Executive Board
of the ICPCC

Vale Howard Clinebell

The International Council for Pastoral Care and Counselling (ICPCC) celebrates the life of Howard Clinebell and joins with his family and friends in mourning his death.

Howard has been without doubt the best-known name in the international pastoral care movement through the latter decades of the twentieth century. His texts, in particular his versions of Basic Types, reflect the evolving understanding of pastoral care over the past fifty years, and have informed pastoral care curricula in seminaries world-wide. Pastoral care training programs and counselling agencies around the world are staffed with people who were his postgraduate students at the Claremont School of Theology.

The ICPCC, which counts amongst its membership 42 pastoral care associations drawn from all five continents, has benefited from Howard's involvement since its inception in 1979. He attended all Congresses of the ICPCC, with the exception of last year's Bangalore meeting. He had in fact planned to make Bangalore his final Congress, but its postponement from 2003 to 2004, in conjunction with his failing health, forced him to cancel. And we missed him.

The character of Howard's involvement in ICPCC was a measure of the man. While he could have attended in a celebrity role, minimising his actual engagement, he chose instead to participate fully as a delegate. An inveterate networker, he encouraged others to share the peace and justice concerns that had emerged from his relationships with his overseas students. The Congresses became reunions with his alumni as well as meetings with many other like-minded colleagues, soon expressed in the formation of the International Pastoral Counsellors' Network for Social Responsibility (IPCNSR). The IPCNSR continues to meet within and alongside the Congresses. At all the Congresses, and in email contact in the years between them, he continued to promote and encourage an expanding vision for pastoral care. Always he was committed and concerned, remaining an activist at an age that would have led many others to retire from the fray, even without the health limitations he endured.

The Council recognises its debt to Howard Clinebell, and gives thanks to God for his life. We will treasure his memory, and we pledge ourselves to further the concerns dear to his heart - an expanding vision of the contribution pastoral care and counselling might make in a global renewal of human societies.

the Executive Board of the ICPCC

from a letter
the President of the ICPCC, Prof. Dr. Ursula Riedel-Pfaefflin/Germany
sent to the ICPCC-delegates, forwarding the above official ribute of the ICPCC

Dear Colleagues, today will be the memorial service for Howard Clinebell who died in April.
Bruce Rumbold, our secretary, has sent a tribute on Howard to IPCNSR, and Kathleen Greider in order to express the thankfulness we feel for the life and work of Howard. ...........

Howard was one of the first and most important persons in AAPC and ICPCC to adress the social responsibility of pastoral care and counseling, saw the political impact of our work, and invited organisations to deal with the growing violence and destruction of nature in theology and care.

I remember the wonderful conference in Italy on violence that was organized by Howard and Adriana Cavina and people all around the globe. Howard was always ahead of important issues in the world and I admire his eager persuit of these challenges even after his health deteriorated and we were anxious about his life- even at the congress in Ghana.

Howard has been encourging many individual counselors from diverse continents and groups, organizations to grow - to take up the metaphor that was leading for the humanistic approach in counseling.
ICPCC has been cooperating with IPCNSR for years but I can envision an even closer relationship and concerted actions as many people are members in both groups. We send today our prayers and blessings to the memorial service and the participants.

This year, we will also have several meetings, where Howard can be honored in our memories - one in HonkKong, The Asian-Pacific congress, beginning of August, and End of August,the European congress in Sigtuna, Sweden.
"We have this treasure in earthen Vessel" is the theme the convening group of the next world congress in 2007 has chosen as the theme.
May the life and death of Howard remind us that the trascendent is only present for us in the immanent, and at the same time, we encounter and experience in the immanent that which transcends our daily struggles and choices.