Skip to main content

Spiritual Care Collaborative A Jarring Note of Discord

The Spiritual Care Collaborative sounds all the right notes when it comes to promoting and advertising the SCC as new breakthrough in collaboration between pastoral care and counseling organizations. High ideals expressed on paper sound good and make a good sales pitch but unless accompanied by serious results on the ground amount to nothing more than lofty words blowing in the wind. Rather than creating harmony in the midst of the pastoral care and counseling movement the SCC sound a jarring note of discord tainted by an exclusive elitism. The SCC recently admitted(1) that it has no developed mechanism for including other participating organizations in the partnership of collaboration. So much then for lofty ideals and claims of Collaboration mere code words used as cover for darker motives of control and monopoly.

Note (1)

NOTICE TO MEMBERS OF THE CPSP COMMUNITY RE. RELATIONS TO THE SPIRITUAL CARE COLLABORATIVE
September 3, 2008

Notice to Members of the College of Pastoral Supervision & Psychotherapy Community
From the Executive Committee
Re: CPSP Relations with the Spiritual Care Collaborative

We in CPSP have made ourselves collegially available to the Spiritual Care Collaborative (SCC) since the SCC and its precursors began in 1996. John deVelder and Jim Gebhart have been in good faith, extensive, and ongoing communication with SCC leadership during the past twelve years. The results of years of collegial conversation have come to no resolution.

The SCC has reported officially to John deVelder that it has developed no process for including other organizations in its membership. Thus, the SCC's claim to be a collaborative organization is to date only talk.


The SCC (and its precursors) was founded originally by the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education(ACPE). The data suggest that the ACPE purpose from the beginning was to establish a monopoly in clinical pastoral training under the aegis of ACPE, in a joint venture with the Association of Professional Chaplains(APC).


We in CPSP had hoped that the ACPE, allied with the APC, had abandoned the dream of monopoly. Apparently it has not. There can be no hope of collegial relations until the dream of monopoly is abandoned. For the time being we must consider our conversations with SCC to be fruitless.


CPSP will continue in its mission to promote with all its energy the training and certification of pastoral clinicians of several levels of expertise. We will continue to make ourselves available collegially to other organizations in the field. But we will also energetically resist any claims of monopoly from any other organization in our field of work.

Visit the Pastoral Report the Online Journal of the College of Pastoral Supervision & Psychotherapy
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

THE WOUNDED HEALER

“The painful irony is that the minister, who wants to touch the center of men’s lives, finds himself on the periphery; often pleading in vain for admission….He never seems to be where the action is.” I wonder if this says more about Henri Nouwen than it does about the minister’s involvement in critical and crisis situations. “ The minister, the story tells us, is sitting among the poor, binding his/her wounds one at a time, waiting for the moment when he/she will be needed. The minister is called to be the wounded healer, the one who must look after his/her wounds and at the same time be prepared to heal the wounds of others.” --- Henri Nouwen. In his article titled “Wounded Healers”, Thomas Maeder quotes a child of psychiatrists (both parents): “I Think my parents were crazy, I think that, somehow, being psychiatrists kept them in line. They used it as a protection. They’re both quite crazy, but their jobs give them really good cover.” It is no secret that the so-called “helping...
Read more

The Founding of the College of Pastoral Supervision & Psychotherapy

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

Time to Call the Hospital Chaplain

Sometime ago Don Berwick, MD spoke about 20 improvements that doctors could make in the end of life care of their patients that begins in a simple conversation. Berwick recommended the following considerations as his top three suggestions: Ask yourself as you see patients, "Would I be surprised if this patient died in the next few months?" For those "sick enough to die," prioritize the patient's concerns - often symptom relief, family support, continuity, advance planning, or spirituality. To eliminate anxiety and fear, chronically ill patients must understand what is likely to happen. When you see a patient who is "sick enough to die" - tell the patient, and start counseling and planning around that possibility. To understand your patients, ask (1) "What do you hope for, as you live with this condition,"(a) "What do you fear?," (b) It is usually hard to know when death is close. If you were to die soon, what would be left undo...
Read more