Participating in a Doctor of Ministry program: Its affect on the pastor's effectiveness and the parish's ministry

The author cites the growing phenomenon of Doctor of Ministry Degree programs in seminaries across the country, but points to the real need for research on D.Min. programs, particularly in the areas of the impact of such programs on the effectiveness of a pastor who participates, and ultimately on the life and ministry of the parish they serve. The article then details the research being done on the unique two-track D.Min. program at the Hartford Seminary Foundation and some of the early results.Dr. Douglass Lewis is Director of the Doctor of Ministry Program and Coordinator for Parish Development at the Hartford Seminary Foundation, 55 Elizabeth Street, Hartford, Connecticut 06105.     

Reviewing Faculty Competency and Educational Outcomes: The Case of Doctor of Ministry Education

Abstract. This research report interprets data from a 1902 survey of directors of Doctor of Ministry (D.Min.) programs regarding the competency of faculty members viewed through the interpretive lens of peer review. According to directors, faculty members are more competent in teaching theological reflection than in teaching social science methods, despite the expectation that such methods are part of D.Min. education. The article discusses implications of the data for improving faculty performance, and suggests how the concept of critical friendship might assist those who teach in religious studies to give and receive criticism from peers. The article concludes with suggestions for further research in D.Min. education.     

Attending to hidden realities: contributions from the work of Michael Polanyi to supervision in pastoral care and counseling

In this article, the author suggests that concepts from the work of Michael Polanyi--such as the tacit dimension, subsidiary awareness, and commitment to a yet unrevealed, hidden reality--provide a theoretical basis for understanding the unique formation involved in pastoral care and counseling supervision.     

Through the looking glass: women and ministry supervision

Issues pertaining to women and clinical pastoral supervision are identified and examined in this essay. An in-depth literature review regarding the relationship between gender and supervised pastoral training provides the basis for the identification of the following themes: the relative lack of female supervisors; how and why we ought to talk about gender and ministry supervision; the contextual relevance of systemic marginalization to ministry supervision; the relationship between pastoral care and the "feminine"; the relevance of a panentheistic God to gender and ministry supervision; and, lastly, the relevance of gender to the supervisory relationship. Although the focus is on the ways in which gender dynamics can affect the female supervisee's experience, the author also takes a brief look at how female supervisors might experience the relevance of their gender to the art of supervision.     

A challenge to church leaders: the necessity of supervision for ordained ministers

This article is an explicit challenge to church leaders and ministers of all denominations to take seriously the necessity of obligatory supervision for ordained ministers. To support this challenge, the author describes fundamental principles of pastoral care that found the moral demand for and benefits of the supervision of pastoral practice. Before offering practical suggestions on the implementation of supervision, reasons for the personal and institutional resistance to supervision of ordained ministers are depicted.     

Clinical pastoral training in an emergency psychiatric service

Summary This paper reports the utilization of an emergency psychiatric service as a new factor in the clinical pastoral training experience. The usual pattern of clinical setting for these students is the hospital ward, where the patient has already been admitted and is making some adjustment to hospital routine and treatment. In such a setting the student misses the opportunity to see the patient at the crisis point of the illness and does not see the large numbers of individuals troubled enough to require psychiatric help but not sick enough to be hospitalized. The latter group constitute the largest portion seen by the parish minister even before psychiatric referral is arranged. During a twelve-week clinical pastoral training program, each student spent a major portion of his time for two of the weeks working on an emergency psychiatric service with a psychiatrist and social worker and seeing a large variety of patients, most of whom were not hospitalized. The experience provided an opportunity to develop evaluative skills and knowledge of appropriate community resources, and offered some experience in brief counseling under supervision. The clinical pastoral training student and the personnel of the emergency service all felt that this was an experience of mutual value and that it should be for a longer period. It is suggested that other clinical pastoral training programs would find it of value to utilize emergency psychiatric clinic settings where available.     

Stewardship Models of Pastoral Care,Counselling and Supervision: The Commonians Meet Ricoeur at Worship

The common factors debate in psychology and, more recently, marriage and family therapy is slow to erupt in pastoral care and counselling. This article introduces the common factors debate into pastoral science by proposing the Stewardship Models of Pastoral Ministry and Supervision. The model integrates common factors research and pastoral practice using Ricoeur’s “economy of the gift” ethic. The model’s focus is pastoral care, counselling and supervision in congregations, a unique community context in search of an adequate pastoral praxis.     

