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A passion for teaching others

Editor's Note: Joan Hemenway was a strong voice for pastoral care and supervisory education. Her work displayed the best in Professional Practice and so we offer this eulogy to honor her work and her life.

Remembering Joan Elizabeth Hemenway

March 14, 1938—January 31, 2007

Joan Hemenway died on January 31st of brain cancer. Joan was ACPE President at the time of her diagnosis in June and resigned in September. Throughout her illness, Joan, her partner, Jennifer Allcock, and sister, Marion Conklin, kept the pastoral care community connected with them and with one another through the Caring Bridges Web site where messages and updates on Joan’s condition could be posted. Her funeral is scheduled for February 24th. Details can be found at http://www.caringbridge.org/cb/inputSiteName.do?method=search&siteName=joanhemenway

Joan’s spiritual journey was rooted in her long association with The First United Methodist Church of Germantown in Philadelphia. There, in the 1960s, she was a part of a group of young women who founded Covenant House, a multi-faceted social agency that provided services to the neighborhood. FUMCOG, as the church is affectionately called, also fostered Joan’s vocation to ministry. Her ordination as a Methodist pastor followed. Always a woman of principle, Joan returned her ministry credentials to her Methodist Conference in 2005 in solidarity with the FUMCOG assistant minister, Beth Stroud, who, because she is lesbian, had been stripped of her ordination credentials.

ACPE was enormously important to Joan. Certified in 1981, she consistently held leadership positions, becoming the first female Regional Director in 1983, being elected to the ACPE Board and its precursor, the General Assembly, and to the Certification Commission, as well as serving on numerous ad hoc committees. Most recently, she spearheaded the ACPE strategic planning process, seeing it to completion shortly before her illness. She received both the College of Chaplains Professional Service Award and the ACPE Distinguished Service Award, the highest honor in each organization. She often called ACPE her “family.” Certainly she was unstinting with time and talent in service to the pastoral care movement.

Two of Joan’s particular talents were as writer and speaker; she had a way with words. She is widely known for her book, Inside the Circle, a review of ACPE’s historical use of psychological systems, with a particular focus on group work including suggestions for change. It is a rare supervisory student theory paper that does not cite this book. The book led to invitations to speak, particularly at regional conferences around the country. A good teacher is also a good student. Always interested in improving her own practice, Joan studied Systems Centered Theory, a unique theory of group work, with its founder, Yvonne Agazarian, for the last ten years.

Over the years, Joan supervised CPE in Philadelphia, New York, Hartford, Bridgeport, and New Haven. In her final years before retirement in 2006, she founded a supervisory education program at Yale-New Haven Medical Center. Her most lasting gift to ACPE may well be the students from her tenures at Hartford and Yale who are now accomplished supervisors and who are carrying forward her passion for teaching others how to be present to suffering people.