s first freestanding, specialty-built hospice facility.
Carolyn gained much of her political insight and acumen as Chairperson and President of the National Hospice Organization (NHO) (1983-1986) where she served as chief spokesperson and political advocate. Carolyn has been called upon again and is currently serving on the Board of Trustees for the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization.

Of the numerous honors and special assignments given her, Carolyn is particularly proud of her achievements with NHPCO, including being honored with the 2006 Founder’s Award; initiating the National Hospice Work Group (1992 – present); serving as Governor appointed Trustee, Board of Control, Ferris State University (1997 – 1999); earning the "Best Managed Non-Profit" award, Crain’s Detroit Business, 1994; being named one of "Detroit’s 100 Most Influential Women," Crain’s Detroit Business, 1997; and receiving the first prestigious "Heart of Hospice Award", by NHO in 1993.

Carolyn earned her Master of Public Administration degree from Western Michigan University, her BA from Miami University, and the esteemed National Leadership Fellowship, from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation to study health care systems throughout the world.

College of Pastoral Supervision & Psychotherapy-Ecclesiastical Endorsement

2007-07-13T20:16:00.000-07:00

Ordained ministers and others commissioned to serve in specialized pastoral ministries are required to provide to the College of Pastoral Supervision And Psychotherapy, evidence of endorsement and validation of their ministries by their faith group. Endorsement and validation of ministry by one’s faith group is a requirement for certification and continued certification with
CPSP.

Ecclesiastical Endorsement Bodies:

Adventist Church
Ecclesiastical Endorsement
http://www.adventistchaplains.org/endorse.htm
Adventist Chaplaincy Ministries
Seventh-day Adventist
World Headquarters
12501 Old Columbia Pike
SilverSpring, MD 20904 USA
Phone: 301-680-6780
Fax: 301-680-6783
e-mail: acm@gc.adventist.org

Alliance of Baptists
Ecclesiastical Endorsement
http://www.allianceofbaptists.org/AOB-2007Endorsement.doc
Ann Sidney Charlescraft, D.Min.
Manager for Bereavement Services
Chaplain/Instructor
Virginia Commonwealth University Health System
Department of Pastoral Care
PO Box 980664
Richmond, Virginia 23298-0664

Apostolic Catholic Orthodox Church
Chaplaincy Endorsement
http://www.apostoliccatholic.org/mentor.html
1900 St. James Place,
Suite 880
Houston, TX 77056
Tel: 713.977.2855
713.266.2456
Fax: 713.266.0845
Email: info@apostoliccatholic.org

Assemblies of God
Ecclesiastical Endorsement
http://chaplaincy.ag.org/gen_requirements.cfm#ioc

Baptist General Convention of Missouri
Chaplaincy Endorsement
http://www.baptistgcm.org/chaplaincy.asp
Dr. Bobby Smith,
DirectorChaplaincy Relations
Baptist General Convention of Texas
E-mail: chaplaincy@bgct.org
Phone: 214-828-5277
Fax: 214-828-5261

Baptist General Convention of Texas
Chaplaincy Endorsement
http://www.bgct.org/texasbaptists/Page.aspx?&pid=4261

Church of the Nazarene
http://www.nazarenechaplains.org/nazarenechaplains/Home/tabid/36/Default.aspx

Requests for endorsement must be made to Chaplaincy Services. Chaplain candidates will be interviewed by the Chaplaincy Advisory Committee and a General Superintendent. The Board of General Superintendents will give final endorsement approval.

Coalition of Spirit-Filled Churches
Chaplaincy Endorsement
http://www.spirit-filled.org/
Rev. David B. Plummer, BCCC
Endorsing Executive
Post Office Box 6606
Newport News, VA 23606
(877)-CSC-CHAP
FAX: (757)-596-7690
Email: Chaplaincy@spirit-filled.org

Cooperative Baptist Fellowship
http://www.thefellowship.info/News/050809chaplains.icm

Dr. George C. Pickle
Cooperative Baptist Fellowship
P.O. Box 450329
Atlanta, GA 31145-0329
(770)-220-1600
Email: gpickle@thefellowship.info

Disciples of Christ
http://www.discipleshomemissions.org/chaplains/procedures.htm
Chaplaincy & Specialized Ministries Office
P.O. Box 1986
Indianapolis, Ind. 46206
e-mail: Karen Jones kjones@dhm.disciples.org

Episcopal Church
Ecclesiastical Endorsement
http://www.ecusa-chaplain.org/

Rev. George E. Packard, Bishop Suffragan
Office of the Bishop Suffragan for Chaplaincies
The Episcopal Church Center
815 Second Avenue,
New York, NY 10017
(800)-334-7626
E-mail: gpackard@episcopalchurch.org
Website: http://www.ecusa-chaplain.org/

Lutheran Church Missouri Synod
Ecclesiastical Endorsement
http://www.lcms.org/pages/internal.asp?NavID=10356

Judy Ladage
Specialized Pastoral Care Coordinator
The Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod
1333 S. Kirkwood Road
St. Louis, MO 63122-7295
(800)-248-1930 ext. 1388
Email: judy.ladage@lcms.org

Orthodox Church in America
http://www.oca.org/DOdept.asp?SID=5&LID=13

Rev. Steven Voytovich Director
170 Bunker Hill Rd.
Guilford, CT 06437
Office: 203-789-3248
Home: 203-453-4405
Email: svoytovich@srhs.org

Presbyterian Church USA
Ecclesiastical Endorsement
http://www.apps.pcusa.org/phewa/networks/paspm/endorsement.pdf

Stated clerk in applicant’s presbytery. Presbytery determines through action of its Committee on Ministry whether persons within its jurisdiction are in good standing.

Website: http://www.pcusa.org/

United Church of Christ
Ecclesiastical Endorsement
http://www.ucc.org/ministers/pdfs/eccendorseprof.pdf

Chairperson, Association Church & Ministry Committee(Association of current standing) The completed and signed endorsement form is to be sent for verification to:

Rev. Richard O. Sparrow
Parish Life and Leadership Ministry Team
United Church of Christ
700 Prospect Avenue
Cleveland, OH 44115-1100
(216)-736-3881
FAX: (216)-736-2237
Email: sparrowr@ucc.org
Website: http://www.ucc.org/

United Methodist Church
Ecclesiastical Endorsement
http://www.gbhem.org/ResourceLibrary/glossary05.pdf

The Rev. Patricia Barrett
Division of Chaplains and Related Ministries
P.O. Box 340007
Nashville, TN 37203-0007
(615)-340-7411
Email: umea@gbhem.org

College of Pastoral Suupervision & Psychotherapy Community in Diversity

2007-07-03T12:35:00.000-07:00

They came from around the world for the 2007 CPSP Plenary in Raleigh, North Carolina.

CPSP has indigenous ClinicalPastoral Education programs in Seoul South Korea, Kowloon Hong Kong, Iloilo City Philippines, Singapore, Moshi Tanzania, Caracas Venezuela, Arecibo & Humacao Puerto Rico, Nassau Bahamas and Canada.

CPSP promoting the voices of the many in the Clinical Pastoral Training movement.We invite you view

Snapshots of the 2007 gathering of the CPSP Community at:http://www.cpsp.org/

BlessingsGeorge Hankins HullCPSP

Diplomate in Clinical Pastoral Supervision

Association for Clinical Pastoral Education: Motion 43 An Indication of a Troubled Organization

2007-05-29T18:00:00.000-07:00

In May of 2006 the ACPE Board of Representatives at it's spring meeting in Atlanta, a motion was adopted that ACPE accredited centers can no longer offer CPSP units of CPE training.The following reasons were presented as to the rational for the motion:

MOTION # 43: ACCREDITATION OF DUALLY ALIGNED (CPSP AND ACPE) CENTERS

Whereas, the Accreditation Commission has consistently received reports from students and seminaries of a lack of informed consent about the contrast of ACPE CPE and CPSP CPE;

And whereas, the Accreditation Commission has experienced a lack of consistent application of the program standards of CPSP CPE programs,

And whereas, the Accreditation Commission finds a lack of transparency with the organization of CPSP, its curriculum processes,

And whereas, the Accreditation Commission has received reports ofACPE CPE centers who hire CPE Supervisors who have membership inboth organizations being dropped from the ACPE roster and offeringonly CPSP CPE after telling the hospital administration the CPSP CPE is "cheaper."

And whereas, the Accreditation Commission has received reports ofstudents being offered both CPSP and ACPE units at the same time but being told that the ACPE units are more expensive and therefore they would have to pay a higher tuition fee. The student is then given the choice of which they would like to be granted.

And whereas, the Accreditation Commission works diligently to uphold the standards required by the DOE accreditation. This is stated onthe certificate we give to each ACPE CPE center. When an ACPE supervisor offers CPSP within the same center it is the Accreditation Commission's belief that this gives the appearancethat both organizations have the same rigorous process.

Therefore, the Accreditation Commission requests the ACPE, Inc.,Board of Representatives to immediately establish a policy that noACPE, Inc. accredited center can conduct units of CPSP CPE.

The motion:Move that the ACPE, Inc. Board of Reps immediately establish a policy that no accredited ACPE, Inc. Center conduct units of CPSP CPE.

Made by Art Lucas, seconded by Miriam Needham and passed with one abstention.

While listing grievous charges against CPSP members the ACPE went public with its allegations and at no time addressed the alleged issues with CPSP. Following the adoption of motion 43 the ACPE took the following action:

All ACPE Centers to receive a letter from Decatur asking to declare and report what kinds of CPE the center currently offers: ACPE,NACC, CPSP or other. This response (signed by each center's primary Supervisor, Professional Advisory Group chair and Administrator responsible for CPE) will be required to accompany each Center's2006 Annual Center Report. A process for addressing ACPE Centers offering CPSP is in place and ACPE accreditation will be withdrawn.

The ACPE then sent a letter to seminaries across the US informingthem of motion 43. At no time has the ACPE addressed any of its concerns with CPSP.

While making serious allegations against CPSP the ACPE was reprimanded by the Department of Education for placing students at risk.

Department of Education evaluator, Ms. Jones, who recently attended meetings with the Association for Clinical Pastoral Educationdirects ACPE to end a practice which "has frequently created problems and put students at risk." The issue, as outlined in theDecember 2006 edition of the ACPE North Central Region News, is as follows: There have been many occasions when ACPE supervisors, despite having clear guidelines in the Accreditation Manual and duly designated colleagues with whom to consult about accreditation processes, have initiated units in satellite or component sites that have not been assessed and approved by those charged with that task. Colleagues on accreditation committees have felt themselves held hostage there after by appeal to students' welfare. ("If you don'tgive us retroactive provisional approval, our students won't getcredit for their unit!")

Ms. Jones pointed out that "the greatest disservice to ACPE students was the continuation of a unit in an unevaluated site."The DOE evaluators unequivocal counsel was that "such situations should receive a cease and desist order rather than accommodation."

While alleging a lack of consistent application of the program standards of CPSP CPE programs, an internal ACPE report revealed that: while the ACPE "excels at developing thoughtful standards to guide supervisory practice, it remains a challenge to embed the standards into actual practice, given how practices evolve differently from center to center and supervisor to supervisor, andhow processes for peer review and continuing education reflect wide variance."

The report further reveals the ACPE as a troubled organization inwhich the peer review process has broken down. The report reads "the peer review process in the ACPE is not structured to support the growth and development of our educating supervisors and no other processes have been formally identified.

Additionally this month the ACPE is required by the DOE to "developand implement complaint procedures for addressing complaints against programs and institutions related to violations of the agency's educational standards and procedures and to develop and implement complaint procedures for addressing complaints against the agency.In other words to put in place a satisfactory mechanism for addressing complaints against itself.

In response to the Dec. 2006 DOE re-recognition hearing the ACPE's Deryck Durston reflected in the ACPE News that the ACPE representatives questioned the competency of the DOE committee members in relation to their task. Now isn't it interesting thatCPSP is not the only organization that the ACPE leadership considers to be incompetent.

The bottom line is that CPSP is in the good company of the DOE.

A CPSP Perspective Lack of Clarity Plagues the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education

2006-10-03T11:23:00.000-07:00

For nearly a decade the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education (ACPE) has erroneously promoted itself as the only legitimate provider of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) and, therefore, the only provider of CPE to qualify for Medicare Pass-through payments. Statements to this fact have been made by Lerrill White an ACPE supervisor and former ACPE President Bill Baugh. In addition former ACPE President James Stapleford further complicated the issue with the misleading comments that recognition by the Department of Education was a necessary qualifier to receiving such payments. The comments by these well known ACPE leaders carry authority and are misleading both to the ACPE membership and to the public at large. It is regrettable then that the ACPE Board of Representatives has failed to take any corrective action to publicly correct the erroneous comments made by some of the organizations most prominent members. One might conclude that the ACPE membership is not well served by its national leaders whose lack of leadership on this issue promotes continued confusion in the ACPE and the public at large.

George Hankins Hull
CPSP Diplomate in Pastoral Supervision

The CPSP Advantage

2006-09-12T19:58:00.000-07:00

The College of Pastoral Supervision & Psychotherapy is unique among the national pastoral care training, certifying and accrediting agencies in that CPSP is a covenanting community. At the heart of the CPSP community is a covenant of mutual accountability grounded in the concept that people are more important than institutions. Believing that life is best lived by grace, the CPSP community places a premium on the significance of relationships between its members. What other organizations attempt to legislate for by standards CPSP is by nature, a community of professional accountability. The CPSP advantage is that people come first.

The Covenant of the College of Pastoral Supervision and Psychotherapy

Spiritual pilgrims
We, the CPSP members see ourselves as spiritual pilgrims seeking a truly collegial professional community. Our calling and commitments are, therefore, first and last theological. We covenant to address one another and to be addressed by one another in a profound theological sense. We commit to being mutually responsible to one another for our professional work and direction.

Chapters
Matters that are typically dealt with in other certifying bodies by centralized governance will be dealt with primarily in Chapters. Thus, we organize ourselves in such a way that we each participate in a relatively small group called a Chapter consisting of approximately a dozen colleagues. Teaching or counseling programs directed by CPSP Diplomates are the primary responsibility of the Chapter.

Recovery of soul
We commit ourselves to a galaxy of shared values that are as deeply held as they are difficult to communicate. "Recovery of soul" is a metaphor that points toward these values. We place a premium on the significance of the relationships among ourselves. We value personal authority and creativity. We believe we should make a space for one another and stand ready to midwife one another in our respective spiritual journeys. Because we believe that life is best lived by grace, we believe it essential to guard against becoming invasive, aggressive, or predatory toward each other. We believe that persons are always more important than institutions, and even the institution of CPSP itself must be carefully monitored lest it take on an idolatrous character.

A Living Experience
We intend to travel light, to own no property, to accumulate no wealth, and to create no bureaucracy. We are invested in offering a living experience that reflects human life and faith within a milieu of supportive and challenging community of fellow pilgrims.

