The College of Pastoral Supervision & Psychotherapy is a theologically based covenant community, dedicated to "recovery of the soul" and promoting competency in the clinical pastoral field.
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The CPSP Pastoral Report Forum is now operative. First, you will need to e-mail Jonathan Freeman to receive the required login information.
By clicking on the "Pastoral Report Forum" button found on the left sidebar of CPSP.ORG you will enter a password protected discussion center for CPSP members only. It will be a lively and interactive place. The PR Forum will provide a context for the CPSP community to enter into discussions, share points of view, request and provide consultation and share resources and ideas on a variety of topics relevant to CPSP and the clinical practice of ministry.
The health and well-being of any community is dependent upon the sharing of information and willingness to be in dialogue. Once we were small enough to "know" the heart and pulse beat of our members. Our growth as a certifying and accrediting body no longer affords us this intimate and informal understanding of one another and the direction of our life together as a covenant community. We must continue to find ways to insure that voices from all perspectives of our diverse community are shared and heard. I think the PR Forum represents a good step towards this goal.
I want to encourage all members of our community to participate in the PR Forum. CPSP as a post modern community is committed to being relational and creating an non-hierarchal way to live out our lives and professional functioning together as clinically trained clergy.
We share the belief that we are at our best when we value individuals, support autonomy, make room for the creative, embrace conflict and differences, make allowances for one another's shortcomings and remain committed to listening well to one another, even if we disagree. The PR Forum has the potential of helping CPSP advance these values that are directly related to "Recovery of Soul." -Perry Miller, Editor
Posted by Perry Miller, Editor at 3:26 PM
The PR continues to hear appreciation expressed for the CPSP Directory that can be accessed off the CPSP.ORG sidebar with a single click. Barbara McGuire, CPSP Registrar, requests any change of information be sent to her via email but to be mindful that updates provided after April 1, 2005 will not appear until the next edition is published. -Perry Miller, Editor
Posted by Perry Miller, Editor at 4:37 PM
In this presentation and paper I will speak of sacred powers of the psyche and soul. In so doing I experience the natural feelings of inadequacy and uncertainty. To discuss why CPSP was formed out of the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education requires an appreciation for some of the most potent forces that drive human creativity and transformation. It requires using strong language and ideas that only approximate the reality they are intended to describe.
Philosopher, theologian and writer William Campbell states, “In time all organizations become evil”. (See video series “Questions of Faith, Who Needs Organized Religion”). I understood him to be saying that no matter how noble and organization’s original motives and goals, sooner or later that organization begins to exist for itself. In the extreme it begins to feed off the people it was intended to serve.
At a regional meeting of the ACPE (Association of Clinical Pastoral Education) in Louisville KY, held in the mid 1980’s, I heard Wayne Oats make the statement that ‘it was quite possible that another organization would need to carry on the work originally begun by ACPE’. This surprised me. I was a supervisor-in-training with ACPE at the time and sensed an amazing amount of energy and vitality in the organization. It was growing rapidly, theology students and clergy were eager for clinical training and many aspired to become supervisors. There were four hospitals in Columbus, Ohio offering supervisory training at that time. I was in an active and engaged supervisory training group.
What was it that ACPE represented for me at that time (and I suspect many others) that gave it the vital energy and made it so appealing? I’m going to suggest that there were at least three factors. Clinical Pastoral Education as practiced by ACPE involved a transformational experience based on a reorientation of personal identity, a new and more effective personal theology, and a people friendly organizational community. I want to address each of these three.
Clinical training became, for many students, an opportunity for identity formation and transformation. It encouraged movement toward “whole self” integration and toward an authentic way of being. CPE was focused toward professional training of clergy. Clergy have often been expected to fit a social expectation of “goodness” measured by the approval of others and standards of moral perfection. Clinical training that encouraged authenticity and whole-self integration challenged this socialization process. Under the influence of psychoanalytic theory, which recognized with nonjudgmental clarity the reality of erotic and aggressive drives, students were confronted with themselves in a new way. This included claiming the “id” dimensions of their lives as a valuable aspect of themselves and in their work of caring. Such self-integration, and self- acceptance increased the power of compassion and the empathic connection made in the caring giving process. The energies of sexuality and aggression profoundly shape the universal human story. The clinical training movement and students discovered that broken and suffering humanity were more open and willing to disclose to care providers who understood their stories, motives, and needs. A listener with some integration of his or her own needs was not shocked or made anxious by the raw elements of the human experience.
Being responsible for the unfolding of my unique personhood with its own beauty and darkness required a supportive understanding community that the peer group and supervisor provided. To engage in a group experience with the trust and acceptance necessary for self-exploration was invigorating and inspiring.
