Clinical Pastoral Education

THE CPE HISTORY IS REPEATING ITSELF by L. George Buck As one who has been involved in pastoral training and education for over forty years (certified as a “Chaplain Supervisor” by the Council for Clinical in 1964), I have experienced a good deal of change in the pastoral education movement. It now seems that history is repeating itself. The present friction between CPSP and ACPE is not unlike that of the Council for Clinical Training and the Institute of Pastoral Care. The Council folk looked at the Institute folk as a bunch academic heads who overlooked the psycho-dynamic approach to “CPT”. One of my first supervisors, Tom Klink, once stated that the Institute super-visors needed to get acquainted with Sigmund Freud. On the other side of the fence, the Institute super-visors saw the Council supervisors as a bunch of feelers who refused to think. This war of words, so to speak, went on for several years. In the mid-sixties, I supervised CPT students in up-state New York. When the New Y...

CPSP is an organization of Volunteers. We have no paid staff, we own no buildings and covenant to travel light. Because we travel light we have the lowest fees structure of any of the pastoral care training and certifying organizations in the US. At the heart of the CPSP community is a covenant of mutual accountability grounded in the concept that people are more important than institutions. Believing that life is best lived by grace, the CPSP community places a premium on the significance of relationships between its members. What other organizations attempt to legislate for by standards CPSP is by nature, a community of professional accountability. The CPSP advantage is that people come first. From The CPSP Covenant: A Living Experience "We intend to travel light, to own no property, to accumulate no wealth, and to create no bureaucracy. We are invested in offering a living experience that reflects human life and faith within a milieu of supportive and challenging community of f...

For nearly a decade the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education (ACPE) has erroneously promoted itself as the only legitimate provider of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) and, therefore, the only provider of CPE to qualify for Medicare Pass-through payments. Statements to this fact have been made by Lerrill White an ACPE supervisor and former ACPE President Bill Baugh. In addition former ACPE President James Stapleford further complicated the issue with the misleading comments that recognition by the Department of Education was a necessary qualifier to receiving such payments. The comments by these well known ACPE leaders carry authority and are misleading both to the ACPE membership and to the public at large. It is regrettable then that the ACPE Board of Representatives has failed to take any corrective action to publicly correct the erroneous comments made by some of the organizations most prominent members. One might conclude that the ACPE membership is not well served by its ...