No pastoral care and certifying organization can be compelled to adopt a posture of critical self-reflection. However, one would expect that one of the marks of an organization standing within the historical clinical pastoral care and training movement would be a posture of critical self-reflection. Given this tradition of self-critical reflection this would not negate the critique of one cognate group by another rather it would promote it. The self-critical faculty is the sine qua non of the pastoral care and training movement. The movement is best safeguarded when all the serious voices of critique are validated and none are censored. In contrast to movements seeking to speak with one voice the clinical pastoral care and training movement speaks with many voices and is best represented by the voice of many.
What I want to do this morning is talk about how congregations function like families. I am going to do it from a variety of points of view. I’m going to begin with a fable. This one is called "Burnout" and it’s about a fish tank with a scavenger fish in it, you know a scavenger fish is supposed to keep the fish tank clean. I’m trying to be as realistic about it in my use of language as possible so I hope that you will appreciate that.
Once upon a time there was a scavenger fish that lost its taste for shit. (I don’t think I have to read the rest of the fable. You all got the message already!) It was your normal, garden-variety scavenger and had never previously shown any signs of being different from the other members of its species. It lived in a normal-sized tank with the members of several schools and, from the very beginning of its association with this ecosystem, seemed always to be in perfect harmony with the environment. It never got in the way of the others and th...