One of the tremendous energies that training brought about was generated by the incredible sense of freedom that emerged as students began to claim and accept themselves and each other. They became free to emerge based on their whole being, not primarily by the mold defined by family, church and social expectation. The liberation and the joy associated with this discovery can hardly be described. Words are inadequate to convey the experience.
Another force of energy that became available in CPE emerged from the psychic forces within each participant. In psychoanalytic terms it is described as “primary process”. The driving energies of the personality are rooted in the two drives/energies described earlier… the erotic and aggressive process. Excessive repression, denial, and projection, often rob the person of creativity, daily life energy and contribute to a depressive life pattern. As clinical training connected students and supervisors to these aspects of themselves… again tremendous energy became available and released.
It is not possible to overestimate the power of these creative and transformational energies. They connect the person to the primitive/primal creative forces of live and the universe. To discover I could embrace all of myself… my imagination, my body, my sexuality, my neurotic quirks, and my worth, and to find a place where the raw power of the psyche is valued and celebrated seemed too good to be true. On top of that, we discovered that owning and valuing these aspects of ourselves could be used as a compassionate force for growth, human transformation and healing… again words fail. It is no wonder that the theological language known to clergy comes to mind, words like; salvation, resurrection, new birth, saved by grace, sacred, holy ground. And since we soon learned that there is risk and uncertainty in this experience, we use words like; faith, hope, courage.
These energies lead to a wildness of being. The founders of clinical training were “wild” men (male for the most part), willing to live on the edge of being, engaging all of themselves, refusing to fit a socially conforming mold. One of the founders was even crazy. These people were authentic, genuine, rough but intensely compassionate and tender. This wildness was evident in passionate discussions, liberal use of alcohol, arguments, card games, and sexy jokes and playful teasing, much of it focused on masculine vulnerabilities. Because this kind of individuality and intense community with energy and acceptance was rare in ecclesiastical cultures, clinical training became highly sought after.
It should be noted that connecting to these forces within the human person and within a liberating community does more than energize and inspire. It is energizing and inspiring precisely because it takes the participant into unfamiliar psychic territory, into a high risk, even dangerous personal and relational process. It tests the strength of the ego to mediate and maintain effective social and personal behavior. Excesses did and would likely occur. This energy is powerful and not always managed well. The adage ‘trust the process’ captured the clinical training and philosophical, positivistic attitude that ultimately, strength of character would prevail, and the risks taken would be worth the benefits gained.
The second feature in ACPE that attracted students and gave it strength was its willingness to embrace and describe such an authentic life as profoundly theological and faithful. Conventional religion often follows the pattern of the pilgrim, doing and patterning behaviors, thoughts and ideas after those that have gone before. Clinical training appealed to another kind of theological/spiritual life, the life of a seeker, an outlaw and risk taker. To the seeker, inspiration may be found not in repressive processes such as fasting and self-denial (as valuable as they may be) but in connecting to the senses, tasting the libidinal juices of life. This approach to a theological/spiritual life was new to many students and paralleled the evolving process of identity formation and transformation. The idea that the authentic life could be a valid expression of faith was revolutionary for many of us.
The third feature that contributed to ACPE’s growth and vitality was its comparatively simple and relationship based organizational process. It began with a deeply personal relationship with one’s supervisor and peer group. Learning what CPE was about was often ‘found’ by experience not by verbal or written explanations or written goals and statements. This forced the student to be responsible for their learning and to tolerate anxiety. Supervisors found community in local/regional/national gatherings. The supportive centralized structure of clinical training was irrelevant to many supervisors… the spirit and power were in the training group and the supervisory relationship.
CPSP emerged from ACPE because 15 people came to see that clinical training began to move away from its original goals and process and began to lose the power, energy and inspiration that had made it so effective and valuable. As ACPE grew, it became more centralized in it administrative structure and began to create and develop standards of measurement for student achievement. It began to measure the growth of the student and validity of training programs through more and more predetermined formal goals. This was defended as an effort to standardize and objectify the certification process. Theory papers became required, reviewed by anonymous readers, assignments were to be completed. Cognitive and behavioral quantifiable measures began to be required. The primary questions of the early clinical training process were ‘Is the student able to be authentic, genuine, courageous and compassionate, capable of adequate openness and intimacy?’ and ‘Does the student have an integration between their personal self-understanding and their identity as a pastor?’ Now the formal structure lead to questions more like ‘Does the student measure up to certain behavioral and cognitive standards?’ Training, which began as a facilitation of the student toward his or her authentic and unique personhood, became ‘Can we get the student to conform to our expectation of behavior and quantifiable criteria for objective evaluation?’ This shift in process was also seen in how training centers were accredited. More and more administrative policies and paperwork emerged with less and less attention given to whether the training center was providing a place for personal growth and understanding the human person in the service of ministry. Supervisors found less and less community in the mist of growing demands for compliance to standards. This communicated the sense that ACPE’s organizational structure no longer served the student and supervisor. Rather, students and supervisors were expected to serve the organization. That confirmed William Campbell’s observation that when an organization’s original noble motives turns to preserving itself at the expense of those it was meant to serve, it becomes evil.