For more information about The College of Pastoral Supervision & PsychotherapyVisit: http://www.cpsp.org/

For information about Clinical Pastoral Education at UAMS Medical Center Visit: http://www.uams.edu/cpe/training_programs/default.asp

Supervisor In Training Forum

2006-08-29T09:34:00.000-07:00

David Fleenor has created an online discussion forum for Clinical Pastoral Education Supervisors-in-Training. The forum provides an opportunity to discuss all issues related to the process of becoming a CPE Supervisor. David suggests the forum will a venue to discuss issues of training, theory papers, committee meetings, theology, disappointments, and celebrations. The forum is limited to current supervisors in training and those that have been out of training for up to two years whether or not their training resulted in certification. The forum is open to members of the College of Pastoral Supervision & Psychotherapy as well as those in the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education. For more information about the forum visit the link which follows:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CPESITS/

You may also contact David Fleenor at:
The Rev. David W. Fleenor
1 East 29th Street
New York, NY 10016
By Telephone: 646.942.0623

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE LEADERSHIP OF ACPE

2006-08-29T08:27:00.000-07:00

August 18, 2006

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE LEADERSHIP OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR CLINICAL PASTORAL EDUCATION (ACPE)

August 28, 2006 The ACPE has lately been taking the low road in its competition with CPSP. Its information and announcements have been marked by faulty claims and aggression. I urge the leadership to consider taking the high road of competitiveness supported by a gracious collegiality. The larger community needs a healthy, decent ACPE that travels the high road. We in CPSP especially need for the ACPE to travel that road. We share a crucially important common task. There is plenty of work for both communities. Besides that, ten, twenty, fifty, or a hundred years from now, when small-minded persons take over the leadership in the CPSP, some of us might ourselves seek another, kinder community, one that fosters justice truth, and a generosity of spirit.

Raymond J. Lawrence General Secretary

Reflections On John Edgerton’s National Clinical Training Seminar Presentation by Linda Walsh

2006-05-16T09:14:00.000-07:00

Reflections On John Edgerton’s National Clinical Training Seminar Presentation by Linda Walsh

I was grateful to be at the NCTS. John Edgarton is a master storyteller - using visions of scary woods, dogs and loving relatives to lure us into the experiential and effective lesson of the Narrative as a vehicle for transformation and liberation. Each patient's story unlocks a subversive message of hope...a liberation process to transcend the sorrow.

He urged his audience to search the patient's biography to discover the "Holy", like a muse, to reflect that God has been there all along. John's compelling personal disclosure woven through contextual references personalized, for me, the responsibility we carry in this spiritual role. In therapy we expose our own story and awareness - but in clinical practice we take that same story objectively and use it to assist and build strength in others.

The good news is that each CPSP meeting is experiencing larger multi-cultural attendance. This enriches my small group experience by weaving wisdom with dynamic reflection. Although I was unable to attend Tavistock, the reverberations were intense. I am reminded that I am personally in control of my own education. Who decides if I am educable or engaged if it is not my choice to be the instigator? John Edgarton followed up on Friday by engaging our place as the Prophet - not as rebels against the law - but as "Outlaws"; agreeing to evolve with and empower the community to transcend the law.

The prophet holds a dream. In CPSP and clinically, we instill a vision that is attainable together. He suggested that empathy requires that we do not revel in the same depression as the patient/community and strive to find that intuitive place of hope. By reviewing President Lincoln's Gettysburg address, John explained how to define a transforming vision that people can get into their imagination....by speaking simply and clearly. It is no wonder that a totalitarian regime is afraid of the artist, the visionary and the creative thinker. The outlaw Prophet has an imagination that is contagious; as is our vision at CPSP.

Presidential Address by James Gebhart, CPSP President

2006-05-12T09:39:00.000-07:00

I want to call attention to our name, to look at it still another time for perhaps a deeper meaning. This is a question of our identity. One of the earliest challenges you had in your clinical training was in response to that question “Who are you?”

It became a maddening question asked by that supervisor, that committee, that fellow student. But we had to return to it again and again. And so I ask you still again. Our name: The College of Pastoral Supervision and Psychotherapy. Much is imbedded in those words.

Today there is only time to focus on the first two words: College and Pastoral. Perhaps next year we might address the last two words regarding the science and art of pastoral practice. We will see.

But first, this word College. Our founders were very wise to have chosen this name. Or perhaps divinely inspired, which is a bit of a stretch knowing them as we do today. Perhaps both. But is the right name at the right time and the right place. The College.

You might pause and notice that no other pastoral organization embraces this term, much less begins with it. Others feature a national or geographic focus of activity: The American Association of Pastoral Counselors; The Canadian Association for Pastoral Practice and Education; The National Association of Jewish Chaplains; The National Institute of Business and Industrial Chaplains; The National Association of Catholic Chaplains. Still other groups define themselves by administrative function: The Association of Clinical Pastoral Education; The Association of Professional Chaplains. Now these titles are all appropriate, all well and good and honorable. They accurately identify a focus. But it is no accident that we, in our life together, began from an entirely different point of view. It was never envisioned that we would be limited by the boundaries of this continent. That is very obvious as you simply look around you at this international audience. And likewise our identity was never framed in terms of political or administrative function as these were the bane of the founders and the point of the original reformation.

And so another name was chosen. The College. There had been another College once, the College of Chaplains, of which I was a Fellow for twenty-five years. I was at first astonished that the old College would give up this name. But then it made sense. Their primary new identity was to be an association to certify chaplains and not a company of persons intent on living together.

We are The College. The Latin origin is both collegium from which come our words colleague or collegiality, and collegia referring to a corporate partnership. Once in a while someone objects to this name thinking it refers to a school of higher education that grants a degree. But this is only a more recent definition; its historic definitions are much more clear. They include: “a self governing society of scholars for study and instruction” (e.g., the College of Surgeons); “a company or assemblage of persons with a common purpose;” “a gathering of clergy living together” (e.g. the College of Cardinals); and “an association of churches or religious leaders each equally empowered.” Read the full text of this Address

Spirituality: Wellspring and Wastebasket by

2006-02-17T11:43:00.000-08:00

Spirituality: Wellspring and Wastebasket byWilliam E. Alberts and Amy E. Alberts
Spirituality reveals not only the infiniteness of divinity but the infinite varieties of humanity. Type “spirituality” in an Internet search service and over 6 ½ million references appear. Follow that with “Christian spirituality,” and you could spend another eternity studying almost 2 ½ million sources. Spirituality may tell us far more about humanity than about divinity. In fact, this brief examination of spirituality is not about tracing the “mysterious ways” in which “God moves. . . His wonders to perform,” as the hymn declares, but about identifying the many and various ways in which the human spirit moves to perform its wonders. Nor do we presume to cover the manifold meanings of spirituality. Still, our study of the human spirit is believed to contain hints of the nature of any divinity.

The rest of this article can be found At:

http://williamalberts.blogspot.com/

Promoting Competency Through an Ongoing Process of Peer Review

2006-02-01T17:29:00.000-08:00

The College of Pastoral Supervision & Psychotherapy promotes competency through an ongoing process of peer review which is a central aspect of our covenant relationship and Chapter life.
CPSP is unique among the national pastoral training and certifying organizations. Credential’s held by CPSP members are renewed annually and contingent upon satisfactory participation in Chapter life and the Chapter's recomendation for renewal.

CPSP understands its task to be first and foremost theological and that ongoing peer review is centered in the CPSP covenant. Within Chapter life, CPSP members covenant together to being held mutually responsible to one another for their ongoing personal/professional development and direction.

Peer review for the majority of our professional colleagues is something that occurs every five years in contrast to CPSP members for whom it is an ongoing feature of Chapter life. In this way CPSP has set the industry standard for a peer review process which is the most dynamic of any of the national pastoral care training and certifying bodies and one that best promotes competence.

Religious and Spiritual Impact in Psychic Process:

2005-11-21T12:57:00.000-08:00

Religious and Spiritual Impact in Psychic Process:
Implications for Pastoral Psychotherapy
BY Rev. Dr. Joseph George

Introduction by Robert Powell, MD, PhD
The 8th Asia Pacific Congress on Pastoral Care and Counseling , held 7-11 August in Hong Kong, had a specific theme and a lofty objective: "Spiritual Formation of the Human Heart" – Tested Models of Caring and Counseling." Thus the following manuscript by the Rev. Dr. Joseph George, of Bangalore, India, tries to address both issues – personality formation and a tested model – at the same time, which is not an easy task. While many will enjoy his clear outline of how we got to Winnicottian "object relations theory" -- which handles religious rituals quite well – we might as well telegraph Dr. George's conclusion:
"The use of religious rituals in pastoral psychotherapy sessions helps the counsellees:
* to recollect their past experience
* to narrate their present experience
* to re-narrate their sense of self
* to understand the nature of their relationships
* to identify areas of conflict
* to motivate change in behavior
* to experience a sense of hope
* to promote conscious self-reflection
* to create a space to contain anxiety
* to resolve any intrapersonal and interpersonal issues
* to gain new direction psychologically and theologically
* to reflect a realistic self-image"

One more point: Anton Theophilus Boisen and Helen Flanders Dunbar were both intrigued by the use of religious rituals and symbolism as a means of meeting suffering persons "where they were". Indeed, there must be a reason why "Amazing Grace" has been called "one of the most recognized songs on the planet". Apparently it connects with people. This "connecting" could bear further study.

Robert Powell, MD, PhD

Full text of Dr. George’s presentation can be found at:
http://www.cpsp.org/

DOE & CPSP BY J. John Edgerton lll

2005-10-14T11:23:00.000-07:00

Paul Tillich, in his sermon on the yoke of religion defined the yoke of religion as law, doctrine and dogma. I want to suggest these are equivalent to standards, outcomes, results and accreditation processes. The yoke of religion is parallel to the yoke of Clinical Pastoral Education. Rather than the standards, outcomes and resources being sources of liberation, they are in my opinion sources of restriction. Instead of them contributing to the transformational processes of new being or new creation, they tend to truncate whatever inner wisdom might evolve. In the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education programs are expected to address three major arenas: 1) Pastoral Formation, 2) Pastoral Competence and 3) Pastoral Reflection. Under Pastoral Formation there are three objectives. Under Pastoral Competence there are five objectives. And under Pastoral Reflection there are two objectives. If the student was to have a specialization in Pastoral Care there would be three more objectives they are to address. When you think of the staggering tasks of having placed before you ten objectives as you begin a unit of CPE and then asked to write an individual contract, you wonder where there is any room for evolution, creativity and process.
I remember in my initial unit of CPE, in the nineteen sixties, I was asked what I wanted to learn. I didn’t know what else to say except I want to learn something about death and dying. The particular center I was doing CPE in must have had a good time with my learning contract because they placed me in Oncology; a unit at that time where everyone was expected to die.

To read the rest of this article click on the Pastoral Report Link below:
http://www.pastoralreport.com/

WHO WE SHALL BE ROBERT C DYKSTRA

2005-05-30T20:46:00.000-07:00

WHO WE SHALL BE

A Lecture to the Community Gathering of the College of Pastoral Supervision and Psychotherapy

Columbus, Ohio

April 6, 2005

Robert C. Dykstra

I feel truly privileged to stand here before you today, partially in awe and longing in terms of what you do as chaplains, supervisors, and students working in extreme situations of life and death, and partly because, as I’ve come to learn more about your organization in particular, I find myself deeply appreciative of what you stand for and are.

As a 25-year-old newly ordained minister fresh-out-of-seminary, I worked as a youth minister in a Presbyterian church in Illinois. It was a large church with several ordained ministers on staff, and we would rotate hospital visitation days. Since I was rarely allowed to preach on Sundays, I recall that my assigned hospital day was usually on Monday. It didn’t take long for me to realize that every Monday I would develop a gnawing headache, and I knew it was a result of anticipating having to go to the hospital that day.

I was talking regularly at that time with a pastoral counselor, John Florell, and at one point he suggested that maybe it would be helpful for me to turn around and face this demon head-on, perhaps by doing some Clinical Pastoral Education. After a couple of years of Monday headaches, I left that congregation and took what for me was a frightening leap into a CPE residency position at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in downtown Chicago.

I credit that year in so many respects for saving my pastoral, professional, perhaps spiritual life. It was a wonderful, wonderful year of acute personal trauma. It didn’t take too many weeks for the headaches to begin to subside.

I went from CPE back into a graduate program in pastoral theology and – wouldn’t you know it? – worked throughout those four or five years as a hospital chaplain at the Medical Center at Princeton, one of the most fulfilling experiences in ministry I’d had to that point and since. I often miss that life and work dearly.

So I know and respect what you do as students and teachers, and I’m still a cheerleader for your cause with my own students at Princeton Seminary. Thank you so much for your work and for allowing me to join you here today.

When John DeVelder asked me whether I could substitute on relatively short notice for a speaker who couldn’t be here this week, he told me that my topic was to be “Who We Shall Be.” I was intrigued by the topic and told John I’d be glad to come. “Who We Shall Be.” It’s got a nice prophetic ring to it.

I thought of Yanna the Psychic, who reads people’s palms and tarot cards on the second floor above the Burger King on Nassau Street in downtown Princeton. I’ve never found myself utilizing Yanna’s services foretelling the future, though she’s been working there for years. She’s been making the local headlines of late, however, especially for having relieved one of her clients of around $150,000 over the past couple of years. Law enforcement officials were really upset about this, and a judge recently insisted that Yanna pay back this money. It wouldn’t take a psychic to predict that the lady who paid Yanna $150,000 doesn’t have great prospects for a very promising future. Now, it seems, Yanna’s own future, at least for the time being, isn’t looking very bright either.

So I thought of Yanna predicting people’s futures when I heard the proposed topic, “Who We Shall Be.”

I also thought of too many vigils staged by Princeton Seminary students over the years on the Saturday night before Easter, in which hundreds of us would parade to various sites all over campus, walking through the whole of biblical history – from Creation at 7:00 p.m., right up through the Eschatological Banquet at midnight. Partway through the night, when we got to the part of salvation history that involved the Old Testament prophets, we would all be standing outside under the balcony of the President’s office. A student dressed in campy prophetic garb and a fake beard would appear standing on the balcony at the appointed time and invariably shout shaming words at the audience below. Who knew that to be a prophet required so much nasty shouting?

Well, I’m not Yanna the Psychic, and I don’t want to shout at you today about your future and mine as caregivers and pastoral theologians. In fact, I’ve now come to see prophets – those of days of old and of days like ours – not so much foretelling the future at all but forthtelling it, persons who simply tell us what they see going on around and within them as honestly and courageously as they can, often without so much as a hint of raising their voices above a whisper and with no elevated balcony or recognized platform in sight.

