Secondly, whether we at that time put it into words or not by forming ourselves into a community of chapters we became in some sense a confederation of clans. In the Old Testament a confederation of clans was called amphictyony. Amphictyony was a gathering or grouping of clans originating with the Greeks and going through Israel’s initial structure of its national life which was tribal in nature. There was no central government, no capital city, no administrative machinery, and no central authority. The tribes and the clans were independent of any authority that might interfere with how they saw themselves dealing with their membership. No doubt it was a patriarchal society and did not have full justice for women. Despite that limitation in other ways it is similar to what we have tried to form and shape in becoming the College of Pastoral Supervision and Psychotherapy.

In an amphictyony structure, not only do the tribes have authority independent of any central government or state, but in times of danger in the tribal coalition there would arise a judge who would call the clans together and repel the foes. Battle strength relied not on customary military organization, but on the rally of the clans. The judge was not a king and his authority rested on personal charisma that gave evidence that the spirit of Yahweh was functioning in his life.

By forming a new community twenty years ago, we disengaged from a dominant reality of how organizations ought to be organized and structured in the pastoral care movement. We went a different direction from Association of Clinical Pastoral Education (ACPE), Association of Professional Chaplains (APC), American Association of Pastoral Counselors (AAPC), and other organizations that organize themselves along the lines of governmental and corporate structures. We liberated ourselves to be creative and to go beyond the empire structures that permeate all institutions and thrive on power and control.

In the last twenty years we have been flirting with, although not fully embodying, being a transforming, co-creating organization true to the needs of humans to have a community full of grace, and promoting restoration of the soul as well a nurturing through our chapters our capacity for transformation. We hopefully have aligned ourselves with the two elements: hopeful imagination and amphictyony community organization that can undergird our unfolding for decades to come.

However at this point in our juncture, I think it is fair to say that we are still adolescent. If you go back to Erik Erikson and his writing on developmentalism you will notice that the adolescent period of development is defined by Erikson as a period of identity verses identity diffusion. For Erikson, we develop psycho-socially not just psycho-sexually. Now the primary struggle of an adolescent is that out of their anxiety to both develop an identity but be acceptable to their peers, they can often have a too psycho-social definition of themselves rather than have the strength for differentiation. I want to suggest to you that’s the primary challenge we are facing in CPSP.

I think this challenge will show up in our internal struggles with each other on whether or not to become an organization that we think will be respected by others if we get recognition in such external governmental forms as the Department of Education or some other agency such as the State Licensure Boards; and through these agencies we think we will be validated as respectable rather than being true to the original vision of what we might be as an organization. We are living in a time where some of our membership may be saying let’s return to Egypt. It’s easier to live under the Pharaoh or it is easier to live under a Babylonian definition of reality rather than leaving ourselves free to have different visions and different perceptions of reality. Walter Wink in his work Engaging the Powers reminds us that most definitions of reality start with a concept of reality that says someone has to be at the top and have power/control. This creates a domination society rather than a partnership society. Usually it has been women or people of color who have been at the bottom and it has been persons who were white euro-male who’ve been at the top. Hopefully CPSP will never go in that direction, but hopefully we will never go in the direction of there has to be a hierarchal structure where centralized power has control over others through highly structured standards and regulations that determine what the membership can do and who they should be.

Also that kind of power usually shows itself in forms of taxation and certainly other organizations have chosen not to travel light, but often to accumulate millions of dollars and they often want to demonstrate their power, as humans have done historically, in terms of ownership of property. So CPSP will have its challenges in the future to not move in that direction.

A second perception of reality beyond the primary one is that all organizations must have authority and centralized power that must be held by a few. In return, these "few" must be able to have control over the membership. This is a concept of reality that says that out of that control and power we as an organization will function at our best.

Both these primary concepts of reality are forms of what I am going to call in this particular presentation, “the Babylonian captivity of our minds”. “The hardest battle isn’t with Mr. Charlie. It’s what Mr. Charlie has done to your mind”. Now if we are to continue to be a community with an alternative liberative imagination we will have to steer away from all definitions of reality and definitions of what we should be that would be predetermined by other organizations. We need to continue to struggle as adolescent needs to struggle with defining ourselves and continuing to form our identity. As a twenty year old we’re still in the midst of forming our identity. I hope we won’t give up that struggle and I hope in our frustration with defining ourselves and differentiating ourselves from others we will not give up the challenge to be true to the original vision of the founders of CPSP which is found in our covenant. There needs to be one organization that doesn’t use therapy and supervision as a way to adjust to a morbid society. (Hillman)

As we celebrate the twentieth anniversary of CPSP I would ask us to reflect on our unfolding and our development and realize that we have done better than anybody predicted we would do. We continue to grow at a very rapid rate. Some people would want to interpret this in a demeaning fashion. They might say we are growing rapidly because we are lax in regards to certification and accreditation. But I would say that another way to interpret that is that we are an organization that is attractive to many people because our yoke is easy and our burden is light and I hope that still remains true in years ahead.