This administrative shift by the organizational structure of ACPE came at a time when health care institutions, primarily hospitals where most training centers were located, were having huge cut backs in support services due to health care costs containment. Hospitals were cutting unnecessary services. Large pastoral care and education departments were being cut back. Now in Columbus Ohio, there are no S.I.T programs with ACPE (one of our hospitals has an occasional SIT student who must travel extensively for a peer group). In my hospital with 830 beds and 6 pastoral care staff (chaplains and supervisor) where Basic ACPE is offered, we haven’t had an office secretary for years. Yet, ACPE’s expectations for details, records and compliance show little adaptation for this profound change in training centers. So not only did ACPE shift its focus of training away from personal integration of the student, it became an administrative burden that no longer made sense.
Although the shift in training goals for students, increasing bureaucracy, and decreasing institutional resources were factors in the split from ACPE, the fundamental energy for this change came from a far more personal motivation. In the mid to late 1980’s the politically correct movement was sweeping the country. Since the early days clinical training had emerged and thrived as a process radically committed to the sacred value of the human person. Challenging and confronting one’s personal bigotry and bias were core features of clinical training. This rich history, however, was not validated or relied on in adapting to the presence of more women in the organization.
Although there were women involved in the early movement, theological professionals were male for the most part. In the early 1980’ many of the most compassionate and eager men sought ways to include women in training and certification. As this occurred a female caucus formed, seeking to further the involvement of women in ACPE as supervisors and students. As the organization underwent the integration of more women and continued its rapid growth, there was a heightened concern that women be made welcome and included. In the midst of the process to include more women there was little thought given to how the authenticity and whole person integration, so essential to CPE, would be used and valued so that women could claim all of who they are. Just as men had found salvation in the clinical method women might as well, maybe the issues would be different maybe not. No doubt the experience of wounds and brokenness being addressed and integrated, which was known by the largely male ACPE organization, could have found a uniquely female equivalent. Instead the organization opted for backing away from those issues in the individual psyche and sought to create a community climate that would allow women to participate without addressing and integrating the raw and rough aspects of being a person (male or female). This adaptation in favor of comfort and avoidance was supported by the larger culture of political correctness. In so doing, the values of authenticity and the exciting contribution of primary process were lost. Criticism emerged toward any direct or public reference to sex, jokes or playful teasing. At this point the men in the CPE movement failed to assert and claim the valued and necessary understanding of whole person authenticity. Maybe the super-ego, shame and distrust of themselves led them to concede this vital and essential aspect of clinical training somehow believing that being themselves in a more authentic way was not acceptable. In this process men and women both lost a vital source of self-understanding, self-acceptance and energy.
It is very important to note that one of the vital elements involved in changing the degree of personal integration, confronting my drives, respecting, recognizing and claiming the primal aspects of myself, is the high need for a trusting community. When these risky aspects of personal life were no longer discussed or shared the need for a highly trusting community decreases. If the need for a high level of trust in a community diminishes the group atmosphere becomes ‘tame’. What results is decreased energy and weaker group bonding.
Some of the male leaders in ACPE experienced public confrontation and shaming for being too transparent about their primal selves. Some of these leaders had been instrumental in encouraging women to join and participate in the CPE movement. To have this experience of shaming and rejection coming from the organization that had been an accepting and validating community for authentic and whole person integration was wounding and shocking.
The wound was all the deeper as it seemed that a trusting community that had understood expressions of anger and sexuality as a vulnerable reflection of trust and transparency was now rejecting its members and what had been so transformative in life. It was as if salvation was being recalled, judgment was now being levied on the very processes and people that had given the organization its life and energy. The judgmental and social demand to conform, which so many had been freed from in joining the movement, had infected the character of ACPE as it took on the voice of social convention, requiring a false-self in order to participate.
Such wounds and alienation resulted in the natural response of anger. This anger was intense and often expressed in the Underground Report written largely and promoted by ACPE supervisor Raymond Lawrence. In this work he embodied the vital role of prophet saying ‘the emperor has no clothes’. That anger coupled with the convictions about what made clinical training inspired and transformational led to a determination to do something constructive.
Fifteen clinically trained supervisors and therapists (most if not all were ACPE Supervisors) met in 1990 to articulate the vision and lay the groundwork of the organization we know as The College of Pastoral Supervision and Psychotherapy.
This early CPSP community had the character of the classic rebel. It was heavily influenced by anger and the wounds experienced but fairly quickly (by the second gathering) it began to focus its energy toward the creating and participating in an emerging new community.