None of us can claim much by way of foretelling, of predicting the future, but I think we are all called to the task of forthtelling, of telling forthrightly what we see and hear around and within us in the present with all the integrity, honesty, and courage that we can muster. Who knows, maybe that’s precisely how Yanna herself bilks $150,000 from a client, by looking at the palm of that troubled woman’s hand only after having first looked deeply into her eyes and recognizing, maybe even identifying with, the pain and yearning therein. Maybe that’s how the biblical prophets got their starts and earned their livelihoods, too, risking to tell of what they saw in the here-and-now more than assuming what the future would hold.

So perhaps “Who Shall We Be?” rather than “Who We Shall Be” – a pensive question more than a fiery proclamation, an intentional decision more than any psychic prediction.

An Idea for a Book
One thing that’s been on my mind a lot in the present lately is a book I’ve just finished editing, entitled Images of Pastoral Care: Classic Readings. I asked John deVelder, among others, to endorse the book for its back cover, and this request, in turn, led to the invitation to speak with you today. I’m a little anxious about talking about the book. It feels a little self-promoting to do so – this lecture as extended infomercial like those on late-night television. I found a way to talk myself out of this initial discomfort with self-promotion, however (for I really do want to promote the book), in that the publisher informed me a couple of weeks ago that since it’s an edited volume for which I’ve had to shell out a hefty sum to various publishers for permissions fees to reprint others’ works (even Anton Boisen’s, whom I had thought was long dead and therefore didn’t need the cash), it was unlikely I would break even from royalties were the press to sell every copy it published, itself an unlikely prospect. If the publisher sells every copy it produces, I’ll still be in the hole (making Chalice Press, it strikes me, into something of my own personal Yanna the Psychic). So I’ve taken strange comfort in this fact, because now I can encourage you to buy this book, when it is published in the fall, as a sort of selfless Public Service Announcement. I think it’s a book that will be especially helpful to students in a first unit of CPE.
Let me tell you a little about it, and why I think it will be helpful, but especially today what I think the book has shown me about where we stand as pastoral theologians in the present, and therefore, in a sense, what it may tell us about who we shall be.

The book is an edited collection of the works of a number of pastoral theologians, many of whose names – Boisen, Hiltner, Nouwen, Pruyser, Gerkin, Dittes, Capps, Miller-McLemore, Kornfeld – are very familiar to many of you. I’ve chosen excerpts from each of these writers’ works in which they propose an image or metaphor for describing pastoral care, starting with Boisen’s description of the recipients of care as “living human documents” and moving through Seward Hiltner’s description of caregivers themselves as solicitous shepherds, Nouwen’s wounded healer, Campbell’s and Capps’s wise fool, and so on, down through the decades of contemporary, mostly Protestant, pastoral theology.

Three of the essays and images were written either by or for hospital chaplains in particular – Heije Faber, in his book Pastoral Care in the Modern Hospital, likened the work that you do (no offense intended) to that of the clown in a circus; my own essay develops the biblical image of the intimate stranger to describe the work of the hospital chaplain in situations of sudden traumatic loss; and Karen Hanson, a hospital chaplain in Minnesota, sees the work of chaplains as akin to that of nurse midwives. Henri Nouwen’s famous book on the wounded healer, and Paul Pruyser’s book on The Minister as Diagnostician, are also particularly relevant to hospital ministry. In the end, however, most of us in nearly any type of ministry are likely to find ourselves in each one of the nineteen chapters and pastoral images or metaphors of the book.
The initial idea for this book emerged out of informal exchanges among colleagues over the course of several recent annual meetings of the Society for Pastoral Theology. A small group of faculty teaching at seminaries and divinity schools that offer doctoral programs in pastoral theology or related fields had begun to gather for an hour or so of conversation during those conferences with the modest agenda of exchanging ideas and learning more about our respective Ph.D. programs. We were seeking to answer questions concerning the specific emphases and requirements of the various programs, the kinds of professional positions to which each school’s graduates typically gravitated, and the texts and topics we considered essential to a core graduate curriculum in the field.

Every institution represented around those tables used a distinctive nomenclature to designate the discipline. Claremont School of Theology offered a Ph.D. in Theology and Personality. At Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary it was a degree in Pastoral Theology, Personality, and Culture. Emory University graduates received a doctorate in Person, Community, and Religious Practice, while Vanderbilt students worked toward one in Religion and Personality. Boston University’s program was in Pastoral Psychology, but Princeton Theological Seminary’s was in Pastoral Theology.

These differing program names mirrored the sense of ambiguity that we ourselves as faculty confided to having experienced when expected to describe or justify our work to others, especially to those charged with assessing our academic standing or status. It became equally clear that a number of us struggled to determine what mix of texts and authors to include in core courses in the history and methodology of pastoral theology at a graduate level. Those texts that we did tend to use were as varied as our institutional designations for the discipline. We found disconcerting this collective inability to identify one or even a number of definitive texts that would lend our students confidence that they were indeed appropriating a coherent sense of the tasks, tools, or methods of pastoral theology.

Despite these common concerns, however, those involved in these conversations over the years clearly shared an undisguised devotion to what we could all somehow continue to name as pastoral theology. We were unwavering in the conviction that pastoral theology had something of critical value to offer. None of us expressed any qualms whatsoever about our mutual desire to see pastoral theology press forward in its service to church, academy, and society, however elusive the nature of its mission even to those entrusted with its oversight.

I typically found these conversations with colleagues to be oddly encouraging. Long after, they continued to lead me to reflect on that process whereby I had come to regard myself, with varying degrees of conviction, as a pastoral theologian. Central to this were certain of my own teachers – Donald Capps, Sandra Brown, James Lapsley, and John Florell, among them — who seemed to have attained some level of comfort in thinking of themselves as pastoral theologians. In their own ways they inspired me to enter challenging venues of ministry, like that of the CPE residency in Chicago, that would otherwise have seemed beyond my reach. Thus I found myself working not only in hospitals, but psychiatric institutions, counseling centers, prisons, and, at times even more disorienting, in utterly ordinary suburban congregations and seminary classrooms.

Though my teachers, too, sometimes found it difficult to specify the nature of pastoral theology in explicit terms, there was no question, in my mind at least, that they were pastoral theologians to me. I saw them as caring, courageous iconoclasts. Their influence quite literally changed the trajectory of my life and contributed to a calling that, however difficult to name, captured my imagination and subsequently shaped a vision of what I hoped to be and do.

Those annual Society conversations led me as well to reflect on certain articles, chapters, and books that had been especially important to me over the years in forming my own pastoral and professional identity. Among them were a handful of philosophical works on hermeneutics, practical theological methodology, and the nature of interdisciplinary dialogue. More often they included many of the far more accessible, experience-near, even autobiographical works and metaphors for ministry that I have subsequently incorporated into this new book.

The Image is the Thing
I remembered how at crucial junctures in my ministry I was often guided, sometimes literally saved, by several of these works. I remember a conversation, for example, with a despondent woman in the immediate aftermath of an unsuccessful suicide attempt. In that instance my early, almost constitutional affinity for Henri Nouwen’s image of the wounded healer, with its rich emphasis on empathy and depth in pastoral care, seemed to do more harm than good. The more empathic I tried to be with her, the more her despair seemed to increase. At such moments I found welcome respite and practical guidance in what were for me at that time the more alien images of the circus clown and wise fool of Heije Faber, Alastair Campbell, and Donald Capps, with their corresponding emphases on reframing, the intentional use of paradox and humor, and a productive focus on a problem’s surface as much as its depth.

So too as a hospital chaplain facing tragic situations that accumulated over years of ministry to the point of taking a serious toll on my faith, I was able to gain needed perspective by conceiving of my work in terms of an image of the intimate stranger in the biblical witness and contemporary public life. In these and many other situations, then, the image was the thing. Having access to a variety of metaphors for ministry provided a modicum of courage and guidance at those not-infrequent moments when I could not possibly have known what I was doing. In gathering these images into one volume, I hope, in turn, to help ministers and seminary students not only to readily discern those dominant or “default” metaphors that typically orient their own pastoral styles, but also to discover an array of alternate metaphors for imagining their way into those inevitable circumstances in ministry where a fresh vision and new approach are warranted.

So I gathered together as many of these metaphors as I could find, though I’m sure you’ll tell me today some I’ve forgotten to include. I knew that they would need some sort of organizing and connecting, especially for the younger generation of seminarians and CPE students for whom so many of these images would be new and unknown.

I myself learned a great deal about what I personally thought of the task of pastoral theology as I attempted to write both an extended general introduction to this book as well as additional introductions to what eventually became its three major sections – those of classical, paradoxical, and contemporary/contextual images of pastoral care. Perhaps for one of the first times in my career as a pastoral theologian, I had to say what I myself thought pastoral theology was and is. This gets to the topic of this lecture as well, which is what it is – or who it is – that pastoral theology, and we as pastoral theologians, shall be. I’d like to share now with you some of those thoughts, many of which, I think, seem very much in keeping with what the College of Pastoral Supervision and Psychotherapy appears to hold most dear in your own organizing principles and philosophy of ministry.

We Shall Be Minimalists
First, then, I’d like to suggest that we are and shall be minimalists who search out truth in the particular, the singular, the personal.

In putting together this book, I’ve come to understand pastoral theology as an art more than a science, in particular an art that values minimalism or minimalist aesthetics. I see pastoral theology as a discipline that seeks not lofty, overarching theories of universal truth or broad ethical principles from which will trickle down strategies for living for the masses. Rather, I envision a pastoral theology with more down-to-earth, minimal ambitions, a field that remains content to search out multiple truths in the particular, the individual, the singular, or the biographical, with the supporting conviction that, as Carl Rogers once said, “What is most personal is most general.” He writes:

There have been times when in talking with students or staff, or in my writing, I have expressed myself in ways so personal that I have felt I was expressing an attitude which it was probable no one else could understand, because it was so uniquely my own.... In these instances I have almost invariably found that the very feeling which has seemed to me most private, most personal, and hence most incomprehensible by others, has turned out to be an expression for which there is a resonance in many other people. It has led me to believe that what is most personal and unique in each one of us is probably the very element which would, if it were shared or expressed, speak most deeply to others. This has helped me to understand artists and poets as people who have dared to express the unique in themselves.

(1)Rogers’s work resembles the work of the artist or poet much more than that of the philosopher or scientist.
(2) Similarly, like the artist and poet, pastoral theologians have tended to concentrate on the partial and the particular rather than the whole or the universal. Pastoral theology does not, in this way, aspire to greatness in the sense of becoming a “theory of everything,” so much as it more modestly and humanly strives to discern beauty or, more pointedly, to discover tiny rays or sources of hope amid complex and painful realities in the lives of particular individuals and communities.
(3) In a thin but poignant book on pastoral counseling, written at the culmination of nearly fifty years of teaching pastoral theology and the psychology of religion at Yale University and Divinity School, James E. Dittes calls for the pastoral counselor to become an “ascetic witness.” Counseling, for Dittes, becomes an almost monastic discipline, in which the counselor renounces the world and its various determinations of success, renounces even any need to succeed or to know that one has, and invokes instead “an alternative reality” wherein “the counselee can experience relief from the burdens of ‘the world’”:

The discipline accepted by the pastoral counselor is an astonishingly simple one. The counselor is content to be a witness, not a player. The counselor is intensely present to the counselee, but as a witness. The counselor does not crave or design to have an impact, to make a difference, or to leave his or her mark on the counselee’s life. Nor does the counselor aspire to find satisfaction, community, or accomplishment.... The counselor abstains from the normal desire to be included in another’s life. The pastoral counselor “gets a life” elsewhere.... The counselor replaces the role of player or partner with the role of witness. The counselee replaces the need to engage, accommodate, and skirmish with the enlivening awareness of being closely and unconditionally regarded – a replacement of the mode of “law” with the mode of “grace.”
(4) Dittes perceives pastoral counseling as a safe and unusual arena where a counselee simply cannot fail but instead at last experiences her life unfiltered.

I’ve found, in putting together the Images of Pastoral Care book, that perhaps the only thing that unites each of these seventeen theorists, other than that they all seem to believe in the power of metaphor to describe pastoral work, is that they all emphasize that appropriate pastoral care shuns the moralism or moralistic tactics so familiar to pastoral care before Boisen (and still operative in many religious counseling approaches today). This may be the only unifying thread throughout these essays, and it is an important one. The authors all want to avoid shaming, judging, or condemning the person seeking care. Since the individual conscience can be the most shaming and moralistic agent of all in our personal lives (more even than our institutions or loved ones), I think for this reason we need to retain a pastoral theology that helps people look within themselves, one that emphasizes the depths of individuals’ intrapsychic lives. In an era when pastoral theologians are turning to sociology and to examining socio-cultural contexts of pastoral care (and these contextual considerations are necessary and important), we must also retain our historic interest in individual psychology if we are to be truly helpful to persons in need. I see this emphasis on individual psychology as a kind of minimalist aesthetic.

We Shall Be Pluralists
Second, I’d like to suggest that we shall be those who privilege pluralism.
The recognition that there are multiple paths to knowing and healing and the attempt to honor individual differences reflect a long history in pastoral theology of privileging, to borrow from William James, pragmatism, pluralism, and empiricism over idealism, monism, or rationalism. In A Pluralistic Universe (1909), James writes:

What do the terms empiricism and rationalism mean? Reduced to their most pregnant difference, empiricism means the habit of explaining wholes by parts, and rationalism means the habits of explaining parts by wholes. Rationalism thus preserves affinities with monism, since wholeness goes with union, while empiricism inclines to pluralistic views. No philosophy can ever be anything but a summary sketch, a picture of the world in abridgment, a foreshortened bird’s-eye view of the perspective of events. And the first thing to notice is this, that the only material we have at our disposal for making a picture of the whole world is supplied by the various portions of that world of which we have already had experience.... All philosophers, accordingly, have conceived of the whole world after the analogy of some particular feature of it which has particularly captivated their attention.... A philosophy is the expression of a man’s intimate character, and all definitions of the universe are but the deliberately adopted reactions of human characters upon it.

(5) From its earliest roots in the 1920s, the contemporary pastoral theology movement in mainline Protestantism has embraced and been influenced by James’s plea for a philosophical pragmatism and pluralism, “the habit of explaining wholes by parts,” of engaging and juggling individual voices and perspectives in the pursuit of understanding and health. Such an emphasis is evident, for example, in the early work of Anton Boisen, that Presbyterian minister whom you know so well. In mid-life Boisen began to suffer severe psychotic breakdowns and, after regaining some measure of psychological health, proceeded to establish Clinical Pastoral Education. In an appraisal of Boisen’s contribution, Bonnie Miller-McLemore observes that
Boisen, having suffered an emotional breakdown and finding himself inside a mental hospital, refused the marginalized, ostracized status of the mentally ill patient. He claimed the importance of what he learned about health, spirituality, and theology as learning that could occur from nowhere else than inside the experience of illness and suffering. This lesson – that we must hear the voices of the marginalized from within their own contexts – is one that pastoral theologians have known all along, even when Boisen claimed the validity of his own mental breakdown.

