ACPE June 2010 E-Newsletter

I assume that anybody who receives an award and recognition for an achievement knows that she or he, in a sense, is just the token recipient of the recognition of the efforts of a whole group of people. I won't recount the work I did with the Salvation Army Officers - I wrote about that in a Journal article a few years ago - but I will note that Teresa Snorton, Franklin Duncan, Amy Greene, Miriam Needham, Robin Brown-Haithco, the Accreditation Commission and many others all participated in helping to create and bless this experimental program of distance learning in CPE - and to provide me friendly emotional support in the process. And anybody who's been married for a while knows that without the support of his marital partner, none of us in the CPE world would prosper. So I am grateful to my wife of 47 years - Helen. So, while I'm grateful to be recognized, in mentioning all these folks, I most emphatically acknowledge that I did not accomplish this alone.

I'm also particularly proud to be sharing the receiving of this award with Jim Corrigan and Dave Myler; their pioneering work with CPE took a good bit more bravery than mine did, and I'm glad that they are being recognized for it.

I will be brief in the rest of what I have to say; I want to tell you a true story: Some of you may recall the name, Loren Mead or may remember the Alban Institute - a sort of think tank about congregational life. Loren headed that Institute for many years; and he wrote a book in 1991, entitled The Once and Future Church. (I need to acknowledge here that he continually uses the term "church"; I'll use his language, but keep in kind that his ideas have much wider application than only to Christian congregations.) His book is about how the church must be changing if it is to continue to accomplish its mission. He talks about how clergy are not happy functioning as they currently do; yet, he suggests, little direction, education and support are being offered to enable them to see how to function in new and more satisfying ways. And he named several initiatives aimed at helping clergy.

Here's what got my attention: Loren did not mention CPE - anywhere! I was irritated. We are, I thought (and think), the agency best equipped to offer the kinds of things that Loren identified about what the clergy need. I wrote to Loren; I enclosed a little piece I had written, urging on him my notion that our expertise in supervision is just what parish clergy need, and suggesting that we can offer them supervisory education, so that they can empower their congregants to do the work of ministry. Here's a part of what he wrote back to me:

"Dear Peter: You're dead right. I should have thought of CPE, but I didn't. (He adds that there's fault on both sides and says he's going to comment from his side). I'm a jilted lover of CPE. Studied under Ruel Howe. Cut my teeth at St. Elizabeth's with Ernie Bruder. Close collaboration with Will Spong at Duke. About 1965. I loved it. It gave me life. Then CPE just went off my radar. That became an invisible part of the religious world...I got the impression (forgive me - I know this is unjust, but it's the impression I got) that CPE folk were not interested in the church I was interested in, they had a vocation to counseling. Mostly one-on-one counseling. I applauded their efforts but wasn't really interested in that enterprise and felt that they weren't interested in mine. Indeed, I sometimes felt CPE was hostile to the church I wanted to work with. I keep expecting a reunion. Ed Friedman's work, in particular, is a point where our trails ought to cross. I worry, as I think I hear you worrying, about the cut-offness of that great stream of the Church from the structures of the Church. One thing I am clear about is that the salaries for pastoral counseling in secular institutions will be in decline over coming decades. And any part of the Church that cannot demonstrate real grounding in and usefulness to congregations will have a hard time surviving."

Well, he wrote that to me in 1993! How prescient his comments seem to me now - even though his description of us as counselors doesn't fully capture who we are. CPE started just about a century ago - the pioneering work of a few who saw the value and the joy and the beauty of overseeing people who were actually experiencing themselves practicing pastoral care - as the very best way to provide education for ministry. Over 40 years ago, we organized as a national body to effect that education; we saw that we had three intra-institutional functions - namely, to accredit centers, to certify supervisors and to set basic standards for Clinical Pastoral Education. In the last 50 or so years, it is possible that we have done our work so well and that Divinity Schools and others have adopted our experiential education model so fully, that we can go out of business. Loren was certainly right, I think, in prophesying what is now coming to pass - namely the growing reluctance of what he called "secular institutions" to fund our educational process. But I believe that rather than being a counsel of despair, Loren is pointing us to the great field awaiting us - ready to harvest; it is the field wherein our pastors, rabbis, imams already labor.

We have flirted all along with what we've called "Parish-based CPE," but it has always been peripheral, and never brought to fruition. I think that now is the time for our pioneering efforts to take us into full exploration of this heretofore peripheral field - and others like it - outside of the hospital. If our newly formed arm, our Foundation for CPE succeeds in helping us fund our work - and since they are we and we are they, I should perhaps better say that if we succeed in funding our work, we should be in a position to market ourselves aggressively to those very imams, rabbis and pastors - and to their institutions and to their work. That is where our natural constituents are and where our work must and will thrive. I acknowledge my Parish-based bias here, but hear this as a call to expand our horizons. Miriam Needham's program is an example - a Parish-connected CPE program which works with homeless people in downtown Atlanta. The Salvation Army program is another example of moving beyond the hospital. CPE was a pioneer when it began; we need to reclaim that pioneering spirit as we return to our roots. I think of T. S. Eliot here, "The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."

I thank you for the award - I thank ACPE for allowing me the privilege to serve these many years as a Clinical Pastoral Educator; and I thank you for allowing me to share my vision with you tonight.

Peter Keese is a Retired Active CPE Supervisor in Knoxville, TN and a recipient of the 2010 Helen Flanders Dunbar Award.