Level I CPE Curriculum
Sutter Medical Center, Sacramento
I. Competency in Self Awareness
Students become aware of themselves as minister.
The curriculum includes:
- The art of self-reflection
- How one’s personality and behavior impacts other people
- Major life events and relationships
- Awareness of feelings
- Attitudes, values, and assumptions in ministry
- Important themes within one’s religious tradition
- Theological understanding of experience
Students learn how to utilize relationships in their ministry practice.
The curriculum includes:
- Pastoral authority with peers, hospital staff, and supervisors
- Basic elements of group process
- Initiating consultation
- Support, confrontation and clarification within a peer group
- Offering and receiving critique
- Awareness of relational dynamics
Students develop conceptual models for their practice of ministry.
The curriculum includes:
- Hospital structure and social conditions related to health care ministry
- Concepts of spiritual care
- Spiritual assessment
- Dynamics of grief and loss
- Introduction to crisis ministry
- Overview of diverse religious traditions
- Framework for theological reflection
- Bio-ethical decision-making and advance care planning
- Basics of group process
- The Enneagram as an assessment tool
Students learn basic pastoral care skills, drawing upon their religious heritage and the behavioral sciences.
Curriculum includes:
- Active listening skills
- Initiation and closure in ministry relationships
- Spiritual care within an interdisciplinary team
- Professional ethics
- Confidentiality
- Use of ritual and liturgy
- Ministry of presence
- Guided meditation
Students learn the clinical method of education, methods for evaluating one’s ministry and identifying professional goals.
The curriculum includes:
- The clinical method of learning
- Learning goals
- Pastoral strengths and weaknesses
- Clinical ministry management
- Self-evaluation as a tool for ministry development