(6)In his early book The Exploration of the Inner World (1936), Boisen speaks appreciatively of James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), from which he appears to have appropriated, without acknowledgment, James’s term documents humains in describing hospitalized psychiatric patients as living human documents who have the potential to reveal profound new theological truths, unavailable in textbooks, to seminary students and clergy willing to attend to and learn from them.

(7) Theology is not so much something to be imposed on or taught to a hospitalized patient by the minister, Boisen believed, as something to be discovered in and gleaned from that patient. This learning was then, and remains today, revolutionary. Pastoral theology, following James, has thus long valued the individual as a progenitor rather than merely a recipient of religious truth. This makes, in my view, for a more modest, but also at times for a more rough-and-tumble, theological discipline. Pastoral theology begins with the scattered and unwieldy parts in order to attempt to understand the whole. Historically for pastoral theology, what is most personal is most general. We shall be pluralists.

We Shall Be Those Who Attend to Individuals
In his book Paradox and Discovery, the philosopher John Wisdom “tells of a keeper at the Dublin zoo who had a record of unusual success at the difficult task of breeding lions. ‘Asked the secret of his success, Mr. Flood replied, Understanding lions. Asked in what consists the understanding of lions, he replied, Every lion is different.’”

(8)This expert zookeeper’s impossible, paradoxical response – How could one ever hope to understand “lions” as a species if every individual lion is different? – captures the quandary of the pastoral theologian and, indeed, of every minister who seeks to become an agent of hope (Donald Capps’s metaphor in chapter sixteen) in complex situations of human tragedy and need. Since every person and every problematic situation is different, it stands to reason that in pastoral theology and ministry, as in breeding lions, one never finally arrives at some fixed body of knowledge for understanding or action. Still, despite essential difference among individuals and the many problems they face, the minister paradoxically can and sometimes eventually does come to the equivalent of the zookeeper’s hard-won sense of understanding lions. What accrues, then, in the many images of care in the Images book is this generous sense of wisdom and hope for understanding persons that derives in large measure from a growing appreciation for their inestimable differences.

William James once said that “one of the most philosophical remarks [he] ever heard was made by an uneducated carpenter who was doing some repairs at [James’s] house.” The carpenter told him, “There is very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important.”(9) The carpenter’s observation is one that, a century later, even scientific research could be interpreted to confirm. Geneticists note, for example, that in terms of the chemical base pairs that comprise our DNA, human beings are 99.9 percent identical. Thus all individual human variations can be accounted for biochemically by a mere 0.1 percent of our genetic material. Still, what a difference that 0.1 percent makes!(10) In reflecting on his carpenter’s insight, James writes:

The zone of individual differences, and of the social ‘twists’ which by common confession they initiate, is the zone of formative processes, the dynamic belt of quivering uncertainty, the line where past and future meet. It is the theater of all we do not take for granted, the stage of the living drama of life; and however narrow its scope, it is roomy enough to lodge the whole range of human passions.

(11)This minute but infinitely fascinating zone of human differences and passions is, of necessity, what captivates the pastoral theologian’s attention. The Images book’s array of essays, metaphors, and images attests to the fact that pastoral theology, not infrequently over against more firmly established or highly esteemed ecclesiastical disciplines, inhabits a messy, pluralistic, characteristically protestant and thereby occasionally heterodox universe.
Valerie DeMarinis captures this sense of the unruliness of pastoral theology in telling of a conversation she happened to overhear between two professors of systematic theology:
The topic was pastoral psychology in general, and the pastoral practitioner in particular. One said to the other, “They are just like scavengers. They have no real theory, just a hunting and pecking, a grabbing and applying. There is no order for them. And they can never explain what they do or why they do it, only that something works or not. It is all technique, and at best has some rationale to measure if it works. It is a very sad state of affairs.”

(12)DeMarinis acknowledges that while she was initially troubled by the disparaging nature of this professor’s depiction of her field, on further reflection she actually came to embrace his image.“Scavengers, though often thought of negatively, are in point of fact highly skilled at collecting, extracting, and cleansing,” DeMarinis writes, thereby proving herself to be something of a capable scavenger in the process. “The responsible scavenger is one skilled at survival, one who knows how to search, salvage, purify, and transform the elements of the world into that which nurtures and sustains life.”

(13) So, too, British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips claims a similar task and purpose for psychotherapy:

If the aim of a system is to create an outside where you can put the things you don’t want, then we have to look at what that system disposes of – its rubbish – to understand it, to get a picture of how it sees itself and wants to be seen. The proscribed vocabulary in anybody’s theory is as telling as the recommended vocabulary.(14) In this respect the pastoral theologian or caregiver, along with the psychoanalyst, must scavenge unapologetically, rummaging about resolutely in what others individually or collectively discard, the minister as dumpster-diver. You can learn a lot about people by going through their trash.

Long before DeMarinis chanced upon the conversation that revealed to her just how distasteful this sort of enterprise is to traditionally more fastidious systematicians, William James, in his plea for pluralism in philosophy, observed:

It is curious how little countenance radical pluralism has ever had from philosophers. Whether materialistically or spiritualistically minded, philosophers have always aimed at cleaning up the litter with which the world apparently is filled. They have substituted economical and orderly conceptions for the first sensible tangible; and whether these were morally elevated or only intellectually neat, they were at any rate always aesthetically pure and definite, and aimed at ascribing to the world something clean and intellectual in the way of inner structure. As compared with all these rationalizing pictures, the pluralistic empiricism which I profess offers but a sorry appearance. It is a turbid, muddled, gothic sort of an affair, without a sweeping outline and with little pictorial nobility. Those of you who are accustomed to the classical constructions of reality may be excused if your first reaction upon it be absolute contempt – a shrug of the shoulders as if such ideas were unworthy of explicit refutation. But one must have lived some time with a system to appreciate its merits. Perhaps a little more familiarity may mitigate your first surprise at such a programme as I offer.

(15)If, as James asserts, philosophers tend to pursue “cleaning up the litter” of the universe by attributing to it some grand systematic structure, then pastoral theologians – with their modest parcel of diverse metaphors and images, a tolerance for the untidy, and a keen eye for the individual, the singular, the unprecedented – are those radical pluralists who, like James, engage in a more “turbid, muddled, gothic sort of an affair.” If we pastoral theologians attempt to unclutter the universe at all, we likely do so, as DeMarinis and Phillips suggest, at ground level as unassuming scavengers, that is, by confronting, even feeding on but ultimately attempting to transform, its refuse, its odds and ends.

More inclined to pluralism than to systematics, then, the authors whose works are gathered in the Images book would likely affirm the paradoxical truths both of the Dublin zookeeper and of James’s carpenter. Pastoral theologians tend to attest that while the difference between one individual, community, or system and another may be small, that difference is nonetheless very important for us to understand as we approach our own vocational variant on the difficult task of breeding lions, that is, as we consider our own attempts as pastoral theologians and caregivers to, in the words of DeMarinis, “search, salvage, purify, and transform the elements of the world into that which nurtures and sustains life.”We Shall Be Healers of a Seasoned Sensibility
In engaging this book’s assortment of essays and images, I am hoping that the reader will experience a sense, as I have in gathering them, of happening upon an embarrassment of riches. One finds in the collection of essays an at once ancient but surprisingly contemporary cache of practical wisdom for guiding acts of caring in Christian community. To be sure, these authors know their Bibles, church history, and theology; but they seem to know something more as well, holding however loosely to a kind of weathered, down-to-earth sensibility for tending to those who suffer or despair. Having traveled many paths into the darkness, as have all of you in this room, they seem to have discovered there cathartic rays of light.

My hope is that this collective dose of images will serve to refresh and expand the repertoire of pastoral understanding and care and counseling approaches of already seasoned ministers and other caregivers. So, too, am I convinced that seminary students currently grappling with their own emerging sense of pastoral identity will find orientation and encouragement in the diverse array of images and styles of care reflected in the book. To this end, I’ve envisioned the book being assigned in an introductory course in pastoral care and counseling, a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education, or a field education or other setting of ministry.

In addition, your students will discover here a unique entree into historical conversations and controversies in pastoral theology throughout the twentieth century. Usually subtle but occasionally overt clashes among pastoral theologians surface in these pages. They reflect differing understandings of the nature of the self and its healing, of the appropriate subjects and objects of pastoral and pastoral theological concern, and of the particular cognate disciplines perceived to be of most value to this field. Even as every lion, parishioner, or counselee, and even as every zoo, congregation, or social context is different, so, too, these essays collectively affirm that every zookeeper, caregiver, or pastoral theologian is different. One thus finds in the book competing philosophical, theological, and anthropological assumptions that reflect, or lead to, divergent clinical, congregational, and communal claims and strategies of care. The wounded healer who pursues the depths of what he conceives to be the singular core of another’s fragile self may well experience as unsettling, for example, a wise fool’s focus on superficial matters and her utter confidence in the sufferer’s resilient multiplicity of selves. It is certainly possible to conceive of philosophical and clinical common ground between the wounded healer and wise fool, along with the many other competing images for ministry here.

(16) These various metaphors nonetheless reflect a kind of historical ebb and flow within recent pastoral theology. The image of the solicitous shepherd that comes into ascendency in the 1960s gives way to the wounded healer in the 1970s, which in turn is displaced by the wise fool of the 1980s, while a host of alternative images arrives on the scene from the 1990s to the present.
Also evident in the book are tensions among the authors and images regarding who or what is perceived to be the subject or object of pastoral concern. Is it an individual parishioner in need, as in Boisen’s living human document as well as in Seward Hiltner’s shepherd, Dittes’s ascetic witness, Paul Pruyser’s diagnostician, or Capps’s agent of hope? Is it a larger congregation or community of persons, as in Miller-McLemore’s living human web, Gaylord Noyce’s coach or moral counselor, Edward Wimberly’s indigenous storyteller, or Margaret Kornfeld’s gardener? Or is it at times the minister’s or caregiver’s own unique self and sorrows, apparent in Nouwen’s wounded healer as well as in Jeanne Stevenson Moessner’s self-differentiated Samaritan, or my own intimate stranger?

Though these positions are not always mutually exclusive, neither are they easily reconciled. They reflect differences both in the relative weight attributed to individuals, families, and the larger community as the source of problems and in the locus of intervention and the resources perceived to be essential for their amelioration.

Readers will also come to find that the range of cognate disciplines engaged by pastoral theologians today has considerably expanded. Various schools of clinical psychology —particularly the psychoanalytic, analytic, and personal psychologies of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Carl Rogers and their disciples, and the functional psychology of William James — served prominently to inspire and undergird the contemporary pastoral theology movement in its early days of Boisen and Hiltner.

Recent pastoral theologians, however, are as likely to draw on systems theories, sociology or political science, or philosophical hermeneutics. They engage African American, feminist, or queer studies as well as art history, literary theory, or even scientific brain research as much as or more than any individual or group psychology as their principal partners in dialogue and practice. This trend, too, can be readily traced through the historical progression of images and metaphors of the book. In this regard, then, the collection offers not only multiple ways to imagine one’s own ministries of care but also a unique narrative means by which to access the historical sweep of contemporary pastoral theology.

We Shall Be Evocative Artists and Art Critics
Quickly, then, two further psychic predictions from Yanna: first, we shall be evocative artists and art critics.

The essays of the book also caused me to raise questions concerning the practical import of a metaphorical approach to pastoral theology and ministry. Presumably, it is not enough to say to a minister or seminarian, “If you see those in need of help, it is your job to help them.” Such a response only begs further questions of what it means to help others in need and of what is unique about the kind of help a minister can offer. I’ve found in assembling the essays and images of the book that their authors rarely attempt to answer these kinds of questions by providing detailed instruction for entering into particular situations of need. They function less as technical training guides or “how-to” manuals for basic counseling or crisis intervention skills than as works of art intent on inspiring ministry in more indirect and subtle ways. Like the evocative power of images in portraits, sculptures, films, or poetry, these pastoral images serve not so much to inform specific tasks of ministry but to foster a richer sense of pastoral self-understanding, identity, and integrity.There are a number of possible ways one can respond to an artistic image. One way is to view it with reverence and adoration, as one might contemplate an icon of the Virgin Mary or of Christ on the cross. Another is to see it as a “graven” image, as a sacrilege or threat, and seek to destroy it by any means possible. A third way is to engage, as art critics do, in a combination of appreciation and critical appraisal.

All of these possible responses have their proponents, and the history of the church is replete with examples of all three. The third approach, however, seems to be one that both honors the tradition and enables its adherents to adapt to new realities. This is likely the most helpful way to consider the progression of pastoral images of this book, i.e., as ongoing attempts by contemporary pastoral theologians to honor their tradition while adapting to changing realities of church and culture. Thus in order to understand and assess Bonnie Miller-McLemore’s image of the living human web, for example, one would be served by knowing something of Boisen’s living human document.

I also noticed a tendency of authors in this collection to romanticize the particular image or model they are promoting, an inclination that may reflect a more widespread idealization of metaphors within pastoral theology in general. The authors understandably accentuate the positive features of the pastoral image they propose, less often highlighting its more questionable aspects or its limitations. A shepherd, after all, is not always known to be solicitous or courageous; a web is often a sticky nuisance; a coach is held accountable for the team’s losses and for the behavior of players even off the field; a gardener can grow weary over decisions about which plants are worth trying to save. Individual essays therefore tend to function here more as exercises in art appreciation. Taken together, however, they also serve as a means of critical appraisal, as art criticism. The turn to each new metaphor in successive chapters may be seen in part as an implicit critique or recognition of the limitations of the old.We Shall Be Survivors

Second, and finally, I’d like to suggest that we pastoral theologians and caregivers shall be survivors.

