We hold our members, colleagues, and everyone impacted by the devastating tornadoes that tore through Kentucky, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio and Tennessee in our prayers and thoughts. To make a donation or volunteer to the recovery effort, please contact the American Red Cross.
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Around 2:30 pm eastern on Friday, December 10th, the Association of Professional Chaplains (APC) called ACPE’s Board Chair Melissa Walker-Luckett and Executive Director Trace Haythorn to inform them that the APC board voted to end merger discussions.
ACPE’s leaders are dismayed and saddened but look forward to maintaining a strong strategic partnership with APC.
The following email was sent to APC’s members this afternoon. ACPE’s Board of Directors will meet on Wednesday, December 15th, to discuss the next steps.
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As we approach our second pandemic winter here in the Northern hemisphere, I am trying to make peace with the quiet dark. Gone is the extravagance of spring, flinging seeds far and wide. And the colorful, fragrant summer with abundance of fruit and lingering of days. The crispness of autumn and the slow draining of color have brought us to this point, with bare trees, grey skies and the darkness that descends each day long before I’m ready for it. |
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Transcript Service Unavailable until January 4, 2022 |
In an effort to decrease wait times, ACPE will be digitizing our yellow card files beginning December 13-January 4, 2022. If your transcript contains a unit prior to the year 2000, your request cannot be filled until the digitization project is complete. If all of your CPE units occurred after 2000, you can sign-in to download and/or print your transcript. We appreciate your patience during this time as we work to provide a better experience for you.
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ACPE and APC invite you to support our efforts to provide this critical and dynamic educational program for our professionals in spiritual care. Your support will help us to bring the dream of healing this hurting world into reality, so that together we may create a better future for all. |
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ACPE Educator David Fleenor made a video on the topic, "What to Expect on the First Day of Clinical Pastoral Education." David describes what one might expect on a typical first day of CPE. |
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Do you sing or play an instrument that you would consider sharing during our centering time, multi-faith, and memorial service events? The 2022 Joint Annual Conference Spiritual Needs Committee is seeking talent within our organizations.
If you are interested please fill out the short contact form by January 6, 2022.
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Components of Spiritual Care. This book can be helpful for staff and certified chaplains, spiritual counselors, ACPE Educators, CPE students, and people with careers related to spiritual care and human services. The book is also a resource for spiritual retreats and spiritual caregivers' training.
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The Chaplaincy Innovation Lab (CIL) is collaborating with the Fetzer Institute to support and build networks of and for chaplains of color. Read more here.
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On November 2, 2021, a Hearing Panel of the ACPE-APC Joint Professional Ethics Process found the Reverend Vivian Smith-Fountain in violation of the following ACPE Standards:
1. c. - Determination: The Panel found that a violation of the ethics code occurred.
1. e. - Determination: The Panel found that a violation of the ethics code occurred.
4. b. - Determination: The Panel found that a violation of the ethics code occurred.
5. a. - Determination: The Panel found that a violation of the ethics code occurred.
After careful consideration of the evidence, the Panel voted the sanction of Suspension.
Rev. Smith-Fountain has received notification of this decision as well as a plan that will enable her to address the violations within the next 45 calendar days.
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In January 2020 the new ACPE Accreditation Manual began with new Standards and the requirement of each center to establish and maintain a portfolio. The portfolio is the structure for the relational way accredited centers and the Accreditation Commission communicate for the review process.
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Centers in Year 6 of the Accreditation Cycle: Site Visit – ACPE Certified Educators will work with the Accreditation Commissioner of their cohort and the appointed National Site Team Chair (NSTC) to establish dates for the visit.
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Once a month the ACPE Professional Ethics Commission (PEC) posts a couple of statements from our Code of Professional Ethics for ACPE Members.