Getting too close: A problem and possible solution in social science PhD supervision

The duties of PhD supervisor involve combining the dimensions of intellectual critic and guide to doctoral students, whilst at the same time offering the latter pastoral care, tasks which occur under conditions of increasing difficulty. The combination of these duties is depicted, and the pastoral dimension of supervision is portrayed as harbouring the potential, unless skilfully handled, for supervisors to become too emotionally involved with their students. The costs of this over-involvement are subsequently identified and a solution is proposed, namely that training programmes for PhD supervisors should contain a pastoral skills component.     

The pastor as genetic counselor

The pastor as pastoral counselor in the setting of the church can play an important role on a genetic team. This article explores the role the pastor plays in the definitive stage: delivery of information, educating, supporting, and counseling in human genetics. Problems that are encountered by team members, patients, and families, and dominant feelings that seem to exist in couples or individuals who discover that their children have a birth defect or that they themselve are carriers of a faulty gene are revealed and illustrated through clinical examples and interviews. Further suggestions are given on how a constructive team approach can help provide information regarding birth defects and how pastors can help and participate in this process.The Rev.M. Wayne Clark, D. Min., is a United Methodist pastor in Sidney, Iowa, and has completed Care and Counseling's two-year graduate training program for pastoral counselors in St. Louis, Missouri. He has served as a consultant to the Division of Medical Genetics at the University Hospital in Iowa City, Iowa, and has worked with the staff of Regional Genetic Consultation Services of the Iowa State Department of Health. He is a member of A.A.P.C. and a clinical member of AAMFT.     

Career assessment supervision: Could what we don't know hurt us?

In this brief comment, one marked discrepancy in the career assessment field is identified: many students receive career assessment supervision, and many counselling and counselling psychology programs seemingly place much value on such supemision, but theoretical, empirical, and practical attention has yet to be advanced toward explicating the career assessment supervision process itself Concern over this lack of attention as expressed, and the need to make a more direct, concerted attack on explicating the career assessment supervision process is called for.     

Contemplation and compassion: the heart of a Franciscan spirituality of clinical pastoral supervision

After five years of supervising CPE modules in two different hospitals in South Africa, a chaplain supervisor reflects on how his Franciscan spirituality had impacted his supervisory ministry. He describes how he was able to narrow the impact to two defining Franciscan qualities: contemplation and compassion. This article explores the relationship between spirituality and clinical pastoral supervision. Then the Franciscan dimension of contemplation and compassion of Franciscan spirituality are considered. Finally some contours of a Franciscan spirituality of clinical pastoral supervision are described.     

Pastoral counselling: an American perspective

While pastoral counselling is a function of pastoral ministry in religious communities, it is also a specialised ministry requiring professional training that extends well beyond a pastoral/ theological education for ministry, as well as beyond the confines of religious communities. This article is an American perspective on Certified Pastoral Counsellors as mental health care providers for individuals, couples, and families, generally on a fee-for-service basis, with many qualifying for reimbursement by private and federal third party payers. It demonstrates that pastoral counselling as practised in the USA is spiritually integrated counselling and psychotherapy, requiring graduate academic and clinical work in these disciplines as well as graduate education in religious studies. It offers an American perspective on this specialised ministry of mental and relational health and discusses its identity and function, methodology, supervision requirements, and the clinical use of religious resources, including a case illustration.     

Pastoral counseling training: training goals in a changing environment

Pastoral counseling training is redefining itself in a changing environment. Theological education and ordination and church relatedness once was the crucible that shaped pastoral counselors. Today that formation process is being redefined as an increasing number of non-theologically trained students who are not seeking ordination come to increasingly fewer pastoral counseling training programs for formation in integrating spirituality and psychotherapy. This article outlines a statement of who an ideal intern would be in one pastoral counseling training program, lists fourteen goals of the training program along with the method of achievement, and who in the training program is responsible to see that the goals are accomplished.     

