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Trace Informal Welcome to Monday Briefing, a weekly digest from ACPE Executive Director Trace Haythorn! 

Each week, you will receive related articles, updates on ACPE transitions, and helpful links to keep you connected, better informed, and well-resourced for the week ahead.
Organizational Design Process: 
Thank you for your thoughtful comments! Our team is now analyzing all of the feedback (over 250 responses yielding a statistical 90% confidence rate). For these responses along with the over 600 participants in listening sessions and other feedback processes, we are grateful to the active engagement of the membership in thinking through this process, making it as participatory as we can. In early August the Organizational Design Work Group will convene to finalize a recommendation to the Board of Representatives. The board will meet the following week. If they approve the recommendation, then our legal counsel will help revise the bylaws, which will be sent to the membership for your comments by early September. We will receive comments through October and will seek a final vote before the November leadership meetings.
 
Please continue to support the members of the Organizational Design Work Group (David Carl, Carlos Bell, Barbara Bullock, Peter Yuichi Clark, Amanda Jones, Jasper Keith and Dick Haines) as they continue to seek to serve ACPE well in the coming weeks.
Good Summer Work!
As we reach the half-way mark for many summer units across the country, we want to take a moment and say thanks to all of the supervisors who are both invigorated and challenged by students getting their first tastes of CPE. We also want to celebrate those students as they dive deeply into this work, into their personal stories, and into the visioning of the work that lies ahead. And most importantly, we remember those served by the supervisors and students: the patients, clients, staff and community members who rely on the quality, compassionate spiritual care. Thoughts and prayers of the national office are with all of you!
An Important Reminder: "Empathy is Actually a Choice"
And in a time such as this, these authors remind us that we cannot assume the best in people. As Stephen Sondheim notes, "Children will listen." As Nelson Mandela stated, "No one is born hating another person because of the color of [their] skin, or [their] background, or [their] religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can learn to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite."
A Hymn and a Poem for Reflection 
I was born and raised in Dallas, TX. My mother and her father were also born in Dallas. It seems we've reached a tipping point. Our leaders have not responded, so people are taking matters into their own hands. So many of us are shocked, and yet we also feel sick with a sadness of recognition: what did we expect? How long before the anger, hurt, fury, grief, fear, pain...how long until the war begins?

Of course there is always a war, and of course there is no war. Our thoughts and prayers are with so many people, particularly our colleagues at Parkland and Baylor Scott & White. Regional Director Wayne Menking shared the following hymn with the Southwest Region:
 
Like most of you I'm sure, I have been searching for words to give voice to the prayer/lament that I have been feeling of late in the midst of all the exclusionary hate, divisiveness and fear that seems to be among us. I am not one given to "nationalistic hymns," and so I shuddered a bit when I saw that the final hymn we were going to sing in church this morning was under the heading, "National Songs." Yet by the end of the hymn, I could not sing as the words touched deeply. I share it with you; perhaps it will have meaning for you as well.
 
This is My Song 
Text by Lloyd Stone; Sung to the tune of Finlandia by John Sibelius
 
This is my song O God of all the nations,
a song of peace for lands afar and mine.
This is my home, the country where my heart is;
here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine;
but other hearts in other lands are beating
with hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.
 
My country's skies are bluer than the oceans,
and sunlight beams on clover leaf and pine.
But other lands have sunlight to, and clover, 
and skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
So hear my song O God of all the nations,
a song of peace for their land and for mine.
 
This is my prayer, O God of all earth's kingdoms,
your kingdom come; on earth your will be done.
O God be lifted up till all shall serve you,
and hearts united learn to live as one.
So hear my prayer, O God of all the nations;
myself I give you; let your will be done.
 
At the APC meeting a few weeks ago, Martin Doblmeier shared that one of the things he learned in his work on the film "Chaplains: On the Front Lines of Faith" is that those engaged in this work are prophets. They are truth tellers and those who call to account principalities and powers, often serving as a voice of sense, of truth, of the world we demand. It is in that spirit that I offer this familiar poem of Dylan Thomas this week.
In Memoriam


Alton Sterling

Philando Castile

Lorne Ahrens, Michael Krol, Michael Smith, Brent Thompson, Patrick Zamarripa
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