Clinical Pastoral Education
Formation through supervised practice
Everything you need to know about CPE at Anam Cara — before you apply.
What is CPE?
The person you bring into the room matters.
Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) is an accredited form of theological education that takes place not in a classroom, but in the lived encounter — at a bedside, in a ward, in the room where someone is hurting. You offer spiritual care to patients, families, and staff, then bring those encounters back to a peer group and a supervisor who help you notice what you missed.
The Celtic tradition calls such a person an anam cara — a soul friend. CPE forms that friendship into practice: learning to listen deeply, to stay when it is hard, and to let your own life be examined so your care grows from attention rather than habit. The goal is growth in pastoral identity, functioning, and self-awareness — so the person you bring into the room becomes more fully present to the person before you.
Who the program is for
For those who cannot look away from suffering.
CPE is for those preparing for or already serving in chaplaincy, ministry, and spiritual care — at a hospital bedside, in a hospice room, inside a correctional facility, beside a service member, or within a community that has learned to carry its grief together. You may be ordained or lay, certain of your call or still questioning it. No specific faith affiliation is required.
What matters is a willingness to bring your whole self into the room — your training, your faith or doubt, your questions and your story — and to let the work of care form you, not just inform you.
What you'll carry forward
Not just a credential earned, but a way of being practiced.
The measure of a unit isn't the hours logged but the person you become through them. Over twelve weeks you will:
- Grow a pastoral identity rooted in a functioning theology of care.
- Learn to assess a person's needs and offer care that fits — then notice whether it helped.
- Practice the self-awareness and reflection that keep a caregiver honest.
- Strengthen the way you meet people across difference — patients, staff, and peers alike.
- Let theology and lived human experience interpret each other, until neither feels abstract.
Clinical & theological components
The CPE model is action-reflection. You take an action — a visitation, a conversation at a bedside — and you reflect on it in writing, with your peer cohort, and with a certified clinical supervisor. That same rhythm runs through every assignment: your learning contract, where you set the goals that will stretch you; didactics and asynchronous learning modules that give you language for what you're meeting; discussion and weekly reflections that hold your experience up to the light; and a mid-unit and final self-evaluation, where you name who you are becoming through the work. Clinical practice and theological reflection are not two subjects here — they read each other, until neither feels abstract, and the care you offer grows from a life that has been listened to.
Format & time commitment
12-Week Intensive · Online-Hybrid
400 total hours: 300 clinical + 100 educational (avg. 25 clinical hrs/week)
All Anam Cara CPE units are 12-week intensives delivered online-hybrid: group sessions and supervision meet online, while students arrange their own clinical site in a local on-site context. Each unit is 400 total hours — 300 clinical hours and 100 educational hours. Students complete the 300 clinical hours over the 12 weeks — an average of 25 hours per week — through paid or volunteer work at a hospital, hospice, church or parish, correctional facility, senior living or long-term care facility, non-profit organization, parachurch ministry, or a police or first-responder setting.
Upcoming terms begin with Winter 2026, followed by Spring 2027 and Summer 2027. See program options for dates and application deadlines.
Materials & costs
What you'll need, and what it costs.
CPE tuition is $1,375 per 12-week intensive unit (400 total hours: 300 clinical + 100 educational). Required textbooks and technology run an estimated $25-$40 per unit — but if you join SCC Premium, they're included at no extra cost. One Premium payment covers all four units required for board certification, along with much more.
For just $125 (first-year student discount, regularly $199), Anam Cara students can join the Spiritual Care Collaborative premium tier for asynchronous affinity-based courses (hospice, corrections, military) included in your premium membership, discounts on books and other resources, and lifetime access to our Board Certified Chaplain Writing Preparation Course ($1,300 value). Premium is optional and never required to complete CPE.