I�ve been an Episcopal cleric for 45 years. No bishop or church committee has ever inquired about progress or regress in my thinking or behavior. Not once.

I could be a practicing Hindu for all my bishop knows. But I�m still in good standing as an Episcopal priest. If I applied for a parish job, the bishop might cast about and find out what the word on the street was about me. Then he might see that I did not get the job, of course. But I would remain a priest in good standing.

Now if the newspapers report me charged with extortion, robbery, or murder, or something even more scandalous, say, like a boorish sexual gesture, then the bishop would commission an investigation. I would be examined by a committee of strangers who would decide on my worthiness to be a cleric, and I could be unfrocked. Negative-based accountability, ineluctably blown by the winds of the latest frenzied moral crusade, postulates that you�re ok unless somebody complains about you. This explains why the churches have such consistently poor leadership, persons who know how to work the system, or cowardly persons who are always looking over their shoulders, following the axiom: lie low, keep your nose clean, and your credentials will remain intact.

Most organizations, including those in our clinical pastoral field function similarly. Once credentialed, one never again submits to any serious or regular peer review, unless a complaint arises. CPSP takes a radically new approach to professional accountability. We have turned negative accountability on its head. We have positive accountability. Every certified person is subject to continuing peer review and annual recertification. Every Chapter meeting is tantamount to a review of credentials. And the work is done by persons who know each other�s history and idiosyncrasies, and most important of all, are willing to risk their own credentials by being identified with one another in the same Chapter. Gross misbehavior by one member of a Chapter that is unaddressed reflects upon and even jeopardizes the credentials of all others, even the viability of the Chapter itself. For example, an active alcoholic in your Chapter who is left unconfronted by such behavior endangers the credentials of every member of your Chapter.

Even with what I am here identifying as �positive accountability,� we should not inflate our capacity to maintain quality control. We know how difficult quality control is. It is difficult enough for each of us to keep professionally current, and to monitor our own unconscious. It is more difficult to assess others. When attempts to control quality become rigorous they tend to expel only the weird and peculiar among us, not necessarily the incompetent. Often the genius of tomorrow is the weirdo today. We know how uneven quality control is in all the clinical pastoral organizations. We know who the people are. Politics drives most of it. Those who work at pulling up all the weeds often kill the fruitful plants as well, as Jesus said.

Actually, I feel rather warmly toward my bishop that he would not care if I were a practicing Hindu. The Episcopal Church could learn something from Hinduism. There is a certain graciousness in leaving me alone, even if it also happens to be a poor way to maintain even the most minimal accountability. It would be useful if the bishop and my fellow clerics were just �interested� in me, but I can�t say that has ever been so.

After Joseph Fletcher of Situation Ethics fame wrote his paper late in life rejecting the Nicene Creed, the Trinity, and the Divinity of Jesus, he met his bishop at a social event and asked him if he wasn�t going to defrock him for his renunciation of basic Christian dogma. His bishop replied that it was best to leave the ember in the fire. I thought that kind of generosity of spirit spoke to what has been best in the Episcopal Church tradition.

We have some wayward members of CPSP who are embers better left in the fire. Sometimes persons are more important than dogmas or standards. If the bishop had defrocked Fletcher, as according to Episcopal standards, he certainly should have, the Episcopal Church would have hurt itself more than Fletcher.

Certification

When I first went into clinical training the Council for Clinical Training was still the principal authority in the field, followed by the Institute for Pastoral Care, both soon to give way to the merger that formed the present Association for Clinical Pastoral Education (ACPE). In those days, in the 60s, the regions were very small and we all knew each other quite well in the region, but they followed the corporate model of power concentrated in the leadership, a key part of that leadership situated in the certification committee. The professional quality of supervisors was quite variable in spite of the fact that the certification was a very rigorous process, bordering on being abusive. Half those who presented themselves for certification were regularly rejected. In spite of this rigor of this all-powerful gate-keeper, the certification committee, it was common knowledge that some of those certified were at best marginally competent. And I noticed that those who kept returning seemed always to get certified eventually. But once certified, there was no further serious engagement or discussion with individual supervisors of what it meant to do the work we do. Quality control has always been a difficult task in any community.

The all-powerful corporate-style certification committee held absolute power over the right to work. That created considerable negative feelings in the community. I remember a certification chair in the 70s, Winton Gable, who was physically assaulted in a New Orleans hotel lobby by another supervisor because his trainee had been rejected by Gable�s committee.

Can we be serious about standards and adherence to the covenant, and also gracious and generous about our less-than-perfect colleagues? Now and again we might see a less-than-perfect certified person in the morning mirror.