Dependence and manhood

American culture is at best ambivalent and at worst hostile to the appropriateness of dependency in males. To reorient this cultural misconception, a healthful model of male dependency is needed-especially for health care and pastoral professionals. This paper offers such a construct by bringing the perspectives of a theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and a psychoanalyst, Heinz Kohut, to an examination of this issue. Out of this discussion, an ethic can be formulated which offers guidelines for the exercise of male dependency and a more complete model of manhood.Thomas L. Truby, D. Min., an ordained minister of the United Methodist Church, completed this paper while serving as a Counseling Associate of The Center for Religion and Psychotherapy, Chicago. It was subsequently used by Dr. Randall C. Mason as an illustration of synthesized depth-psychology and theological reflection (Advances in Self Psychology. Ed. Arnold Goldberg. New York, International Universities Press, 1980, p. 421). For their guidance on this project the author is especially grateful to Dr. Mason and Dr. David M. Moss of The Seabury Institute for Pastoral Psychotherapy, Atlanta.     

Master's level pastoral counseling training: Skills and competencies

Directors of master's level pastoral counseling training programs were surveyed to determine their perceptions about the skills and competencies in which their students receive training. The data were analyzed as a whole, according to several subsets, and in comparison to similar survey data for master's level counseling psychology programs. A discussion of the findings is included.     

Clinical pastoral education (CPE) on the prairie

While the Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) method is usually employed in the health care setting and pointed toward the pastoral care of the sick, it can be adapted to the pastoral care and supervision of students doing ministry in the political, economic, and cultural systems of the rural community. In this article, the author, who speaks from thirty years of experience as a CPE supervisor in small towns in eastern South Dakota, describes his approach, an approach that emphasizes immersion in the general systems of struggling communities on the Great Plains. From his experience, he derives ten practical lessons that are applicable to CPE work in the rural context or in any pastoral setting.     

“Immunity‐to‐Change Language Technology”: An Educational Tool for Pastoral Leadership Education

Abstract. One of the primary aims of pastoral leadership education is to offer reflective processes that enable learners to surface, critique, and construct different epistemological conceptions of reality leading to more effective pastoral practice. In many pastoral leadership education programs, this type of intentional reflection usually takes place in a mentoring or supervisory relationship as well as in a reflective seminar. In this essay, I describe how I have used the “immunity‐to‐change language technology” as one type of reflective process for intentional reflection and transformational learning in pastoral leadership education. The results of my research and ongoing use of this educational tool indicate that it can be valuable for enabling change by helping learners expand their pastoral leadership capacities and become more effective in their practice. Given my findings, I conclude that this educational tool could be of interest to other educators who are seeking to broaden their own repertoire of approaches to transformational learning. A version of this research appears in a forthcoming book by the same author, published by Novalis, in Fall 2008.     

Near-death experience: A review from pastoral psychology

Published interpretations of near-death experience from the vantage of pastoral psychology are virtually nonexistent. Subjective reports from survivors and investigative contributions from other disciplines are scattered and diverse. A comparison of twenty-one near-death experience transcendence accounts with the available literature may not only offer direction for further systematic inquiry but also contribute to our pastoral understanding of life and death.He is a candidate for the S.T.D. in pastoral psychology at San Francisco Theological Seminary, San Anselmo, California, and a Fellow in the American Association of Pastoral Counselors.The author gratefully acknowledges the help of his brother, Michael B. Sabom. M.D., of the Emory University Medical School, Atlanta. Georgia, in the preparation of this article, it is to his continuing pastoral work with NDE survivors that this article is dedicated.     

Do Self-efficacy Expectation and Spirituality Provide a Buffer Against Stress-Associated Impairment of Health? A Comprehensive Analysis of the German Pastoral Ministry Study

We aimed to analyse stress perception, psychosomatic health and life satisfaction in pastoral professionals, paying particular attention to their individual and shared resources. Enrolling 8574 German pastoral professionals (48 % priests, 22 % parish expert workers, 18 % pastoral assistants, 12 % deacons), we found that pastoral professionals’ stress perception is associated with psychosomatic health impairment. General self-efficacy was a beneficial resource to protect against stress perceptions, while perception of the transcendent had a further yet weakly positive influence for stress-related impairment of health. External stressors (i.e. team size, duration of work per week and size of pastoral unit) were only of marginal independent relevance.     

A fact-finder's journey to Europe

The author undertook a trip to sixteen cities in eight European countries to study Continental models of integrating spiritual development and mental health and to look at training programs in pastoral counseling. He found a growing secularization of clergy who want to offer human services and cannot do so within established church hierarchies. In Roman Catholic areas he found pastoral counseling services directed to the religious professional rather than to the laity or the public. Training programs have yet to be fully developed. Only the Swedish model, in its history and multidisciplinary character, resembles the situation in the United States.