Updates to BCCI Chaplaincy Certification

he Board of Chaplaincy Certification, Inc.® certification commission met December 7–8, 2021, for two three-hour sessions. At the request of the Anti-Racism Task Force of the Association of Professional Chaplains, our goal was to make our certification process more equitable and to promote quality chaplaincy care by working against dehumanization and injustice of every kind, especially anti-Black racism. Each commissioner brought at least one idea/proposal for a reform to our certification process. In the first session, we gathered forty ideas/proposals. By the second session, we narrowed in on nine reforms to seriously consider. After discussion, debate, and revisions, we came to a consensus on six concrete reforms. We want to share these six reforms with the APC Anti-Racism Task Force and the APC Board of Directors and—with their input/blessing—enact them as soon as possible.

• RUBRIC: We will develop and implement a rubric for all certification competencies. Rather than just a “met”/“not met” assessment on the basis of however a given committee interprets each competency, a rubric would spell out exactly what it takes to demonstrate each competency and would give a finer gradient of feedback to candidates. We believe that moving to a rubric is the highest-priority anti-racism reform we can make, to reduce subjectivity and therefore bias in the evaluation process. We are already drafting the rubric in collaboration with the National Association of Catholic Chaplains and Neshama: The Association of Jewish Chaplains (as a continuation of our partnership with the NACC on the Center for Health Organization Transformation study “Professional Health Care Chaplaincy Certification: Exploring Efficacy & Strategizing Future Directions”). But including it in this collection of anti-racism reforms marks our resolve to devote even more attention and resources to this work.
• PIC2: We will change Professional Identity & Conduct Competency number 2 from “Articulate ways in which one’s feelings, attitudes, values, and assumptions affect professional practice” to “Articulate ways in which one’s feelings, values, assumptions, culture, and social location affect professional practice.” Along with a rubric to support this addition, the revised competency asserts that a Board Certified Chaplain must account not only for their individual “stuff” but also for the ways in which larger, systemic influences affect the spiritual care they provide and/or how their particular social identity informs their spiritual care—a best practice of anti-racism and social justice work in general, to hold that everyone has particular social locations and culture, not just “ethnic” people or “minorities,” and to make visible/spoken what is invisible/unspoken (e.g., Whiteness).
• NEW OL COMPETENCY (AND RELATED EDUCATION): We will establish a BCCI task force charged with 1) developing a new, sixth Organizational Leadership Competency about power dynamics and systemic inequities and 2) making recommendations about additional education we need to offer members, candidates, and interviewers so that we can meet, assess, and live this new OL competency as well as the revised PIC2 competency (above).
• A SECOND CHOT STUDY: We will fund another round of the study CHOT conducted, with the goal of identifying any problem(s) in our certification process that we missed by not having a more racially, ethnically, and religiously representative sample of our membership population in the original CHOT study. The initial study included fifty participants, forty-six of whom were White and forty-four of whom were Christian. For this second round, we propose an equal, additional sample of fifty participants stratified so that the total sample of the first round and second round combined—one hundred participants—would more accurately reflect the diversity of our membership.
• CERTIFICATION-INTERVIEW OBSERVERS AND AUDITS: We will establish a BCCI task force to generate a policy for including external observers in at least some certification interviews and auditing some certain past certification interviews. (Criteria for which interviews to observe and which to audit—and/or whether to do so randomly—would be part of what this task force figures out.)  Regular audits and external observers promote a culture of quality improvement and accountability (beyond relying on appeals), to identify, prevent, and maybe even remedy biased certification outcomes.
• RENEWED RECRUITMENT OF PEOPLE OF COLOR AS CERTIFICATION INTERVIEWERS: We have a disproportionately White pool of interviewers, which contributes to several dynamics of systemic racism in how we assemble certification committees (e.g., tokenism) and how candidates who are people of color experience our certification process (e.g., lack of representation). We will continue targeted, direct recruitment of BCCs who are people of color to serve on certification committees. We will put a new emphasis on recruiting newly certified chaplains to volunteer as interviewers. When someone declines, we will follow up with a brief question about what makes them decline, so that we might better identify systemic barriers and address them.

