No abstract
In 1844, the Congregationalist minister Enoch Pond in Bangor, Maine, reminded his fellow clergy that they had been commissioned not only to feed the sheep of their flocks but also to nurture the lambs. Under no circumstances, he cautioned, would a good minister neglect the children, for both Christian parents and their pastors felt “the deepest anxiety” that the children of American parishes would not “receive that wise government, that faithful discipline, that Christian instruction and restraint, which, by the blessing of God, shall result in their speedy conversion, and bring them early and truly into the fold of Christ.” He called for pastors to pray for the children, to convene meetings of praying parents, to pay attention to children during pastoral visits, to impart special instruction to children from the pulpit, to visit their schools, to institute Sunday schools, to teach children the Bible, and to offer catechetical instruction. The devoted pastor would acquaint himself with children, “enter into their feelings, and interest himself in their affairs; and thus engage their affections, and win their confidence.“Christian clergy in America had long heeded such admonitions. Seventeenth-century Puritan ministers made serious, if sporadic, efforts to teach the catechism, often invited groups of children into their homes for instruction, contended over the implications of the baptismal covenant, and urged parents to teach their offspring religious truths and Christian practices. Eighteenth-century Anglican clergy made similar efforts to instruct children, and their revivalist counter-parts in New England and the Middle Colonies encouraged the conversion of children at younger than customary ages. Jonathan Edwards devoted careful attention to his four-year-old convert Phebe Bartlet, who followed in the path of her converted eleven-year-old brother by announcing, after anguished prayers and cries for mercy, that “the kingdom of God had come” to her.
Within the past half century, thousands of American clergy have completed a program of professional training known as "clinical pastoral education," a long-term supervised engagement with men and women in crisis in hospitals, prisons, and social agencies. The movement has profoundly shaped the development of pastoral counseling in America and it forms the background of current debates about counseling and moral guidance. In fact, the new ethical questions represent a return to the early agenda of clinical pastoral education, which emerged from the moral fervor of the twentiethcentury progressive movement.I should like to argue that clinical training and the pastoral counseling traditions that it spawned bear even today the clear imprint of their origins in progressivism. The founders of clinical pastoral education were moral reformers at heart; they wanted to reshape ethical sensibility and to reform professional leadership within and sometimes without the churches. That moral purpose has endured. But they did not always share the same moral vision. Their programs and practices reflected two conflicting kinds of ethical sensibility, and two differingjudgments about what was ethically important in human nature. The early divisions within the movement were not merely clashes between strong personalities; the quarrels had a conceptual underside; they exhibited different presuppositions about ethics. I. The Turn to the InterpersonalThe innovations of clinical pastoral education culminated a long legacy of dissatisfaction among the clergy. That legacy, strangely enough, found expression within the driest genre of religious literature produced in the nineteenth century: the pastoral theology textbooks. Nineteenth-century versions of the older Puritan and Anglican textbooks on casuistry and the cure of souls, the pastoral theologies quickly degenerated into collections of cliches and simpleminded instructions to parish ministers. But toward the end of the century they also mirrored some of the changes in the churches and some of the anxieties of the clergy that stood in the distant background of clinical pastoral education.
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