There are pressures at work against pastoral theology today as a formal discipline and subject matter within seminaries and divinity schools. I’m not so alarmist to say that pastoral theology as we know it is an endangered species, but there is some cause for concern. A large swath of well-known pastoral theologians – Donald Capps, Rodney Hunter, Andy Lester, Howard Stone, Nancy Ramsey, among them, are nearing or have reached retirement age or, in the case of Ramsey, have moved on to an administrative position, and we in the academy at least no longer take for granted that as these retirements occur, the positions will be filled by others. In the 1960s, there were far more positions in the field of pastoral care in major seminaries and Divinity schools than there are now. Princeton Seminary, where I teach, is a happy exception to this general trend in many distinguished institutions. Two decades ago we had two tenured and one untenured positions in pastoral theology at PTS. Today we have four tenured positions. But we do not take this positive development for granted, and we still look over our shoulders and cover one another’s backs. So we must be alert. We must continue to think, as you are here today, about the future of pastoral care, though we are not Yanna the Psychic nor Hebrew prophets of old. But we are those who know a good thing when we see it, know life-changing acts of ministry when we see them, and are occasionally privileged to find ourselves serving as agents of such acts of transformation, agents of hope, in our ministries of care and counseling.
___________________________________________________
1 Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 26.
2 From boyhood on, however, Rogers was deeply interested in scientific exploration and later subjected his innovations in psychotherapy to empirical investigation and confirmation. See Rogers, ibid., 5-6.
3 For a comparison of pastoral theological methodology to art criticism, see Donald Capps, “The Lessons of Art Theory for Pastoral Theology,” in Pastoral Psychology, Vol. 47, No. 5, 1999, 321-346.
4 James E. Dittes, Pastoral Counseling: The Basics (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1999), 61, 63.5William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 7-8, 20.
6Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, “The Living Human Web: Pastoral Theology at the Turn of the Century,” in Jeanne Stevenson Moessner, Through the Eyes of Women: Insights for Pastoral Care (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 21-22, emphasis added.
7 In William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 3, James writes: “The documents humains which we shall find most instructive need not then be sought for in the haunts of special erudition – they lie along the beaten highway....” Compare Anton T. Boisen’s early book, The Exploration of the Inner World: A Study of Mental Disorder and Religious Experience (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1936), 10-11: “I wanted [seminary students] to learn to read human documents as well as books, particularly those revealing documents which are opened up at the inner day of judgment,” and, again reminiscent of James above, “[My work] proposes to examine, in the light of my own experience, the experiences of other persons who have been forced off the beaten path of common sense and have traveled through the little-known wilderness of the inner life.” On Boisen’s familiarity with James’s The Varieties, see Boisen, ibid., 89-90.
8 John Wisdom, Paradox and Discovery (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965), p. 138.
9 William James, “The Gospel of Relaxation,” in William James: Writings 1878-1899 (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1992), p. 831; and William James, “The Importance of Individuals,” in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1956), pp. 256-257.
10 See, e.g., Dean Hamer and Peter Copeland, The Science of Desire: The Search for the Gay Gene and the Biology of Behavior (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), p. 211.
11 James, The Will to Believe, p. 259.
12 Valerie DeMarinis, Critical Caring: A Feminist Model for Pastoral Psychology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993), p. 12. I have not devoted a chapter to her intriguing metaphor for ministry because she discusses it in the space of only a few paragraphs.
13 DeMarinis, ibid., p. 13.
14 Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 19.
15 William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 45-46.
16 One encouraging example is Donald Capps, Living Stories: Pastoral Counseling in Congregational Context (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), especially its introduction and chapter one.

GENERAL SECRETARY'S REPORT TO THE CPSP COMMUNITY

2005-05-30T20:32:00.000-07:00

April 27, 2005
GENERAL SECRETARY’S REPORT TO THE COMMUNITY
2005 PLENARY COLUMBUS, OHIO
Raymond J. Lawrence

The clinical pastoral movement that emerged early in the 20th century was another chapter in the long history of the cure of souls, both in Christianity and other religions. This particular manifestation of the cure of souls grew out of the conflicted triangle of Anton T. Boisen, Richard C. Cabot, and Helen Flanders Dunbar. In this triangle is the whole story of the movement right into the present. In the dance of these three is distilled and encapsulated all the richness and pathology of this movement of which CPSP is merely a part.

Boisen's position in the triangle was as an advocate of his theory that religious experience and mental disturbance have the same features, and that understanding one helps to understand the other. He learned this not from books, or from thinking about it, but from going absolutely mad himself. He was hospitalized four times in psychiatric hospitals, the first time locked in for 15 months, and he thought that he was a much better and wiser man because of what he experienced and learned in that hospitalization. Only a couple of years after he was released from involuntary hospitalization, he was appointed chaplain at Worcester State Hospital, an astonishing rebound. For Boisen the study of madness was virtually the same thing as the study of religion, and the more we know about each the better we are able to assist troubled persons. Boisen was not interested in "doing something for the patient," a motivation that seems to have recently swept the movement and carried all before it. Rather Boisen thought it enough simply to understand the patient and the patient's experiences.

Richard C. Cabot, MD, was Boisen's principal financial and moral supporter in the beginning. Cabot was in the forefront of emerging clinical medicine. From Cabot Boisen learned the case method of approaching persons and illness. The case method requires that everything about the patient's world be reviewed for clues to their condition. Cabot's mission was to upgrade the skills of clergy so as to improve medical care.

Helen Flanders Dunbar, psychiatrist, literary critic, and theologian, enrolled in that first summer group, and though she stayed only a month, she returned in years following. She became Boisen's chief supporter and soul mate, and apparently his only consummated romantic relationship. Dunbar's mission was to clarify the relationship between illness and the psyche, and health and the psyche. She was the founder and first editor of the Journal of Psychosomatic Medicine.

The three, along with Philip Guiles, formed the Council of the Clinical Training of Theological Students (CCTTS, later shortened to CCT) and promoted clinical training for clergy. For five years the training programs went on swimmingly. The numbers of trainees increased rapidly.
In 1930, Boisen's mother died, and his life-long girl friend, a florid hysteric, was treating him badly as usual. Boisen had his second distinct psychotic break.

The happy triangle deconstructed. Cabot had never agreed with Boisen's basic premise about the significance of mental disturbance. He was a chemical man, and would be happy to see the day that psychiatric practice was mostly drug therapy. He believed that chemistry would eventually solve mental disturbance. Cabot concluded, therefore, that Boisen was unfit for ministry and proposed to dismiss him from their new fledged organization, CCTTS. Dunbar sided with Boisen, seized the books, and took them from Boston to New York where she set up a new office, effectively isolating Cabot. Cabot in Boston eventually formed the Institute of Pastoral Care.

From 1930 to 1967 there were two centers of power in the clinical pastoral world, New York and Boston. They each touted a different philosophy, and they were competitive with each other. Boisen, Dunbar, and Hiltner were the original New York leaders; Cabot, Guiles, and Russell Dicks were the same for Boston. Neither owned the whole truth. The dialogue and debate, even the strife between them, was enriching to the movement for the next 35 years. If the clinical pastoral movement had a golden age, this was it.

The Council worked mainly in psychiatric hospitals; the Institute in general. The Council focused mainly on personal transformation, both the trainee's and the patient's; the Institute focused on skill development. The Council called its mission training; the Institute called its mission education. The Council made use principally of the case study, the complete picture of the patient; the Institute used primarily the verbatim of a single encounter. The Council held the view that ministers are healers; the Institute tended to view ministers as those who assist physicians in healing arts.

The debate was rich. The players were memorable. That generation certainly seemed to witness a number of unusual and creative characters the likes of which we have not seen in a generation. Tom Klink, Armen Jorjorian, Ken Lee, Len Cedarleaf, Russell Dicks, Philip Guiles, Ernie Bruder, Joseph Fletcher, John Billinsky, Dick Young, Wayne Oates, Seward Hiltner, Edward Thornton, and Carroll Wise were only some of the remarkable characters who led that former generation.

In 1967 the great merger took place. The Council, the smaller Institute, Southern Baptists, and Lutherans groups all merged into one organization called the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education (ACPE). In retrospect we can see that it was driven by what Edwin Friedman calls the herding instinct among animals, a response to anxiety or fear. A handful of supervisors strongly opposed the merger. Ernie Bruder at St Elizabeth's in Washington, DC, opted out, and spent the rest of his life running an unaccredited program. George Tolson and others predicted the merger would be destructive, but their voices were drowned out in the joy of becoming one unified family. Or so it appeared.

The financial commitment for the merger came originally, not from pastoral clinicians, but from an outsider with money. Clement Stone put up $100,000 to promote a merger, which essentially paid for the mechanics of it. Some supervisors argue that the merger took place only because of Stone's money, but others claim that Stone assisted supervisors in doing what they wanted to do.

The result of the merger was that traditions and philosophy of the smaller IPC came to dominate the field. From '67 onward, the principles of IPC took the stage, and the principles of CCT went into eclipse. In retrospect some matters become clear that cannot easily be seen at the time. In fact, what then occurred at the time was a silent coup, establishing the values of the Institute as preeminent.

1. Attention was placed more on skill development than personal transformation. 2. CPT became CPE. 3. Far more training programs were established in general hospitals than psychiatric hospitals 4. Verbatims replaced case studies. 5. Chaplains postured themselves as persons less as healers or therapists than as those who assist the healing process directed by physicians. 6. Cabot became the putative founder of CPE, and Boisen the one who implemented his ideas. (You can read in the various editions of ACPE Standards the words "Cabot founded clinical pastoral education, an idea that was enlarged upon by Boisen.") Dunbar vanished from corporate memory.

Why is this important? In 1990 CPSP resurrected the ghost of the Council. We contended that an understanding of the self and an Understanding of the patient and his/her experience was considerably more important that learning a set of skills. We proclaimed Boisen as our spiritual father, not Cabot. We resurrected from oblivion Dunbar and her interest in psychosomatic dynamics.

Part of the argument for merger was the promise of engaging the wider community more effectively. One big group is stronger than several smaller ones, it was said. That proved to be an illusion. Quite the opposite is the case. After an initial spurt in growth following the merger, the movement as a whole has not grown, and is arguably less effective than it was prior to the merger. The posture of the seminaries toward clinical training (CPE) has cooled. I recall as a brand new supervisor in the late 60s being quite amazed that seminaries depended on supervisors' evaluations in some cases to decide whether the seminarian should be allowed to continue in seminary. All that has changed. Now supervisors are on trial. An unhappy clinical training course now results in a poor evaluation of the supervisor rather than the student.
The achievement of the merger was a univocal movement. That's what was dreamed of. It was the illusion of political power. "Unity in diversity" was the slogan, but the real product was group think. Dissent was inhibited. Idiosyncracies were scorned. The illusion was of one unified clinical pastoral movement that would march to one drummer and speak with one voice. It was an alluring vision. It presented well in public. But in order to accomplish such a feat, lots of ideas and lots of people had to walk the plank. Any peculiar voice that attempted to raise its head was summarily quashed.

The Bell Telephone Company used to have billboards in my youth saying, "We may be the only telephone company in town, but we try not to act like it." It is very difficult to attempt to act like something different from what you are. Ma Bell did not succeed.

We do not need to enthrone one monopolistic clinical pastoral training organization in this country. We had one from 1967 to 1990, and it has not lived up to its promise. We are destined to be a polyvocal, pluralistic movement. Competency and creativity are far more important than unity and conformity. We do not want univocalism even within CPSP. We want individuals and Chapters to develop their own distinctive voice, think new thoughts, and break new ground in our common vocation.

AN UPDATE ON THE CURRENT POLITICAL LANDSCAPE
CPSP emerged primarily out of the loins of the ACPE. Since then, the ACPE position towards us has been mostly on the order of the emperor's new clothes. We have been almost invisible, officially speaking. We understand that. It is difficult for an established organization to accept a renegade group that separates itself from the mother group. The Anglicans were a long time forgiving the Methodists for bolting.

In 1993 a dialogue meeting took place with three persons from each organization. It was a good-spirited discussion with no animosity. Everyone seemed clear that CPSP is of a different philosophy and organization, but there was no energy to continue meeting.

Generally the ACPE has been highly competitive in relation to us. We expect that. We can live with it. But we will not accept misrepresentations. The ACPE waives the flag of United States Department of Education (DOE) recognition as if it is the thing without which on cannot do training, a great hyperbole. We are currently in discussions with the DOE too, and the agency has encouraged us to present ourselves to them. They are not promoting monopolies. There is of course a question in some of our minds whether getting entangled with a government bureaucracy is not the kiss of death. This matter will continue to receive serious attention from us as we proceed.

The ACPE have claimed over and over again in the ACPE News that only ACPE qualifies for Medicare pass through funds. This is and always has been a totally false claim with no basis in fact. In spite of our complaints, they have issued no public correction.

Subsequent to the 1967 merger, several new organizations emerged. The College of Chaplains, the National Association of Catholic Chaplains, and the National Association of Jewish Chaplains. Then in 1994 there was a movement to once again unify all the pastoral care organizations, this time to the exclusion of CPSP. William Baugh, then president of the ACPE, convened the so-called "four presidents." His motivation seemed to be to unify the four organizations against CPSP. But unification was voted down by the respective organizations.

After that failure, the Council on Collaboration was invented, and that body proposed to create "universal standards," later changed to "common standards," for the clinical pastoral movement. When we heard that such a project was underway we twice formally asked a seat at the table for CPSP. John deVelder made the request on behalf of the Executive Committee. Twice we were denied a seat on the grounds that the project was already underway. We were given assurances by George Handzo that the Collaboration group intended to be fully inclusive in the long run.

The first edition of the Common Standards included an exclusive list of legitimate clinical pastoral training organizations. That list established the ACPE as the only significant clinical training organization. No other training was recognized.

The action of the Council on Collaboration was similar to an automobile association that might form a set of standards for a safe car. Let's say they list anti-lock brakes, safety glass, air bags front and side, and General Motors construction. You would say, "That is not a safety standards document, but a company endorsement." That is precisely how the Common Standards function.

Thus it was that CPSP filed a grievance with COMISS last December, stating that the Council on Collaboration violated the spirit of collegiality that is the basis of COMISS, the roundtable for all those who have an interest in clinical chaplaincy. The ACPE claimed to "hear the concerns" at the COMISS meeting. The Collaboration group met in January and revised the Common Standards. The revision subsequently printed is even more monopolistic than the original.
Subsequent to the December COMISS meeting I wrote to the Executive Director of the ACPE, who referred me to the president, Art Schmidt. I wrote to him also, and spoke with him on the phone. Our conversation was friendly and collegial. The Collaboration group was to have a board meeting Jan 25, and Schmidt reported that they would respond to our concerns about monopoly, the concerns that were raised publicly at COMISS, and get back to me. I have received no communication of any sort since then.

My conclusion is that the ACPE is fully committed to establishing a monopoly in the training field, and that their intent is to put CPSP out of business. Even if I am wrong about the intent, their actions are pointed to the same objective. If they can sell their Collaboration documents to the wider community they will put CPSP out of business even if they did not intend to do so. I do not expect them to succeed in making the sale.

The ACPE spoke soothing words in response to our protests of monopolistic claims, but they continue to act on a monopolistic course. I am reminded of the Psalmist. "Butter is on their lips, but in their heart, a sword."