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The board has been reading and reviewing all the correspondence it has received from members, non-members, past board members, and stakeholders in the field of spiritual care since we announced our decision to cease merger talks with ACPE.  We have received many letters of support for our decision, and some are upset with the decision to end the merger talks while others are seeking more information about why the board made this decision and why a deciding vote was not passed along to the members.

Business decisions, especially of this magnitude, can be difficult to understand.  We have been trying to explain this decision without breaking agreements of confidentiality that were agreed to at the beginning of these discussions over four years ago and remain in place today. We respect our long collaboration with ACPE and plan on continuing that collaboration now and in the future.

The board’s decision was based on our responsibility to act in the best interest of APC. After more than 45 hours of joint meetings between APC and ACPE representatives and considerable due diligence research, the board decided a merger with ACPE was not in the best interest of APC. 

Most mergers or acquisitions take place, because one of the organizations is in trouble or they have a collective goal that they are seeking to achieve, a goal that cannot be reached on their own. When it comes to APC and ACPE that is not the case.  Both organizations are healthy and strong, and there is nothing that we could only do as one organization that we cannot work on together, cooperatively but as separate organizations.

On the advice of counsel, we reviewed the legal responsibility we have as board members, to carry out the full duty of care and fiduciary responsibilities assigned to us by law when making decisions as a board.  As such, the board is expected to put the same care, thought and diligence into making a decision for the organization as they would for their own personal matters.  A decision to dissolve requires extensive consideration of the board.

With this distinction explained and because the board could not identify a single compelling reason or goal that APC could not continue to pursue as an independent organization, the board made the decision to indefinitely suspend merger negotiations with ACPE.  

Could the board have voted to let the APC membership vote to dissolve and merge with ACPE?  Illinois law states the board must first vote if the merger is in the best interest of APC and its members. If the vote were yes, then members would have had opportunity to vote.

Additionally, five years ago when these merger talks started there were five strategic partners involved. When others left the conversation for reasons of their own, the conversation was transformed from merger talks to one of acquisition.  APC would dissolve and its assets would be transferred to ACPE. Only BCCI would remain. 

There has been a lot of talk about “the profession” when discussing the merger.  I ask you as chaplains, what profession are we responsible for as members of the Association of Professional Chaplains?  The field of spiritual care is far and wide, and we are blessed to be a part of it, but not all chaplains are educators, not all chaplains work in the field of healthcare.  There is a profession that APC works for, and it is chaplaincy.  We continue to believe that ACPE has the best clinical pastoral education for our certified chaplains, but CPE does not define what a chaplain is or does.  The board is proud of our members and the work we continue to do.  APC is proud of the profession of chaplaincy, and we are proud to continue to serve it. 

The board is currently working on APC’s next strategic plan, and we have several exciting changes coming later this year. APC has been continuing to work on revisions to the website and a new certification application process. Once these new systems are up, we expect to bring additional enhancements online for maintenance of certification and requests for verifying certification status.  We are excited to begin a new chapter of APC and we continue to work with ACPE and all our strategic partners, just as we have done in years past.  We know that many still feel the pain of disappointment but sometimes moving forward is the next step to healing.

We ask that you humbly accept our delay in responding as a matter of balancing our head and hearts in these matters during these challenging times. The goal is to speak clearly, factually, and precisely within our functional boundaries as a board. We acknowledge that our internal process has made it seem we are insensitive.  Please charge it to our heads, not our hearts. Our on-going plan is to share a series of communications in the APC Forum and other communications, providing further insight into our process of ending talks of acquisition.

Rev. Dr. Jeffery T. Garland DMin Eds BCC-PCHAC is a chaplain the VNA Health Group Barnabas Health Home and Hospice & Palliative Care Center in West Orange, New Jersey. He serves as President of the APC Board and may be contacted at president@professionalchaplains.org.

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