Certification in CPSP, then, is rooted in an intimate community of trust and engagement which continues to be lived out through some way of being together as a Chapter community. We believe this has more promise than the old corporate model to better promote both professional quality and fair treatment to persons.

Communication vs. Hierarchy

The relationship between Council and Chapters will be one of trust, but trust built on communication. That is the CPSP way of accountability. It is a radically different way from all other communities of which I have knowledge. Chapters that do not communicate will be separated, just as individuals who do not communicate should be separated from Chapters.

This is not to say that communication solves all conflicting views as to what constitutes competency. It does not. We may have to fight over or struggle with some issues, as we have in the past. But we believe that open communication will go a very long way toward forming an accountability that is both serious and generous.

We have created a model different from any other accrediting body in the field. It is not easy for persons, even ourselves, to get their minds around the CPSP model. Even those of us in leadership positions have trouble with it. A pyramidal, corporate model, with power exercised downward is different from the conglomeration of loosely related circles. The Army, Catholic Church, General Motors, the Federal government, and most of the clinical pastoral organizations are built on a pyramidal, corporate model. CPSP, on the other hand, is a grass roots community of diverse sub-groups.

I am honestly astonished that Judaism has prospered for a couple of millennia as well as or better than Christianity without any central authority or corporate headquarters. Any handful of people anywhere can gather and call themselves Jews. Somehow this works. (Alcoholics Anonymous and Baptists with a more limited history have followed the same course, and also done quite well.) I don�t think we can be quite a liberated as Jews, because we need to vouch for those we certify. However, Jewish history calls into question the value of hierarchy, even the paltry hierarchy we have in CPSP. It certainly calls into question the vast hierarchy of some of our sister organizations where the price tag for maintaining the bureaucracy is something close to $2,000 a year for each certified person. The bureaucratic cost in CPSP is currently a little over $50 a year. In a world where most of its people subsist on about $2 a day, even our costs seem immoral. I do think that those of us in leadership on the Governing Council, our meager bureaucratic superstructure, should travel light.

The Department of Education (DOE)

In the past five years we have been engaged in discussions with the DOE and our pursuit of recognition by that agency. The major stumbling block is that DOE requires an Accreditation Commission that is independent, well-financed, and requires that some of its members are persons who are not members of the CPSP community.

The DOE would require that we delegate to an independent commission the authority to accredit and to remove accreditation of our training centers. The CPSP leadership pursued this at first thinking it could maintain the fiction of an independent Accreditation Commission, but has decided, at least for now, not to go down that road. It is contrary to our basic philosophy. We know of course that in practice the independence of accreditation commissions in other organizations is a kind of fiction. How can any commission be independent if its bills are paid by the community? And its bills would be great. Such a commission would recreate the bureaucratic monster which we escaped from when we left the other organizations.

DOE recognition is just that. It is not itself a certification. It has three benefits.
1. It permits an organization to sponsor J-1 visas for international students. But no one wants a J-1 visa, which requires massive continuing paperwork to be reviewed by the government and is very restrictive. Every international trainee I have had in 40 years has been on the much more user-friendly R-1 visa, acquired by way of ecclesiastical authorities, and which has no link to the DOE.
2. It permits GI benefits to trainees. In 40 years of supervising I never met a trainee with GI benefits.
3. And it has some amount of public relations benefit for those who are comforted by advertising stating that we are recognized by the Federal government, which means, currently, recognition by George Bush and his appointees.

DOE recognition is not required for Medicare reimbursement funds to hospitals, in spite of claims to the contrary by the ACPE for more than a decade.

The leadership has decided that the price is too high and the benefits are too few to request DOE recognition at this time.

So we are taking a new tack into the wind. We are reverting to our original philosophy whereby Chapters are fully accountable for their own training centers and the Accreditation decisions regarding them. Thus Chapters will live and die, prosper or fail, according to the kind of competence they support. If a Chapter sponsors poor quality, Chapter standing will be on the line. Our fail-safe position is that each March everyone�s credentials are on the line, as well as each Chapter�s right to exist as a CPSP Chapter. If a Chapter fails, no member of that Chapter has a claim on any other Chapter for credentials. The annual re-certification is the place we set our teeth in regard to discipline and quality control. Thus, as we stand now, the Accreditation Committee is an advisory committee to the Governing Council, and to any Chapter seeking advice, but with no authority to rule on accreditation of centers. It is a parallel committee to the Council�s Review Committee on Certification (CRCC).