Paul Tillich in his work on religion says that, institutionalized religion restricts and limits, rather than liberates the human spirit. He comments on the fact that the way religion accomplishes becoming a yoke rather than a source for transformation is through doctrine, dogma, and morals which are shaped and formed in a way to undercut the vitality of religion and in essence take the energy out of the animating principal of life. Tillich believed that if we were to be a part of the new creation and be transformative that we were going to have to move beyond the yoke like tendencies of all institutions.

Thomas Berry reminds us all institutions failed the human community in our era. CPSP is a pastoral care organization trying to move beyond the yoke of standards, outcomes, measurements, and other forms of institutionalization that live by law not grace and where the organization is more important than the people in it. Instead, we are striving to be a community that lives out of a theology of grace and has a structure that is flexible to allow for co-creations and transformation. What A dream!

What I am suggesting is that we live in a treacherous moment in our history. It is treacherous in the sense that we may be tempted to prematurely cease the struggle of what it takes for us to become an organization that is true to our own interpretation of reality and our own creativity and imagination. One of the ways we can do that is to put a yoke around our organizational life through such ingredients, as goals, standards, measurements and to do it in a kind of way that has a rigidity to it that does not leave us open for imagination, creativity, and flexibility. There is no doubt that soul is connected closely to the creative, the imaginative, and the instinctual. If soul is to unleash its potential it must live within a structure that leaves these elements free; one of the major reasons we have thrived is we have lean flexible and flexibility is a key ingredient in aging.

Paragraph of Clarification:

When I suggest we stay clear of over standardization and attempting to measure that which cannot be measured I am proposing that it is enough to say, for instance, that what we are seeking to achieve in a unit of CPE or pastoral counseling training is growth in pastoral formation, pastoral competence, and pastoral reflection. I think these broad categories fit with training in both pastoral counseling and chaplains. When we move beyond these broad categories into specific goals and outcomes we are developing a yoke that will choke the learning process and predetermine the learning experience such that we regress from andragogical to pedagogical form of adult education. I hope CPSP will go in a different direction.

In an agrarian society, several thousand years ago up to the 1700’s, there were two types of yoke developed. The first yoke helped with planting but choked the animal if the plows went deep. However, innovation outdistanced expansion and second type of yoke was developed that did not choke the animal but rather tapped into his strength. I hope CPSP can develop this type of yoke. We can be a model for developing broad perimeters defining who we are and what we are about as pastoral counselors, clinical supervisors, and chaplains. Our perimeters do not need to limit our creativity or our imagination.

I have for almost thirty five years supervised an average of fifteen to twenty persons in pastoral care and counseling annually. The persons who grew the most were those who usually at some point after considerable clinical experience began to get a whole different vision of where they needed to grow personally and professionally than when they started their training. If they had been overly straight-jacketed (as they could be by standards that predetermine what they needed to learn) then they would have missed out on an opportunity for transformation. We need to not choke but tap into the strength of the client/learner in the counseling/supervisory experience in both CPE and counseling.

If we can possibly stay clear of putting a yoke around our own necks that chokes and continue to evolve in terms of our identity, then I think we are in a position to thrive. We must always avoid trying to put new wine in old wine skins. The structures and paradigms of corporate, governmental organizations simply do not unleash or restore the soul.