WHAT ARE THE COMMON STANDARDS?
Astonishingly, the Collaboration group's Common Standards are the standards of no organization known to humankind, this in spite of all the promotion. The Collaboration group says its members have covenanted to strive toward the Standards. If CPSP were to strive toward the Common Standards, we would have to go backwards. I encourage you to read them.
Who actually produced the Common Standards? Walter Smith's money and George Handzo's leadership, with the cooperation of many in leadership in the ACPE, produced the document. How did they manage it? Smith put up $100,000 in matching funds, and invited the ACPE and its clients to pay half for the project. A great number of people were flown into New York City to do the work (and enjoy the Big Apple). This boondoggle carried a final price tag of $96,000. A better set of standards could have been produced by Jim Gebhart and a handful of colleagues over the course of a week-end in Columbus. We could have used $96,000 for a better purpose. The production of the Common Standards was a laundry list of the obvious, and a scandalous waste of what is essentially the members’ money.

The well-heeled Collaboration group and its Common Standards project also present the prospect of making COMISS irrelevant. We think that the subversion of COMISS would be a terrible loss to the clinical pastoral community.

A COMMENT ON THE SIX ORGANIZATIONS IN THE COLLABORATION GROUP
Of the alphabet soup that describes the six organizations in the Collaboration group, the ACPE is the only one benefiting from the monopolistic play. None of the other organizations actually has a dog in this fight.

-The Canadian group, CAPPE, has no jurisdiction in this country.-The American Association of Pastoral Counselors (AAPC) does not do clinical training, and we have no quarrel with them. Doug Ronsheim very graciously spoke to our Plenary last year.-The remaining three organizations depend on the ACPE to train their leadership, and thus are to one degree or another client organizations of the ACPE.-NACC is to a certain extent a client of ACPE, which offered to (in 2001) grandparent credentials to all NACC supervisors, greatly reducing independent training by NACC. We do not have any quarrel with the NACC. We wish them well.-NAJC is not a training organization, but an organization certifying Jewish chaplains. We have no quarrel with the NAJC. We wish them well.-APC is not in the work of training chaplains. They do not train chaplains, only certify them. In the early 1990s, when we were just getting started, the APC actually recognized CPSP as a collegial organization. Don Gum was part of that initiative. But shortly following their official recognition of CPSP, the 94 annual meeting was flooded by a number of aggressive ACPE supervisors who charged CSPS with a lack of ethics and professionalism, and they forced a reversal of the decision. I was there. It was a trial by mob. Since then, the APC has been ambivalent towards us. They have recognized our training at points, and not at others. We have no quarrel with the APC. We wish them well.

WHAT THEN SHALL WE DO?
1. Speak up at every opportunity and describe to the anyone who will listen the campaign underway to declare the ACPE a monopoly in the field of clinical pastoral training.2. Continue the dialogue and debate wherever possible. Even if ACPE will not participate, we can still answer their claims. It may be a short dialogue. They speak, and we respond. Even if it is unwelcome, it is dialogue. In this connection, I have publicly called for an updating of the White Paper, because it is a potentially useful document for all communities in the field.3. Never, never react. Edwin Friedman taught us this. To react is to respond out of feelings. To react in anger may feel good, but it generally is unproductive. Being nice, and obsequious, out of fear and intimidation is also a form of reacting based on feelings. The alternative to reaction is to respond after thinking, reflecting,clarifying, and exploring. A thoughtful response does not have to be nice, just thoughtful---and wise.4. Remember that administrators and personnel offices do not care much for the subtleties of the alphabet stew. Typically they look for signs of competence, not alphabets.5. Avoid the kind of group-think that views every member of ACPE as our enemy. We have many, many friends in ACPE. They do not march in lock step as their newsletter suggests. 6. Bury the illusion that we might rejoin them. We should be delighted to meet them for respectful, collegial dialogue for the purposes of growth and development, theirs and ours, but we do not need to join. When Apple joins Microsoft, maybe we will join ACPE.7. Remember Saul Alinsky, one of my teachers, who spent his life dislodging entrenched and vested interests in business and politics. He often said that such interests never fail to shoot themselves in the foot. 8. Grow. We have generally lived heretofore by the Perry Miller rule: "Make sure no one can find us, and we will not be bothered by undesirables." We now need to grow ourselves a little more political power. We have now more than 300 certified members. When we double that number we will have more certified persons than ACPE, which has now fewer certified members than it had a generation ago. It will be much more difficult for monopolistic claims to be made when we have a little more meat on our bones.9. Invest as little energy as possible protecting ourselves against anyone. Act only when we must.10. Diligently maintain our tradition of self-criticism. That is especially difficult to do when under attack, but it is a non-negotiable. If we become too nice, too courteous, and ultimately uncritical of each other, we will lose our souls. No tradition, ours or others', is immune to critique. One of the dangers in the current interest in muticulturalism is the lack of critical purchase. All traditions, beginning with our own, should be held up for examination if we want to present ourselves as clinicians. Even the traditions of the vaunted Royal Navy are subject to critique. Winston Churchill was once attacked when he was First Lord of the Admiralty for demeaning naval traditions. He asked rhetorically, "What are the traditions of the Royal Navy? Rum, sodomy, and the lash." 11. Do not take ourselves too seriously. All of the alphabet stews in our movement are but a tempest in a teapot. In relation to the larger culture and its problems, our internecine struggles are of little significance. The increasing and alarming gap between the rich and the poor, in this country and abroad, is a problem that will eventually come home to roost. The rise of religious rage, and I refer not so much to Muslim as Christian rage, promises to consume everything. The gross and increasing duplicity in our political life is similarly alarming. CPSP will not prosper if the social order unravels as it currently threatens. We will be like chaplains on a Titanic that deserved to be sunk.12. Finally, we must ultimately fall back on divine providence. We actually control very little in this life. I was born the year after Hitler came to power, and my entire life has been shadowed by the events of the middle 20th century. Just before I was born Paul Tillich fled Germany, and soon after Karl Barth followed suite, after preaching a sermon, "Jesus Christ was a Jew." In the midst of the Nazi threats to his life, Barth said, "We must go on doing theology as if nothing has happened." For us, doing theology means continuing our critique of the currently fashionable gods wherever we encounter them, both personally and systemically, and doing so in the name of the god of justice and mercy. So, whatever arrows come our way, and there may be many, let us be steadfast in our vocation---as if nothing has happened.

CPSP BOARD CERTIFIED CLINICAL CHAPLAINS

2005-05-20T20:25:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

The College of Pastoral Supervision & PsychotherapyCPSP is an international, theologically based covenant community, offering accreditation and certification to individuals and programs that meet standards of expertise in pastoral counseling, pastoral supervision and psychotherapy.CPSP confers Diplomate, Pastoral Counselor, Board Certified Clinical Chaplain and Board Certified Associate Clinical Chaplain credentials to persons who demonstrate competence, meet its standards, aspire to its principles, and commit to its discipline.CPSP confers accreditation on clinical pastoral education (CPE) programs and pastoral counseling training centers.CPSP a community in which power is located in the grass roots, with a minimal hierarchy and minimal budget.CPSP a community in which power is located in the grass roots, with a minimal hierarchy and minimal budget.

The CPSP Chapter

is a group of at least six members, but not more than twelve, who commit themselves to the Covenant and to further the life of the CPSP community.are geographically based for convenience and have no fixed geographical boundaries.
maintains communication and collegial relationships on matters of importance between meetings.

is the designated context for settlement of all matters related to accreditation and certification, adjudication and continuing education.
provides support, challenge, discipline, consultation, education, and theological reflection for its members.
is the entry point for persons seeking to participate in the CPSP community.

The Governing Council

is the governing body that determines the standards, policies, procedures, and boundaries of the CPSP community.
consists of general officers and representative from each chapter.
provides oversight to Chapters and their programs.
certifies annually that Chapters are in good standing and faithful to the Covenant.
ratifies on March 17 of every year the respective Chapters’ submission of names for persons to be re-certified.
settles matters that Chapters may be unable to resolve.
is the court of last resort in the CPSP community.

"Committed to being mutually responsible to one another in their professional work and direction." -from the CPSP Covenant

Programs

CPSP accredits a wide range of training programs in clinical pastoral education, pastoral counseling, and pastoral psychotherapy. CPSP programs meet or exceed generally accepted standards of training for pastoral counselors, institutional chaplains, and pastoral psychotherapists. CPSP programs also meet traditional seminary requirements for candidates seeking graduate theological degrees as well as minimal standards set by various denominations and governmental agencies. CPSP programs are designed to prepare persons for credentials as Pastoral Counselor, Board Certified Clinical Chaplain, Board Certified Associate Clinical Chaplain, Dipolmate in Pastoral Supervision or Diplomate in Pastoral Psychotherapy. Clinical work in accredited CPSP programs may be transferred to certain universities for the pursuit of advanced theological degrees. (D.Min., Th.D.,etc)

Quality

The unique character of Chapter life fosters mutual accountability and collegiality among members. The Chapter provides an on-going community for consultation, discipline, continuing education, support and fellowship.
Discipline in CPSP is a pro-active process rather than a reactive one.
All credentials are continually reviewed by the Chapter and all credentialed persons must be endorsed annually by the Governing Council in order to remain current.

History

CPSP was founded in 1990 in a response to a widely felt need in the pastoral education and counseling community for a recovery of soul. CPSP stands in the tradition of Anton T. Boisen, Helen Flanders Dunbar, Russell Dicks, Seward Hiltner, Carroll A. Wise, Thomas W. Klink, and numerous other pioneers of the clinical pastoral training movement who fostered the exploration of the inner-self leading to personal transformation of the clinically trained minister.

As the preeminent historian of the clinical pastoral training movement, Robert C. Powell has indicated, transformation rather than skill development is the essential meaning and purpose of the movement. Thus CPSP is committed theologically and primarily to the development of the idiosyncratic self of the clinically trained pastor. It is further committed to the development of specialists in Pastoral Counseling, Clinical Chaplaincy, Pastoral supervision and pastoral psychotherapy.

The Covenant of the College of Pastoral Supervision and Psychotherapy

Spiritual pilgrims

We, the CPSP community see ourselves as spiritual pilgrims seeking a truly collegial professional community. Our calling and commitments are, therefore, first and last theological. We covenant to address one another and to be addressed by one another in a profound theological sense. We commit to being mutually responsible to one another for our professional work and direction.

Chapters

Matters that are typically dealt with in other certifying bodies by centralized governance will be dealt with primarily in Chapters. Thus, we organize ourselves in such a way that we each participate in a relatively small group called a Chapter consisting of approximately a dozen colleagues. Teaching or counseling programs directed by CPSP Diplomates are the primary responsibility of the Chapter.

Recovery of soul

We commit ourselves to a galaxy of shared values that are as deeply held as they are difficult to communicate. "Recovery of soul" is a metaphor that points toward these values. We place a premium on the significance of the relationships among ourselves. We value personal authority and creativity. We believe we should make a space for one another and stand ready to midwife one another in our respective spiritual journeys. Because we believe that life is best lived by grace, we believe it essential to guard against becoming invasive, aggressive, or predatory toward each other. We believe that persons are always more important than institutions, and even the institution of CPSP itself must be carefully monitored lest it take on an idolatrous character.

A Living Experience

We intend to travel light, to own no property, to accumulate no wealth, and to create no bureaucracy. We are invested in offering a living experience that reflects human life and faith within a milieu of supportive and challenging community of fellow pilgrims.

Inquires

Persons interested in CPSP membership or in training programs may contact:

Raymond J. Lawrence General SecretaryP.O. Box 162Times StationNew York, NY 10108

email raymondlawrence@cpsp.org

Visit one the CPSP Web-Sites

www.cpsp.org

www.pastoralreport.com

The College of Pastoral Supervision & Psychotherapy

2005-04-13T20:12:00.000-07:00

The College of Pastoral Supervision & Psychotherapy

CPSP is an international, theologically based covenant community, offering accreditation and certification to individuals and programs that meet standards of expertise in pastoral counseling, pastoral supervision and psychotherapy.

CPSP confers Diplomate, Pastoral Counselor, Board Certified Clinical Chaplain and Board Certified Associate Clinical Chaplain credentials to persons who demonstrate competence, meet its standards, aspire to its principles, and commit to its discipline.

CPSP confers accreditation on clinical pastoral education (CPE) programs and pastoral counseling training centers.

CPSP a community in which power is located in the grass roots, with a minimal hierarchy and minimal budget.

The CPSP Chapter

is a group of at least six members, but not more than twelve, who commit themselves to the Covenant and to further the life of the CPSP community.
are geographically based for convenience and have no fixed geographical boundaries.
maintains communication and collegial relationships on matters of importance between meetings.
is the designated context for settlement of all matters related to accreditation and certification, adjudication and continuing education.
provides support, challenge, discipline, consultation, education, and theological reflection for its members
is the entry point for persons seeking to participate in the CPSP community.

The Governing Council

is the governing body that determines the standards, policies, procedures, and boundaries of the CPSP community.
consists of general officers and representative from each chapter.
provides oversight to Chapters and their programs.
certifies annually that Chapters are in good standing and faithful to the Covenant.
ratifies on March 17 of every year the respective Chapters’ submission of names for persons to be re-cretified.
settles matters that Chapters may be unable to resolve.
is the court of last resort in the CPSP community.

"Committed to being mutually responsible to one another in their professional work and direction." -from the CPSP Covenant

Programs

Quality

The unique character of Chapter life fosters mutual accountability and collegiality among members. The Chapter provides an on-going community for consultation, discipline, continuing education, support and fellowship.
Discipline in CPSP is a pro-active process rather than a reactive one.
All credentials are continually reviewed by the Chapter and all credentialed persons must be endorsed annually by the Governing Council in order to remain current.

History

CPSP was founded in 1990 in a response to a widely felt need in the pastoral education and counseling community for a recovery of soul. CPSP stands in the tradition of Anton T. Boisen, Helen Flanders Dunbar, Russell Dicks, Seward Hiltner, Carroll A. Wise, Thomas W. Klink, and numerous other pioneers of the clinical pastoral training movement who fostered the exploration of the inner-self leading to personal transformation of the clinically trained minister.

The Covenant of the College of Pastoral Supervision and Psychotherapy

Spiritual pilgrims

Chapters

Recovery of soul

A Living Experience

Inquires

Persons interested in CPSP membership or in training programs may contact:

Raymond J. Lawrence General Secretary
P.O. Box 162
Times Station
New York, NY 10108
email raymondlawrence@cpsp.org

Visit the CPSP Web-Sites
http://www.cpsp.org
http://www.pastoral.com

It's Time to Reinvent Freud

2005-02-03T19:54:00.000-08:00

It's Time to Reinvent Freud
By Richard A. Shweder; Richard A. Shweder, professor of human development at the University of Chicago, is currently a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

There is a panic inherent in the anticipation of professional extinction that is the dread of Freud's disciples these days.

The announcement by the Library of Congress that it would shelve an exhibition titled "Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture" coincided with the winter meeting of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, prophetically titled "Is There a Place for Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture?" -- thereby confirming the fear of many psychoanalysts that the answer may be "no."