The Environment We Contend With

The times we live in are especially daunting, and effect the way we are able to work:

-The escalating discrepancies between the few rich and the many poor both here in this country, and even more seriously abroad

-The moral collapse of the U.S., where its highest leaders have become war criminals, authorizing abductions, torture, indeterminate imprisonment---�extraordinary rendition�, they call it---overturning widely respected agreements on due process such as the Geneva conventions on warfare. As the German people found out in the middle of the last century, the deeds of a nation infect everyone, even those who presume only to observe from the bleachers.

-The incipient religious war playing out on the international scene, especially focused on Muslims.

-The irrelevance and political pandering of so much of the religious and clinical pastoral leadership that follows every passing fad.

-Not least, the continuing warfare among clinical pastoral organizations jockeying for position in the most irreligious of undertakings, self-promotion.

It is a difficult time to work for justice and compassion among all people. We are losing ground in that calling. The comfort we find in our CPSP community cannot assuage the sense that entering a darker age than the one in which we were born.

I regret to report to you that a number of our colleagues in the field are still engaged in a concerted effort to discredit CPSP. It�s not that they hate us. They simply want to franchise themselves as the only acronym to authorize clinical chaplains, or the only acronym qualified to certify clinical pastoral training, or CPE.

The power center of this self-franchising effort is the so-called Council on Collaboration Group, a group that we several times asked to be included in during its formation. We were told there was no room for us. We would be invited in later, the organizers said, several years ago. Their apparent agenda is to franchise the Association of Professional Chaplains as the exclusive chaplaincy certifying body and the ACPE as the exclusive body for clinical pastoral training. The intent is also to outflank and supplant the COMISS network, the only existing roundtable of clinical pastoral organizations and denominational representatives. The goal is to lock up the clinical field so that no one will be allowed to work as a chaplain without APC credentials, and no one will do any clinical training or CPE without ACPE credentials. They are nowhere near such an objective, but they are determined and well-financed.

The So-called �Common Standards�

A part of the schtick of the Council on Collaboration is their subscription to a document they call �Common Standards.� They are common indeed---without substance. The Common Standards are both a stalking horse and a show dog. The Common Standards do not establish a substantive foundation for a true profession, but are for public relations purposes. Their code of ethics is so general that with a few changes in verbiage could be read as well as a code of ethics for hairdressers, janitors, or subway station attendants. When you read the fine print you will see that none of the member organizations that tout the �Common Standards� has yet adopted them. They commit only to �working toward adopting them someday.�

Take for example the matter of peer review which in the Common Standards is called for every five years. The largest of the Collaboration Groups, the APC, has not instituted any peer review. The ACPE has. It goes like this. Every five years one must meet with three friends, presumably professionals, and ask for a consultation on one�s professional work. The results of the consultation never see the light of day, and no mandated consequences are specified. This is certainly not a bad thing to do. In fact it is a good thing to do, but it won�t cut the mustard in terms of getting to any substantive accountability issues. Even the devil himself could collect three friends every five years to give him a consultation, the results of which have no consequences.

We all need to be vigilant about this. We know from the world of politics that a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth for many people. The big lie that affects us is that CPSP does not exist, or if it exists it is not legitimate.

When allegedly religious people fight over turf and money they are more vicious than the most aggressive of the Wall Street crowd. We should not minimize the threat that this cabal is to us. Nor should we fear them. Their objective is to make everyone in this room unemployable in the clinical chaplaincy and training field, but they will not succeed.

It grieves me to make such a report. There is more work to be done in our field than all the organizations together can possibly do. The human needs are so great. To have to fight colleagues for a right to exist professionally is a melancholy fact. Yet religious people seem to spend most of their capital fighting each other for dominance. Protestants against Catholic in Ireland. Muslim against Hindu in India and Pakistan and elsewhere. Episcopalians clawing at each other over whether homosexuals are by definition sinners unworthy of ordination.

I ask you to be alert, and to report to the CPSP leadership any misrepresentations you become privy to. We collect data. I also ask you to treat individuals in these competing communities as colleagues, with respect and with truthfulness. In spite of the official position, not everyone in these organizations favors the current tide. Many are embarrassed by it. We have many friends in both the ACPE and the APC.

The Muslim Situation

We are daily immersed in news of the militancy and terrorism of Islamists. It is easy to fall into believing that they are violent, and we are not, or Islam is violent and Christianity is not. It is not, and has never been, that simple. Historians would be hard-pressed to settle the question of whether Christianity or Islam has promoted more violence in history.