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We invite all ACPE Certified Educators who are working with Educator Candidates to join us for informal consultations. For 2022 the first meting will be on February 7, 2022 from 12:00pm to 1:00pm ET.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has done something to our collective sense of time. Some things feel like they are screaming forward at breakneck speed, while others seem stuck in a moment. Li-Young Lee offers this poem as a reflection on time. Lee writes, “This poem is an attempt, I suppose, to understand time—the nature of time—and it seems to me that each of these stanzas is a figure of time on the one hand, and on the other hand a figure for eternity. I’m not sure if I’ve successfully communicated that, and I don’t mean in terms of subject matter or narrative, but in terms of what the language might inspire in the reader: the images, the ideas, but even more than the images and ideas (which are all in the head) something at a cellular level of understanding, something at a logic beyond our diurnal logic. This poem, in a way, is a very big failure, and it fails on many levels. I think what every great poem has to do is solve many problems, and these problems are problems that have plagued human beings, I want to say, since the beginning of time, but is that true, or did something change with the advent of the written word? I don’t know. Maybe I should start over.”
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When the big clock at the train station stopped,
the leaves kept falling,
the trains kept running,
my mother’s hair kept growing longer and blacker,
and my father’s body kept filling up with time.
I can’t see the year on the station’s calendar.
We slept under the stopped hands of the clock
until morning, when a man entered carrying a ladder.
He climbed up to the clock’s face and opened it with a key.
No one but he knew what he saw.
Below him, the mortal faces went on passing
toward all compass points.
People went on crossing borders,
buying tickets in one time zone and setting foot in another.
Crossing thresholds: sleep to waking and back,
waiting room to moving train and back,
war zone to safe zone and back.
Crossing between gain and loss:
learning new words for the world and the things in it.
Forgetting old words for the heart and the things in it.
And collecting words in a different language
for those three primary colors:
staying, leaving, and returning.
And only the man at the top of the ladder
understood what he saw behind the face
which was neither smiling nor frowning.
And my father’s body went on filling up with death
until it reached the highest etched mark
of his eyes and spilled into mine.
And my mother’s hair goes on
never reaching the earth.
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The arrival of the new COVID-19 variant knocked the wind out of many of our sails. And yet, there is a persistence in the miraculous beauty of the universe. When the stuff around you seems just too much, look to the stars for beauty and perspective:
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This Week on the Calendar |
November 28 - December 24
Advent (Christianity)
Advent is a season of spiritual preparation in observance of the birth of Jesus. In Western Christianity, it starts on the fourth Sunday before Christmas. In Eastern Christianity, the season is longer and begins in the middle of November.
December 14
10th of Tevet (Judaism)
The 10th of Tevet observes the beginning of the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E.
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ACPE Spiritual Care Professional Rev. Robert Wendel died on Friday, December 3, 2021. He had a stroke and died of cardiac arrest in the emergency room.
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The American Academy of Religion (AAR), the largest scholarly society dedicated to the academic study of religion, with more than 8,000 members around the world, invited ACPE’s Executive Director Trace Haythorn to serve as a member of its finance committee.
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The Georgia Society of Association Executives (GSAE) elected ACPE’s Director of Communications & Technology John Roch to serve on its executive committee beginning in 2022. Over the next four years, John will serve as GSAE’s treasurer, chair-elect, chair, and past-chair.
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The VA St Louis Health Care System is currently recruiting for an ACPE Certified Educator.
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Ascension Seton has open positions in our residency program starting September 6, 2022 and ending on August 18, 2023.
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Other Educational Opportunities |
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ACPE: The Standard for Spiritual Care & Education |
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ACPE is the standard for spiritual care and education. Our diverse membership includes Certified CPE Educators, Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapists, Spiritual Care Professionals and Practitioners, Pastoral Counselors, Chaplains, Faith Communities, and Seminaries. Our multi-disciplinary, multi-faith, multi-racial community of professionals provides education, connection, and formation through continuing education, networking, and leadership development.
ACPE is the premier, Department of Education recognized, organization that provides the highest quality CPE programs for spiritual care professionals of any faith and in any setting. We do this through a rigorous accreditation and certification process for centers and educators that provide CPE.
The depth of our training enables students to realize their full potential to strengthen the spiritual health of people in their care as well as themselves.
ACPE members are actively engaged in a wide variety of professional development activities including communities of practice, conferences, spiritual care research, and informal networking. We are more than just an association: we are a movement committed to the transformation of the human suffering.Our opportunities for formation and community enrich our member's work of healing and transforming people and communities in the US and across the globe.
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