The new organization sought to balance its own self-authenticating nature with efforts to engage with collegial organizations in the field of theological education and clinical practice. A significant force for healing was the involvement of several effective women who also valued the process of authentic and whole person integration as a part of preparation to effective care. Phyllis Hicks, an early CPSP president, Beng Imm Low, Dorothy Greet and Susan Lunning were powerful women and did a great deal to validate the idea that the clinical training process known to be so effective for so many men could be engaged in by women with equally remarkable experiences.
By the mid-1990’s a new generation of students and supervisors began to emerge that did not have the history of wounds and rejections of ACPE but had discovered the energy, hope, inspiration, and freedom that this new organizational culture created. This new group of members has challenged CPSP to be more self-authenticating and less reactive to the wounds that continue to emerge from time to time in its interactions with ACPE. We understand that to be reactive is a continuing form of dependence that is counter to what we want this organization to be. This self-authenticating attitude and being assertive in developing relationships with cognate groups has served CPSP well as it seeks its rightful place in the clinical pastoral education field.
Much of what I’ve described as forces and factors that lead to the formation of CPSP can be intuited from reading “CPSP Covenant”. Phrases like ‘recovery of soul’, being ‘non-predatory’ and the priority of ‘persons are always more important than institutions’ are a direct result of the effort to provide a vital and necessary corrective in the clinical pastoral education movement.
Posted by Perry Miller, Editor at 10:31 PM
When the Pastoral Report initially published Robert Dysktra's address to the CPSP Plenary, Who We Shall Be, we failed to include the footnotes Dr. Dysktra provided. If you copied the article as originally published and/or sent the URL to your colleagues and friends, the PR encourages you to replace the old copy and to alert those to whom you sent the URL that a corrected version of his article is published on the PR. The PR regrets any inconvenience this error might have caused. -Perry Miller, Editor
Posted by Perry Miller, Editor at 9:31 PM
The Star Democrat, a newspaper in Easton, Maryland published two articles related to CPSP and CPSP accredited CPE programs directed by Brian Childs through the Shore Health System. Included with the articles are some photos. Take a look at the articles: Two Given Certification by Pastoral College and Pastoral Education Session Under Way.
-Perry Miller, Editor
Posted by Perry Miller, Editor at 8:46 PM
Dear Colleagues in Ministry:
I am writing to you at this time to share the sad news of the death of
Howard Clinebell, one of the leaders of our pastoral care and counseling
movement. He passed away on April 13th.
While I'm sure most of you have much more history and connection, in brief he was a United Methodist Minister, Professor Emeritus, School of Theology, Claremont, California where he taught pastoral psychology and counseling for three decades, and was the co-director of the Pastoral Counseling and Training Center, now the Clinebell Institute; author of "Ecotherapy:Healing Ourselves,Healing the Earth," and a number of other books.
He was the first chairperson of Pastoral Counselors for Social Responsibility which grew to become the International Coordinator of the Pastoral Care Network for Social Responsibility, a network of pastoral care specialists in some 50 countries committed to justice, earth-caring, and peace. He was active in the international arena of pastoral care and counseling for many years.
A memorial Service is being planned for Saturday May 14th, at 1:30pm, at the Kresge Chapel at the Claremont School of Theology.
I would also like to include a word of greeting in sharing this news, as the newly elected Public Relations and Communications Officer for the International Congress for Pastoral Care and Counseling (ICPCC). This is an international congress convening every four years. All pastoral care and counseling communities can become members, and Richard Liew is currently the representative to the ICPCC Council for our North American pastoral care and counseling communities. Please visit our webpage at www.icpcc.net .
Please do not hesitate to contact me or other members of the ICPCC
Council to further dialogue on the work of the ICPCC. Planning for the Eighth Congress is underway, and currently is scheduled to be held in Krzyzowa Poland, August 7-14, 2005.
Peace mixed with grief on the passing of Howard Clinebell.
The Rev. Steven Voytovich, D.Min.,
Public Relations and Communications Officer
International Congress for Pastoral Care and Counseling (ICPCC)
Posted by Perry Miller, Editor at 2:29 PM
A Lecture to the Community Gathering of the College of Pastoral Supervision and Psychotherapy
Columbus, Ohio
April 6, 2005
by 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. 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.
Posted by Perry Miller, Editor at 10:57 PM
CPSP Diplomate Bill Alberts presented a paper for the March 12, 2005 retreat of the New England Conference's Methodist Federation for Social Action. His presentation, Clarifying and Claiming Progressive Values addresses how code words allow people to rationalize the contradiction between belief and practice.You may access his presentation at http://www.nemfsa.org/specialevents.htm and/or go to his blog (http://williamalberts.blogspot.com/)
-Perry Miller, Editor
Posted by Perry Miller, Editor at 10:55 PM