A lot of us are concerned when we hear stories of chapters not functioning or people not acting ethically. We have processes through our chapters to deal with these. I want to suggest to you that one of the most freeing things we can do as an organization is to be the pastoral care organization that doesn’t center on the weeds. In the thirteenth chapter of the gospel of Matthew, in the parable of the weeds and the tares where there is a field of mixed plantings there is the directive to let the weeds grow. In this parable when the field has been planted and the workers of the field go out and observe the field there are tares growing up with the wheat. The owner suggests not to worry about that. In other words go take a seat under the tobacco barn, enjoy the breezes, smoke a pipe, and have a good glass of wine. The suggestion is that one of the best things to do with the fact that the weeds are growing in the midst of the wheat is to let them grow together and at the end you can separate the weeds and the tares, but in the meantime to concentrate on the weeds is to loose your focus which needs to be on planting and letting the crop grow. I think this is a good parable of wisdom for CPSP. The last time we meet at Columbus, Frank Ciampa talked about the fear that permeates all pastoral care organizations concerning the issue of legal litigation. To live out of our fear is to focus on the weeds. Maybe the parable in Matthews 13 can be a guide to us all to focus less on controlling weeds and more on enjoying the crop. We’ve got a markable crop growing in CPSP.

Secondly, I think we need to not only not worry about the weeds, but we need to keep on planting. We have had phenomenal growth and we are an organization that’s important to a lot of people because we thrive in chapters. A lot of people want to judge our movement and make statements about us when they do not really know us, our chapters and what we mean to our membership. So I am suggesting that we suspend judgment on who we are.

In 1876, at the first centennial celebration of this country the Japanese government brought a plant to this event called kudzu. It was at that time considered an exotic plant. After the centennial many people purchased seedlings of kudzu and they grew them in their homes and they displayed them as a plant that has prestige. It was considered unique and rare. When the dust bowl hit in the 1930’s, the federal government saw kudzu as the plant that might replace cotton because it could thrive in almost any condition and grow at the rate of one to two feet per day. So kudzu, by the 1920’s and 1930’s became a plant that was the most promising crop of the future when soil erosion and the climate conditions were not right for such crops as cotton and tobacco. However, when kudzu was planted, it was not clear how to use it as it moved from an exotic plant to a plant that might potentially become the greatest crop this country had ever known. However once we moved through the dust bowl and got to the other side and the climate conditions were restored so that other crops could grow fruitfully kudzu began to be designated as a weed. It grew everywhere. It grew up telephone poles. It grew on railroad tracks. It grew across junk car yards. It covered almost everything in its path and people could not figure out ways to control it. Because we could not control this particular plant and it’s growth pattern, we tried to figure out ways where you could poison and destroy it. We judged it at that moment to be a plant that was useless, harmful, and destructive in terms of how it climbed trees, covered railroad tracks, power lines, telephone lines, and so on and so forth. Now, that might have been the final judgment on kudzu. However it wasn’t; and isn’t. I have got friends of mine, who for the last twenty years specialized in how to use kudzu as a source of food and nutrition. Their names are Edith and Henry and they discovered that kudzu is filled with nutrients and it can be grown almost anywhere in the world. They have several cookbooks on how to use kudzu in creative ways as a food source that might one day resolve world hunger.

What I am saying is that in CPSP, we need to suspend judgment and not accept premature interpretations of who we are. And like the great parable on sewing the seed, we need to keep sewing the seed of CPSP as a liberated, imaginative community that is formed in small tribes or clans; which are accountable to each other, support each other, and nurture each other in grace. We need to continue to support the idea and plant the seeds of the growth of a covenantal community that will not have a yoke around the neck of its membership, that chokes the membership’s creativity. And we need to continue to support this type of organization as literally a new vision of what we might be, what we can become, and how we can live together. We need to promote the values of lifelong education/training through consultation and process reflection for all that are in ministry and seek to care skillfully for others.

One of my concerns is that in this particular moment in our history, when there is a push by some for us to have what they consider recognition that makes us respectable through governmental agencies, is that we could sell our soul for a bowl of pottage like Esau did. That was Esau’s problem; sold his soul for a bowl of pottage.

I think we are at a place where as we grow large, people are going to say, we have to return to the traditional structures to function as an organization because we are now big and largeness implies certain realities. I want to challenge us to be the first organization ever, that will probably within the next few years reach over a thousand members, that remains true to the original vision of functioning primarily out of chapters and that it is in the chapters where we will do certification, accreditation, and deal with ethical complaints. It’s in chapters where we will both support, challenge, and hold each other accountable for being those persons that not only are about having our own souls restored, but restoring the souls of others. Majorie Suhocki said, “We clearly have our work cut out for us. But the spirit of God who wants creation to thrive is with us. The kingdom/queendom of God is among us and it is a kingodm not just of words but of power. The New Creation will be God’s work and our work. We are truly co-creators in the process of tranformation.”

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John Edgerton, President can be contacted at: jedgerton@wakemed.org