Students
About Social Justice Clinical Pastoral Education
Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) in Community and Social Justice Ministries provides training for leaders from all communities of faith who want to further develop their spiritual care and counseling skills.
Our CPE center is provisionally accredited through the ACPE: The Standard for Spiritual Care & Education and is given graduate level credit at seminaries. It combines hands-on spiritual care with qualified supervision and peer group reflection, preparing people for specialized chaplaincies, and enhancing faith leaders’ congregational ministries.
How it works
The ACPE Certified Educator uses community programs and congregational settings to teach narrative counseling theory to faith leaders, lay ministers and seminarians. Individually designed learning contracts focus on pastoral reflection, competence, and specialization. Together we strive to build a continuum of care between communities of faith and those in greatest need, and to further develop our ability to respond to the needs of individuals through direct service and crisis care.
Program components
Group Process Learning: Each unit is built on interpersonal group process learning in which five to eight faith leaders/ seminarians learn purposeful listening skills and the basics of narrative counseling theory.
Clinical Work in Spiritual Care/Chaplaincy or Congregational Ministry: Each faith leader/ seminarian provides spiritual and pastoral care in settings in the community working with a special focus on serving men, women, and children who have experienced poverty, institutionalization, or marginalization.
Individual Supervision: Biweekly individual consultation for processing clinical work and interpersonal issues is also offered.
Program structure
Units are offered in the fall (September-December), spring (January-May) and summer (May-July).
Clinical placements
Congregational settings - refugee and immigration services - long-term care chaplaincy - ex-offender mentoring programs - correctional chaplaincy - homeless shelters - transitional living residences - addiction treatment and recovery - churches integrating the 12-step program – prisons - inner-city mission congregations/social services.
ACPE outcomes for faith leaders
Articulate central themes of religious heritage and the theological understanding that informs ministry.
Identify and discuss major life events and relationships, as well as community and cultural contexts, which influence personal identity as expressed in pastoral functioning.
Initiate peer group and supervisory consultation and receive critique about one’s ministry practice.
Risk offering appropriate and timely critique.
Recognize relational dynamics within group contexts.
Demonstrate integration of conceptual understandings presented in the curriculum into pastoral practice.
Initiate helping relationships across diverse populations.
Use the clinical methods of learning to achieve their educational goals.
Formulate clear and specific goals for continuing pastoral formation with reference to personal strengths and weaknesses.
Articulate an understanding of the pastoral role that is congruent with personal values, basic assumptions, and personhood.
Provide pastoral ministry to diverse people, taking into consideration multiple elements of cultural and ethnic diversity, social conditions, systems, and justice issues without imposing their own perspectives.