About Our CPE Program

What our CPE Program Consists of…

THE OBJECTIVES OF TRAINING

From the Standards of the College of Pastoral Supervision and Psychotherapy

The Overall Objectives of Clinical Pastoral Training are:

  1. development of the uniqueness of the trainee's person as a gift through which the trainee is able to offer a pastoral relationship to persons in crisis who might present a variety of theological and cultural perspectives.

  2. development of a professional identity as chaplain/pastoral counselor through the integration of theory, theology and the integration of pastoral care.

  3. development of conceptual competence in personality and psychosocial development; group and systems theory; the resource of religious symbols and values; and the psychology of the religious experience.

The Specific Objectives (referred to as "Competencies of Pastoral Clinicians" in the CPSP Standards) are:

  • Demonstrated ability to make use of the clinical process and the clinical method of learning. This includes the formulation of clinical data, the ability to receive and utilize feedback and consultation, and to make creative use of supervision;

  • Development of the self as a work in progress, and understanding of the self as the principal tool in pastoral care and counseling. This includes the ability to reflect and interpret one's own life story both psychologically and theologically.

  • Demonstrated ability to establish a pastoral bond with persons and groups in various life situations and crisis circumstances.

  • Demonstration of basic care and counseling, including listening, empathy, reflection, analysis of problems, conflict resolution, theological reflection and the demonstration of a critical eye so as to examine and evaluate human behavior and religious symbols for their meaning and significance.

  • Demonstrated ability to make a pastoral diagnosis with special reference to the nature and quality of religious values.

  • Demonstrated ability to provide critical analysis of one's own religious tradition.

  • Demonstrated understanding of the dynamics of group behavior and the variety of group experiences, and the effective utilization of the support, confrontation and clarification of the peer group for the integration of personal attributes and pastoral functioning.

  • Demonstrated ability to communicate and engage in ministry with persons across cultural boundaries.

  • Demonstrated ability to utilize individual supervision for personal and professional growth, and for developing the capacity to evaluate one's ministry.

  • Demonstrated ability to work as a pastoral member on an interdisciplinary team.

  • Demonstrated ability to make effective use of the behavioral sciences in pastoral ministry.

  • Demonstration of increasing leadership ability and personal authority.

  • Demonstrated familiarity with the basic literature of the field: clinical, behavioral, and theological.

 

WHAT OUR CHAPLAINCY TRAINING INCLUDES

Clinical pastoral training involves a "clinical" (action-reflection-action) model of learning that engages with real people in real situations of crisis, distress, uncertainty, suffering, loss or grief.

Utilizing the hospital as a container for learning, our training provides Chaplain Interns and Residents a wide range of ministry opportunities among a very diverse community of patients in a number of settings.

The founder of clinical pastoral training, Anton Boisen, situated theology among the social sciences and believed that a religious or theological education alone was insufficient for meeting the needs of those persons chaplains care for. A distinctive aspect of our program is how seriously we take the significant contributions that the behavioral and social sciences and other fields offer to understand the people we care for. Chaplains-in-training in our program will find that integrating learning from fields as diverse as systems theory, interpretive anthropology, neuropsychoanalysis, and others, will significantly enhance their ministry and help them to care for others.

In addition to the supervised direct ministry experience itself, our training includes:

Case Study Reviews

Case studies are the principal learning tool in clinical chaplaincy training and each Chaplain Intern or Resident is required to write up and present to their cohort group case studies of actual caregiving encounters.

The goals of the case study are to promote individual self-reflection by the chaplain and to use peer consultation and that of the clinical supervisor to refine the chaplain's clinical pastoral competence.

Small Group Relations / Presencing Group

Our cohort groups utilize key aspects of the Tavistock Model of group relations. The small peer group provides opportunities for chaplains to explore issues in the "here and now" and fosters an experiential learning about issues such as boundaries, authority, roles and tasks using the cohort experience as a tool to understand unconscious processes in group systems.

Didactics

A variety of presentations are provided by Supervisors and others.

The subject matter, always tied to real cases and situations, is wide-ranging and includes a material drawn from the behavioral and social sciences.  Special topics are drawn from the supervisors' areas of expertise and the clinical placements of the chaplains.

Trainees may also have an opportunity to offer didactics of their own choosing to their peers.

Individual Supervision

Regularly scheduled one-on-one meetings with a clinical supervisor provide the chaplain-in-training an opportunity to review cases and aspects of one's pastoral care and counseling, to reflect upon personal and professional aspirations and growth, to seek consultation, and to evaluate progress toward individual learning goals.

Readings and Various Media

In keeping with the scope of our program, readings and other resources come not only from the pastoral care literature but also the broad range of behavioral and social sciences.

Films and Internet-based media are also key resources in our program.

Everyone in our program has 24-hour access to the robust Kaiser Permanente clinical library network. Its librarians actively support the learning goals and interests of each program participant.

 

“We exist to help patients find purpose and meaning in the midst of the grief, distress, loss, perplexity and disorientation that so often accompany a hospital stay.”

— CPE Supervisor Dr. David Roth