We may be teetering on an international religious war. Such warfare will make it difficult for us to pursue our calling as religious clinicians. The Boisen tradition both values religion and approaches all manifestations of religion clinically, which means critically. In the incipient war between Christianity and Islam, exacerbated by the escapade in Iraq, we will forfeit the possibility of clinically critiquing any manifestation of Islam. Such is the evil character of war. It is having tragic consequences for our dialogue with Islam. We cannot treat Islam with kid gloves while taking a critical posture, as we must, toward aspects of Christian practice. But to make a critical comment about any manifestation of Islam will play into the hands of those making war. All religions are a mixture of noble and ignoble. If we were to treat beliefs and practices of any religion with kid gloves, the clinical process would be aborted.

And let us not be too pious about terrorism. I doubt there are many among us, a few Gandhians perhaps, who, if pushed to the limit, would not resort to violence to defend themselves and their families against what they perceive as lethal threats.

Part of our difficulty today is that we do not know enough history. I want to relate a piece of history that many Muslims know, but which I doubt anyone in this audience has heard. In the 7th century Muslim armies conquered Jerusalem in their march through the Middle East and Africa, supplanting Christian culture as they went. After conquering Jerusalem the Muslims allowed Jews, Christians and Muslims to live together in that city, cheek by jowl, in relative peace for five hundred years. In 1099 the Crusaders from the West took Jerusalem back. When they occupied the city they killed every Muslim, and they herded every Jew in the city into their synagogue and burned them to death. Eighty-eight years later the great Saladin proclaimed a jihad and succeeded in reconquering the city for the Muslims. When Jerusalem fell, Saladin decreed that there be no reprisals; no murder, no rioting, no looting. Jerusalem became once again a city of Christians, Jews, and Muslims living together in relative peace. Muslims know this history. Christian do not.

The Black Hole of �Spirituality�

In common discourse in the wider culture �spirituality� has largely supplanted such words as religious, pastoral, theological. It is not a step forward.

Religion and theology generally have hard edges. There is a �there� there. If you have a theology, you are a Barthian, or Tillichian, Satanist, Waldensian, Buddhist, Thomist, Christian Scientist, a fundamentalist, or something else. Your theology may be ready for the dustbin of history, but a theology at least has definition.

Spirituality in its current and increasingly popular usage is a rebellion against religion. A new sort of religiosity is claimed, one bereft of form or definition. It has no hard edges because it has no definition, unless it is defined as a vague feeling of well-being in the universe. Religion and theology are multiform, and often contradictory, but they are not as vaporous as spirituality.

Religion, and with it theology, has fallen into disfavor in popular speech in part because religion includes such a grab bag of assorted beliefs and practices. �She�s religious� deserves the response, �What religion?� She�s a devout Hindu, or whatever. The claim that �she�s spiritual� on the contrary does not lead to inquiry of what spirituality. No one would know what to do with the question.

The Pittsburg Steelers have a football player who crosses himself before and after every play, or so I heard. The sportscaster proclaimed to the world on TV that he was a very spiritual fellow. Who knows what that might mean? Maybe he�s an animist who practices magical acts to gain his objectives. Many baseball players are like that. Notice that the sportscaster did not characterize him as very religious, following which one might ask �what religion?� If he is Catholic (Catholics do cross themselves) the ground is prepared for inquiring what part of his millions of dollars in income goes to assist the poor of the world. The hard edges of Catholic theology require such questions. Spirituality has no such hard edges. It requires nothing but feeling good. Therein lies a problem for us.

We as religious professionals need to know that this black hole of spirituality has continuing pernicious effects on our work. We cannot stop people from using language we object to, but personally I avoid the word spiritual whenever I can.

CPSP will live or die by the life lived out in Chapters. Your Chapter. Chapters are the locus where things will happen or not happen. Do not look to the corporate office.

We must conspire to do the hard work of being a faithful professional community. Conspiring is noble. The root meaning comes from breathing together. Any social venture worth undertaking must be conspiratorial. Breathing together and in private.

We should conspire to surmount the emptiness in the organized religions, and the sickness in the pastoral care and counseling movement. We should conspire to promote serious clinical practice. We should conspire to expose the current love of war that threatens everything dear to us. We must conspire to get the economic share more evenly divided among people.

Anyone who thinks these are benign tasks that will be welcomed in the public at large is too much of an idealist. The world is not one great big tea party, except for the super rich. We are immersed in a culture war with so much at stake. Any religious people worthy of respect will join in such efforts.

I urge our forty-four Chapters to think new thoughts, to try new practices toward the furtherance of love and justice, and to create a more faithful social order. I urge you all to make a difference.

Let our forty-four Chapters dispute; let them take different paths. But let forty-four Chapters flower. Let a hundred flowers bloom!

Raymond J. Lawrence