The library's half-hearted decision to put the great guru in cold storage left some analysts in a sweat, feeling defensive, unloved and full of self-doubt about their prospects in the intellectual and economic marketplace. The delay is probably less important than it seems. The authority of curators to be unchallenged arbiters of taste has evaporated over the past decade. In this age of "identity politics" and hotly contested points of view, the very idea of "public culture" has become an oxymoron.

And one does not need a degree in economics to figure out that if exhibitors cannot be highly selective, discerning and partial, then any display or narration about a controversial subject is probably going to be too expensive to mount. The library was just spineless and poor.

The declining mental health of our nation's psychoanalysts, however, is a real matter for concern. Is there a place for psychoanalysis in contemporary culture? What should we tell them to do about their dread?

For starters, let's not deny their reality. Freud has many intellectual enemies. And they are far more numerous and varied than the 42 critics (including Gloria Steinem and Oliver Sacks) who signed a petition urging the Library of Congress to shower the Viennese doctor with venom rather than just glory.

Here is the short version of the enemies list. Sociobiologists don't like Freud because they think family members have no sexual interest in one another. Cognitive scientists don't like Freud because they think the "unconscious mind" is a rapidly firing network of widely distributed neurons, with no mind of its own. Behavioral geneticists don't like Freud because they really think biology is destiny and that early childhood experience has very little to do with your life.

Postmodernists don't like Freud because they think that interpretation is merely free association, while Freud believed that by studying free association he might uncover the true meaning of a "text." Feminists don't like Freud because they think he discounted reports of sexual abuse, disparaged the female body and collaborated with his buddies against his female clients. They think Freud was a patriarch.

Even academic psychologists and philosophers of science don't like Freud. The academic psychologists think that the study of the mind has nothing to do with sex, religion, literature, mythology or the history of civilizations, while Freud, bless his heart, made those topics the core of his curriculum. And the philosophers of science come in two kinds: those who think Freud's tenets are untestable and hence unworthy of scientific consideration, and those who think his tenets are testable and have been shown to be false. So the rap on Freud is not very good.

The word is out in the medical world. It takes too long to "know thyself." Increments of personal insight are hard to measure or reimburse. Moreover, medical interns get nervous when they have to speak to their patients. They know all too little about the body and even less about a broken heart, or the history of civilization, which is why we need Prozac. Freud once wrote: "However philosophy may bridge the gap between physical and mental, it still exists for practical purposes, and our practice on each side of it must differ accordingly." Freud may have underestimated our practicality and overestimated our sense of purpose, but he was right to worry that the marriage of psychoanalysis to medicine would one day end in disaster.

He might even have been pleased to discover that in contemporary American culture the major interest in psychoanalysis is found in schools of theology and on Broadway. Psychoanalysis has a popular appeal, not because it is a form of medicine or alternative therapy but because it is a secular religion that tries to address the deeper meanings of life. This is a time for psychoanalysis to discover its true identity. It is time for a divorce from medicine. It is time for a remarriage with theologians.

Freud taught that to be happy one must maximize pleasure (the id), be moral (the superego) and survive (the ego). I am not worried about the survival of psychoanalysts. I think their fears of extinction are largely irrational. I just hope they have the guts to do the right thing.

Spiritual Counsel: An Art in Transition

2005-02-02T18:16:00.000-08:00

Spiritual Counsel: An Art in Transition
Rodney J. Hunter
Originally appeared in The Christian Century 118:28 (October 17, 2001), pp. 20 – 25.

In 1993 JOHN PATTON coined [employed] the phrase "paradigm shift" to describe a dramatic turn in the practice of pastoral care. Patton pointed out that pastoral care was focusing more and more on social and cultural concerns, moving from a "clinical pastoral paradigm" to one that Patton named "communal-contextual."

Both models evolved during the second half of the 20th century. Before that, another paradigm had prevailed throughout most of the church's history. Pastoral care concentrated primarily and often exclusively on the gospel message. It disregarded the concrete particularities and individuality of persons and contexts and tended, as Patton said, to "universalize its understanding of human problems and express them in exclusively "religious terms."

In the 1950s, churches and clergy left the classical paradigm behind and became caught up in the excitement over pastoral care as a healing art, a kind of therapy shaped by a new psychological consciousness. By the '60s, the pastoral care movement had morphed into an ecclesial and academic establishment. Mainline seminaries employed clinically trained professors of the therapy, and theological students flocked to their courses. A new ministerial profession—professional counseling—appeared, and psychotherapeutic modes of thought pervaded theological reflection and congregational life.

Derived largely from psychotherapy, the clinical paradigm was concerned with the individual's personality and psychopathology. In the late '70s, the therapy appropriated family systems theory and a more social approach that focused on the dynamics of relationships. By the '90s, some version of this approach was included in most seminary instruction, usually in combination with elements of the older, individualistic model.

Narrative theory and theology also made an impact when Charles Gerkin and Donald Capps urged pastoral counselors to have their "clients" (an unfortunate term) create and articulate a narrative of their experiences—to "tell their stories." Pastors were taught the skill of eliciting these stories, as well as the skill of listening to them.

While it did not abandon psychology or systems theory, the narrative approach emphasized meaning-making as fundamental to human life and to the pastoral role. In this context, pastoral caretakers could reintroduce theological concerns, and identify social and cultural differences.

The most comprehensive change, however, has come in the past decade with the communal-contextual paradigm. In today's liberal seminaries, the pastoral themes are social and cultural: gender, race, ethnicity, aging, together with their associated forms of oppression, abuse and violence. Closely related is a strong emphasis on fostering community that is inclusive, just and caring. Today we aim to "hear all voices." The influx of women into seminary teaching has been key to this shift.

As valuable as the latest developments have been, it would be a mistake to sweep away what was gained in the past, and what was generally good in the earlier paradigms, including the classic one—in which theology was central. Telling and hearing stories, for example, can lapse into uncritical exhibitionism or romanticism if one does not apply the clinical paradigm, with its critical edge of analytic psychologies and empirical assessments. The "communal-contextual" approach requires reflection too. This term has acquired strong interpersonal connotations that tend to idealize and romanticize the often-unglamorous task of living together in family, church or civil society.

Missing in much contemporary discussion of pastoral care is the structural element that makes community dependable and trustworthy over time. Terms like institution and organization suggest what's missing, for these are vitally important for providing the secure boundaries and resources necessary for trustworthy, deep, enduring relationships and for a stable community that encourages healthy and meaningful personal living. By this logic, pastoral care ought to be concerned about fostering personal commitment to religious institutions and organizations, and about shaping personal lifestyle in relation to traditions of moral and spiritual practice. But it is not clear whether the teachers of pastoral care acknowledge this fact or its implications for pastoral care and counseling, even though the "communal-contextual paradigm" is a priority, and creating community is often invoked as a fundamental aim of ministry.

Clinical pastoral education (CPE) remains a central component of training in pastoral care. It complements classroom instruction with pastoral experience in situations of intense need and suffering.

CPE courses continue to increase, apparently driven by an influx of laity—a trend which may suggest a softening, broadening and secularizing of the "pastoral" part of CPE. Minority participation, mainly from African-American and Pacific Rim students, has also increased.

CPE is based, however, on the secular-medical model of professionalism. It does not fit easily with the diverse cultural and spiritual traditions that people bring to hospitals and to CPE programs. CPE must incorporate the reality of cultural pluralism and the presence of non-Christian faith traditions into its process.

The setting for the CPE training is important too. Almost all CPE in the U.S. is located in medical and surgical facilities, with very little of it done in mental hospitals and practically none in prisons. What are the consequences of this reliance on medical settings for shaping pastoral identity and formation? Even those who support an emphasis on a medical context can agree that we need to develop more pastoral care supervision in congregational settings.

Nevertheless, CPE programs have been revised in ways that parallel seminary teaching—a greater emphasis on context, narrative and themes of cultural diversity and gender. I am told that these concerns often overshadow the attention formerly given to psychological analysis. The increasing number of women (they account for half of all CPE units taken) has no doubt contributed to many of the changes. Once known as a confrontational, crisis-inducing mode of learning susceptible to abuses of power, clinical supervision today has a different spirit—more collegial, less authority-centered and more socially, culturally and theologically oriented. In 1990, a dispute over the direction of these changes led to the formation of an alternative clinical pastoral organization, the College of Pastoral Supervision and Psychotherapy.

Beneath all these differences and developments lie fundamental religious questions. What is pastoral caregiving? What makes it religious? How should it relate to the dominant models of care in our culture? How should it relate to worshiping communities?

Fundamental social and political issues face CPE as well. Who is to be included and considered authoritative in the teaching and learning of the pastoral art? Whose pastoral care practices and traditions should be considered authoritative for pastoral education and why? Responses to these and other questions will determine the shape of CPE's future, its educational relevance and its spiritual integrity.

Seward Hiltner, one of the patriarchs of the pastoral care movement, worried years ago that pastoral caregiving was losing its religious component. Pastoral counseling was established as a profession in 1963 with the founding of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors (AAPC). Hiltner opposed the move. He feared that creating a separate profession would split the ministry, create distance between pastoral counseling and the church, and secularize the field. Although Hiltner eventually reconciled with AAPC, his concerns have been realized. Specialized pastoral counseling has become, by AAPC's own definitions, a mental health field, a form of psychotherapy. Although it includes theological and spiritual perspectives in its self-understanding, it is only loosely related to the churches.

On one hand, there is no question that specialized pastoral counseling is valuable to people who are trying to sort out their lives and gives them a measure of depth, dignity and integrity. Pastoral counseling is an enormous asset to the churches and deserves more support from them, including financial support. In addition, pastoral counseling reaches persons who might otherwise not venture near a church or pastor. Such "seekers" can begin to take the measure of their lives without fear of being subjected to proselytizing or moralistic judgment. They can work in an intimate, trusting relationship with a psychological healer who by dint of long, challenging training and commitment is able to "enter their pain" and help them toward constructive solutions. At its best, pastoral counseling represents a profoundly important expression of the liberal churches' socialmission. Given recent developments in secular psychotherapy and psychiatry, the influence of managed care, and the psychotropic drug revolution, the need for this social service and witness has never been greater.

But who will pay for it? Pastoral counseling is often long-term therapy, but even in the short term it is labor-intensive and costly. To qualify for insurance reimbursement, pastoral counselors need to be licensed and certified through a professional organization such as the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapists (AAMFT). In most states, meeting state qualifications involves accountability to a non-pastoral training and credentialing process. In other words, to earn a living as a pastoral counselor it is necessary to become a certified secular psychotherapist. There is little economic incentive for becoming a pastoral counselor.

This setup spells disaster for the pastoral identity of the profession, as evidenced by a 25-percent erosion of AAPC's core clinical membership (full-time practicing pastoral psychotherapists) in the last ten years. There has also been a precipitous decline in the number of AAPC training centers, and an increase in the number of therapists who meet AAPC theological standards but have not been trained in its centers. A generation of pastoral counselors has been theologically educated but not clinically formed in theologically based, pastorally defined programs. Economic pressures, moreover, continue to make it difficult for pastoral counselors to make their services available to low-income persons (hence the need for church- or community-based subsidies).

It is hard to predict how this will shake out. Perhaps pastoral counseling will reaffirm its pastoral identity through a closer institutional tie to the churches and community organizations, and will develop forms of economic support that are relatively independent of managed care and insurance reimbursement. Studies and experience repeatedly show that there is a large pool of people who specifically seek a theologically based form of psychological help and who are willing to pay for it without insurance—if they can. If they cannot, support from churches and community sources is sometimes available. Perhaps developing such support should be a priority of churches as well as pastoral counseling centers, for without these changes, pastoral counseling could disappear as a profession, and its members could become absorbed into secular professions. This can be averted only by clarifying and reinforcing pastoral identity, connecting more closely with sponsoring churches and developing new funding sources and marketing strategies.

A closely related issue is the proper role of religion in the practice of pastoral counseling. Counselors typically keep a low profile here, avoiding heavy-handed proselytizing and moralizing in order to encourage a wide-ranging, deeply personal and honest soul-searching. Many pastoral counselors do, on occasion and when it seems appropriate, discuss matters of faith and ethics. But the therapeutic or "health" model has so defined the aims and methods of the profession that little room is left for questions of faith and ethics in their own right, questions that cannot be completely subordinated to the psychological healing process and may be in tension with it at points. We need "theologically informed psychotherapy." But we also need a distinctly pastoral, therapeutically informed art of spiritual and moral counsel. The theoretical and practical problems in all of this are complex and vexing, but basic to the struggles of the field.

Clinically oriented pastoral theology took shape as a discipline in 1985 with the organization of the Society for Pastoral Theology. The society has defined the field and created a viable, socially inclusive institutional context for supporting pastoral theology as a discipline. Members such as Bonnie Miller-McLemore and Brita Gill-Austern have produced sophisticated publications (see Feminists and Womanist Pastoral Theology). Feminism has shaped both the society and the discipline's self-understanding, and has contributed to its inclination toward liberation and narrative forms of theology and pastoral theory.

At the same time, pastoral theology struggles to achieve recognition in the academy, especially in the university-related divinity schools that pride themselves on achieving excellence in traditional forms of research and scholarship. Defining the field is absolutely crucial here, where pastoral theology's theory-practice mix and its interdisciplinary character are not easily understood and appreciated. Sad tales are told of faculty arguments over its legitimacy, and of promotion and tenure reviews that come to grief over the issue. Some believe that the field of pastoral care is in decline and will be replaced by courses and faculty appointments in "spirituality" and other fields.

Is the larger academic field of theology and related traditional disciplines prepared to include, learn from and support the kind of contextualized theological reflection that pastoral theology represents? Will the church and its leaders value and support pastoral theology's integrative, contextual, praxis-oriented theological form of inquiry? The questions have public importance. American society is driven by competitive economic forces that cheapen and exploit the personal dimensions of human relations and community life. Our major academic and religious institutions must support disciplines of inquiry into the nature and practice of caregiving, and into the human needs and problems that prompt this care.

Pastoral caregiving is an important and essential variation on this theme, with its concern for plumbing the depths of meaning involved in caring, in the humanity thus disclosed, and in the divinity. As a hybrid discipline of academy, church and clinic, pastoral theology—and its counterparts of pastoral care and counseling—are of profound importance, however far we are from a full recognition—or even a vision—of its character.Rodney J. Hunter teaches pastoral theology at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta. Dr. Hunter's presaentation to the CPSP community at the 2001Plenary, Postmodernism – What Does It Mean, and What Are Its Implications for the Future of the Clinical Pastoral Movement? is another important work by this gifted thinker and writer.

Copyright 2002 Christian Century Foundation. Reproduced by permission from the (October 17, 2001 issue of the Christian Century. Subscriptions: $49/year from P.O. Box 378, Mt. Morris, IL 61054. 1-800-208-4097

Remember Where You Came From

2005-02-02T17:39:00.000-08:00

BY
RAYMOND J. LAWRENCE
GENERAL SECRETARY
MARCH 15, 2001
An old woman in my first congregation used to say to her grown children, when parting, "Remember where you came from." Stories of where we come from are typically variable. The various gospels, canonical and otherwise, tell the same story of where Christians came from in various and sometimes quite different ways. The Apostle Paul tells the story of where he came from religiously in somewhat different ways each time he tells it.

I once heard a Swedish pastor say in a sermon that Swedes were Lutherans because a 16th century Swedish king decided in favor of Lutheran Church during the Reformation, which is not untrue. If the story of Swedish Lutherans is told that way, they should probably give up being Lutheran.

Another truthful statement is that Swedes are Lutherans because Luther risked his life and honor to restore a biblical faith rooted in a change of heart to counter medieval Catholic scheme of salvation by works, specifically a system of indulgences. Yet another truthful recollection is that Luther demonstrated that a serious religious life could include an enthusiastic affirmation of sexual pleasure, and proclaimed that affirmation through his life, liberating nuns and marrying one himself, and teaching that sexual abstinence was an unnecessary and vain burden. In that telling one might actually want to be a Lutheran.

Where we in CPSP came from is a tale that can be told many different ways, and how we tell it will show whether we have anything worth committing to. A stranger phoned me several weeks ago to ask me about CPSP. "Are you the group that organized about ten or fifteen years ago, made up of rogues and misfits?" he asked. He sounded as if he might be smiling, so I did not take offense. I told him I was not sure we had organized yet. Ken Blank is still trying to get an accurate and official membership list. I looked up "rogue" in the dictionary after he hung up and it said that a rogue horse is one that won't behave, which is exactly the same metaphor that Tillich used, saying that the biblical meaning of "spiritual" is continued today only in the word "spirited," as when we say a horse is "spirited." In that case we should boast of being rogues. As for whether we are misfits, I'll be satisfied to have written on my tombstone, "Proud to have been a misfit." Anyone who is a good fit in the present order, even in the religious community, is, as they used to say in the old days, "unfaithful."

So where did we come from? CPSP was created abruptly on one week-end elevenyears ago when fifteen persons gathered in Roanoke, but that's not the best way to tell our story. For a decade or more previously a number of persons in our field had raised critical questions about the direction of the clinical pastoral movement, beginning most notably with Robert Powell who in 1979, in his last date with the ACPE, addressing the question, "Whatever Happened to CPE?" Several years of mostly verbal challenges to the direction of the clinicalpastoral establishment culminated in the publication of the Underground Report (UR) in 1988, a stinging critique of the direction of the clinical pastoral community. This publication was supported by well over a hundred supervisors and counselors. But the leadership was offended, and responded with a blind eye and a deaf ear. The movement whose life blood is the critical faculty was unable to accept criticism of its own actions and program. If a trainee in any clinical training program had assumed such a posture, such a trainee would have been labeled "unteachable."

Of the numbers who supported the UR, some fewer number were interested in creating a new organization. When finally only fifteen gathered to consider creating a new organization in 1990, our real interest was not in an organization, but in saving our professional lives. We experienced the established clinical pastoral community as capricious, controlling, driven by political agenda rather than a desire for competency, and posing a threat to our right to work, our ticket to a job.

A pattern of dominance and submission were the marks of our professional communities in those days. Fear and intimidation characterized the spirit of the professional gatherings that we experienced. The record is replete with cases of collegial knifings. We were finding far too many bodies by the side of the road, professionally speaking, victims of mean-spirited bureaucratic infighting and culture wars. Some of this is documented in the early issues of the UR. We imagined that we as a community of professionals could do better than that.

We thought we could and ought to have a professional association that seriously attempted to be ruled by respect and care for one another, not by domination and submission. So we created CPSP, reluctantly.

It is rare for a large organization to foster respect and care for all its members, especially rare in the corporate, pyramidal structure of the rulers and the ruled. Somehow the bullies always seem to rise to the top. No one is immune to acting in a predatory manner. But we believe we have created the kind of community in which such behavior can be most easily addressed.
Concurrent with a pattern of domination and submission, we noted a diminishment of the self-critical, which is the life-blood of the clinical pastoral movement.

It is very rare in history that an established institution permits radical critique within its ranks. All institutions are pretty much like my favorite uncle, who says that there are only two kinds of criticism that he resents, constructive and destructive. The lesson here is not subtle. We will have to be resolute and diligent if we want to nurture a capacity for the self-critical in our midst. That requires conscious deliberation, more than simply a laissez-faire posture, because all the instincts for self-preservation and success point to killing off any serious internal critic. Our continuing vitality will be determined by our ability to nurture a receptiveness to criticism, and also by a continuing courage and audacity on the part of the membership. That is no small assignment. If we are in danger externally from controlling corporate structures, we are in more danger from our fear of taking the risk of being critical.

Some members of this community dissent from some of our current direction. We need to hear from such persons, and we need to help them be heard. We should have nothing to fear, and much to gain. The rationale for the Tavistock-style session here at this meeting is that it invites free association and spontaneity of communication---even some craziness—and thus hopefully offers a space for views that might not otherwise be heard. We will not hear all that needs to be heard unless we hear from the crazies, or that crazy dimension of each of us. Donald Capps makes the point that social phobics are giving testimony to the meanness and aggression in our social fabric. The neurotic and psychotic may be our very best critics. When we lose the capacity for the self-critical we will have become just another organization, and I hope I am not around to see that day.

CPSP was formed out of the memories of our own experience in clinical training. It was not formed around the corporate bureaucratic model, that by its very nature smothers criticism with public relations and undermines collegiality by promoting patterns of domination and submission. We remembered the redemptive process of our own clinical training, an experience that was marked by deep criticism and deep respect and care, an experience that we would never demean or trivialize by calling it skill training. We experienced our own clinical pastoral process as transformative. We sought in creating CPSP to rekindle the transformative process that seemed to be diminishing in our professional lives. We constructed the Chapter model out of our memories of the clinical training group as the best hope for fostering continuing transformation, individually and corporately.

Robert Powell often reminds us that transformation is the central goal of clinical supervision. Certainly anyone true to Boisen's vision of training would hold to that view. That transformation continues to slip out of view in the course of the history of the clinical movement is a curious phenomenon. I believe there are good reasons why this is so. Transformation is a problematic concept.

An applicant for clinical training came to see me some weeks ago and mentioned to me that she was unsettled by an interview in another center because the clinical supervisor had communicated to her, though somewhat obliquely, that he intended to change her in the course of training. I told her I thought she ought to be leery of anyone bent on such an objective, but I needn't have said that, because she was already leery. But even as I said what I did to her, I also knew that the process would indeed be transformative if it were successful.

We have a paradox here. The process is transformative, but the clinical supervisor, or in the case of counseling, the counselor or therapist, must not attempt to elevate herself into the role of director of the process. Supervisor as director becomes manipulator. Therapist as director becomes manipulator. We are surrounded by such manipulators. Some time back I confronted a supervisor-in-training who used the metaphor for her work with her group of pastoral trainees as of her making a movie. "But it's not your movie," I said. It is the trainee's movie, and you are at best a consultant to the process. Imagine acquiring a therapist who thinks of herself as making a movie of your life. Transformation must begin and end with the client/trainee, and loss of focus on this issue is destructive.

Furthermore, the supervisor must not to presume remove herself from the effects of the transforming process. As Jung said about his therapy, the therapeutic process changes both therapist and patient. The supervisor or therapist must avoid posing as the transforming agent. The supervisor must be servant of the transforming process, and as a willing recipient of it as the trainee, and in doing so must take a certain agnostic posture, not knowing quite where any particular supervisory or therapeutic process will lead. We all must remain permanently as advanced learners, maintaining our awe of the process that is not different from the awe that our trainees or clients bring, even if we bring to it considerable experience and wisdom and perhaps less anxiety. As supervisors and counselors we must enter the process with a posture of not-knowing. As Wilfred Bion puts it, aware of his hyperbole, we begin each session with no memory, no understanding, and no desire. Such is the essential agnostic posture.

We are all aware that one of our sister organization has adopted what it calls an "outcome" approach to the evaluation of training. In a certain sense we can all agree that a clinically trained minister looks different from an untrained one, and so outcome analysis is not entirely inappropriate. However, when we are front-loaded with a list of specific outcomes, we as supervisors begin to know too much, and we inevitably lose the serendipitous, transforming character of training in which both we and they, supervisor and supervisee, are changed by a process of exploration, analysis, and reflection. Even more bizarre would be the therapist with her list of specific outcomes. We know of course that many such therapists are practicing all across the land. They are working from their lists, and it is a painful fact of our modern world. The outcome approach in our work is the road to perdition.

When John D. Rockefeller in 1860s started refining crude oil to makekerosene, to replace whale oil as the lighting fluid of lamps of the world, he dumped the waste product, gasoline, into the rivers of Ohio. But soon the internal combustion engine was invented and the by-product became more valuable than the product. Sometimes it is difficult to decipher what is valuable and what isn't. Most of the clinical pastoral field today has reverted to refining kerosine, and dumping the gasoline.

This is not a new issue. Since the beginning of the clinical pastoral movement it has been conflicted over this issue. The proponents of skill training on the one side, who knew precisely what they wanted the trainee to learn, and the (more agnostic) proponents of transformation on the other, who undertook explorations of the inner world, and in some cases the inner world of madness, not always clear what they might discover in the process, but always seeking the development of the self.

Among the triumvirate who created the clinical pastoral training movement, Anton Boisen, Helen Flanders Dunbar and Richard Cabot, the latter was quite clear of his position: he strongly promoted clinical training as skill development. He wanted skilled pastors who could assist physicians in their healing work. He held in contempt any dabbling in the inner world of the mind or psyche. An M.D. himself, he held to the view that psychiatry was a sick science. Very early on, in 1931, he took the position that Boisen, because of his recurring psychosis, and especially because Boisen regarded his psychotic experiences as learning opportunities, was unfit to be a minister, much less a clinical pastoral supervisor, and dismissed him from the movement. Dunbar then staged a coup d'etat, seizing the books of the fledgling organization, and taking both them and Boisen from Boston to New York City, where they established a new office. Were it not for Helen Flanders Dunbar, Cabot would likely have vanquished Boisen early on.

For the next 40 years, from the 30s until the merger of the Boston and New York groups in 1967, Boisen's spirit dominated the clinical pastoral movement. As the decades have passed since the merger, the Cabot philosophy has increasingly carried the day. When most of the clinical pastoral movement today claims Cabot as the principle founder, it is being quite candid. The later ascendancy of Cabot has meant that the transformative power of clinical pastoral training movement has been diminished, replaced by a more superficial teaching of skills, such as how to say a useful prayer. Such specific skill training is easy to peddle in the marketplace of the healthcare industry, as well as the churches. When the clinical training movement has finally boiled itself down entirely to skill training, it will have severed its ties entirely with Boisen and become the Cabot movement.

It is important that we define the transformation that clinical pastoral training seeks. For definition we must go back to our own early experience in training, when we were the trainees. I came into training like many of my colleagues, as a minister with almost a decade of experience, but basically on the rocks and unemployable. I was not entirely ineffective as a minister. More importantly, I had failed to find a mentor in my early developing years as a professional and I had failed to find a community that could engage, confront, and support me as I tried to shape my professional identity. I had been exempted from clinical training by the seminary because I had field work in a church, which shows how little the seminary understood the significance of that training. I remember being intrigued and somewhat unnerved by my peers’ stories of training with Pat Prest at the nearby Medical College of Virginia.

My first job in the Episcopal Church was as assistant at St. Andrews Church in Newport News. The bishop, to his credit, came to pay me a visit after six months at my job, to inquire how I was doing. I told him that the Rector I was working for wouldn't talk to me anymore, that we were in some kind of cold war, and that I felt hopeless. The bishop spoke only one sentence to me in response, and never spoke another word to me as long as he lived. He said, "No one before ever had any trouble relating to the man." And that was the end of that. I was fired about a year later, and moved to another congregation where I had similar problems. I am not presenting a mea culpa. I had my authority problems, but the authorities I worked for had their problems too. It was a lethal dance.

It should surprise no one that a senior pastor and a junior pastor should have authority issues between them. That is predictable. The shame was that no one in leadership understood that such problems are to be expected and are worth processing, and that in the process great wisdom is often discovered, wisdom about ourselves, about others, about the nature of human relationship in general, and that selfhood does not develop without such a mentoring process. Without a strong sense of self there is no ministry. And while I could have benefited from skill training, such training would not likely have penetrated the complexities of my authority problem and the delicate personal task that faced me of learning how to be an authority in a world and a church that does not welcome authority, but rather seeks to stamp it out before it spreads.

Some years and a job later, I entered a residency program and all these issues reasserted themselves. However, now the context was radically different. In place of incompetent functionaries in the person of the several bishops and senior pastors, I faced my first clinical supervisor, Armen Jorjorian. I thought I was entering a course in skill training, but what I came to was a salvific, redemptive journey into myself. The genius of Jorjorian was that he journeyed with me like Virgil with Dante into hell, not seeming to know where we would end up, and indeed I doubt he did. But he was wise enough to pose penetrating and often unnerving questions at certain points. He also cared about me. I dare say he loved me. I got a grasp on myself as a person and as a pastor. I got some skill training too, but that was a pale benefit in comparison. I also simultaneously received the benefits of psychotherapy, but the larger impact on my sense of self came from Armen Jorjorian who will remain the man who most showed me how to be a person and a pastor.

Two essential ingredients set the context allowing clinical training to be transformative: A person of heart and wisdom in the leadership position so that the enterprise is not derailed by political or public relations concerns, and one who doesn't know too much about where the process will lead. Armen kowtowed to nobody and nothing in his pursuit of wisdom, and he was appropiately agnostic. His leadership made the program possible.

The other element that lays the foundation for transformation is less complicated and is easy to create: a small face-to-face group that is committed to reflect on data in a serious manner, with membership that is willing to speak the truth come what may, is reasonably informed, and possesses a compassionate heart. There is virtual magic in such a group when the membership shares its problem cases of pastoral care and counseling. The transformative experience is almost assured. I continue to be astonished at how true this is. In Chapter lifeand in clinical training groups, even when leadership seems a bit clumsy, the effectiveness of the process is almost magical.

I am a happy man today because I believe that together we have successfully created an imperfect but caring and self-critical professional community against all odds, nurturing the transformative power of the original Boisen/Dunbar movement against strong contrary trends, and I am confident that this vision and this work will be carried on after the present leadership has been laid to rest. We have yet much to do as a community, but we are keeping the covenant, and in the years ahead many strong and idiosyncratic selves will grow up among us and lead us forward. Like Abraham, who lived by faith, and was obedient to that ancient covenant, one not different from ours, I believe that our children will one day be more in number than the stars in the heavens.