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International Association for Spiritual Care (IASC)REPORT TO THE MEMBERSHIPMeeting of the IASC Board April 26-27, 2019Current Board Members:Pamela Cooper-White, President (2021)Claudia Kohli-Reichenbach, Secretary (2023)Emmanuel Lartey (2024)Georg Wenz (2021)Dear IASC members,We hope you are doing well, and we greet you warmly in the name of our International Association for Spiritual Care!As those of you who were at our last conference in New York in July 2018 will remember, we made the decision at that time to use the 2019 year to take a break after four consecutive conferences for the board to meet for a review of our mission and our progress in our first four years, and to strategize ways to strengthen IASC as a collaborative membership and research organization beyond yearly conferences, and to plan for the future. We current board members met in New York in April, 2019, for this purpose.We reviewed the mission statement of IASC, which is as follows: IASC’s Mission is to enhance the capacities of scholars and practitioners worldwide in acquiring, disseminating and applying knowledge of theory and practice of spiritual care with an emphasis on interdisciplinary, interreligious and intercultural scholarly investigation. The Association offers vital continuing education opportunities, encourages networks for professional support and enrichment, and facilitates growth and interdisciplinary innovation engaging medicine, psychology, theology, nursing, and social work.IASC engages in:a. Promoting multidisciplinary research concerning spiritual care.b. Fostering, encouraging and facilitating scientific exchange.c. Creating and disseminating knowledge.d. Promoting education of students, scholars, practitioners and the general public on spiritual care.e. Collaborating with other international and national scientific associations, professional associations and other groups, societies, institutions and individuals who contribute to progress in the field.Based on written conference evaluations, feedback from members, and our own assessment, we agreed that we have been very successful primarily in the areas of continuing education for spiritual caregivers and pastoral theologians. We have mounted four outstanding, well-attended conferences (2 in Bern including our constituting conference in 2015, one in Jerusalem/Beit Jala, and one in New York) which over 4 years brought together at least 300 researchers and practitioners of spiritual care from over 20 countries and from multiple religious traditions, languages, and cultures. We honored Isabelle Noth for her tremendous work in inaugurating both the IASC and the first two conferences as well as Claudia Kohli Reichenbach, Emmanuel Schweizer, and Katie Givens Kime and others at the University of Bern for their tremendous work these past 4 years – without whom we would not exist!; and Sarah Bernstein, Ruchama Weiss and the staff at the Rossing Center, Jerusalem in 2017 and Pamela Cooper-White and the staff at Union Theological Seminary, New York in 2018 for all their hard work organizing our last two conferences. Papers from the first two conferences have now been published as books by Vanderhoek & Ruprecht thanks to Isabelle, Emmanuel, Claudia, and Georg Wenz.Where have been less successful in the areas of our mission involves the important areas of ongoing and collaborative interreligious and interdisciplinary research. Although we have been able to recruit conference presenters from multiple religious traditions who shared important scholarly research with us, our membership remains largely Christian; the majority of our conference presenters and IASC members have been pastoral theologians and spiritual caregivers/related practitioners, with few representatives from the fields of medicine, nursing, and psychology. We have also not yet created a mechanism for sharing research projects or developing potential collaborations throughout the year. A major challenges is that “research” itself is not defined the same by everyone in IASC or by every discipline, e.g., medicine, nursing, psychology, and theology, and the more secular the country, the more empirical the research emphasis tends to be (grant funders, governmental funders, etc.); the field of spiritual care itself is increasingly divided between spiritual (medical, psychological, secular) and more traditionally theological approaches (especially in institutional religious contexts). The balance of theory, practice, and theology/spirituality is also an issue. We have heard “loud and clear” that there is a desire among conference attendees and IASC members for more avenues for ongoing scholarly and research dialogue. With these successes and challenges in mind as a Board, we have made the following plans for the next two years with the goal of increasing avenues for research and widening the dissemination of research, and increasing opportunities for communication and exchange of ideas among the members as a true membership organization:We are planning to create a new online Journal of Interreligious Spiritual Care, to begin with an inaugural Vol. 1, nos.1/2 in 2021. Emmanuel Lartey and Pamela Cooper-White are working on a proposal to a highly regarded international publisher with whom we both have had good working experiences in the past. Early work will be needed to identify an editor/co-editors and create an editorial board from within the IASC membership. Our rationale for the journal title is that although our organizational title as IASC is “International,” what distinguishes us most from other spiritual care organizations nationally and internationally, and what encompasses our international and intercultural mission is the growing challenge of interreligious spiritual care and the need for theological, spiritual, and existential sensitivities across the disciplines of medicine, nursing, psychology, and theology/spirituality toward care recipients in an increasingly pluralistic and migratory world. Our first issue is intended as a resource for researchers and practitioners of all the disciplines represented in our core mission, asking the question What Is Spiritual Care?: with multiple essays each from Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, and existentialist/secular perspectives (as a start, for our first volume). We also intend to give our authors the freedom to problematize and/or use their own terminology re: the term “spiritual care” itself. While this volume is intended to have significant practical implications for care, it should be guided by our central mission of doing rigorous scholarly religious/theological/spiritual and theoretical inquiry. If possible, this first volume only might be published simultaneously as an online journal and a printed book, with the working title Spiritual Care?: Views and Perspectives from Different Religious Traditions, and None.. While this first inaugural issue will have somewhat the character of a handbook, we anticipate the journal evolving into a dialogical format, in which lead articles would be followed by two or three brief responses by other authors from the same or different faith traditions or research disciplines, and expanding the faith traditions and research disciplines represented. We will develop mechanisms for both solicited and unsolicited manuscripts.In order to make this first volume even more participatory among all our membership, we are planning first to host a Webinar in July 2020, in which all the IASC members will be invited to discuss the central question “What Is Spiritual Care?” from your respective spiritual tradition and professional/research discipline. More details re: the organization of this webinar and precise date will be forthcoming closer to the time.In order to make this first volume even more participatory among all our membership, prior to the publication of the first volume, we also hope to host our next in-person Conference in July 2021 “What Is Spiritual Care?: An Interreligious Dialogue” (location to be announced – possibly hosted at the Emory Conference Center in Atlanta, Georgia, US?). Each half-day during the three-day conference will be devoted to one of the spiritual traditions, beginning with a panel in which the invited authors of the first volume will present drafts of their essays. Conference members will be invited after hearing the presentations to give feedback in facilitated small groups. This feedback will be recorded and used by the authors for incorporation into their final journal articles. The intention here is to create more opportunity for conversation among members as a main feature of this conference. Other times for informal social conversation and networking will also be scheduled.(continued next page…)To facilitate ongoing networking between these more formal annual opportunities for scholarly exchange, we are planning to create an ongoing, online IASC members-only discussion board on an updated IASC web siteBusiness matters:The Board voted at this meeting to situate all future business operations of the Association at the locale of the President of the Board for ease of administration. (Currently = New York, USA; the organization continues to be registered as a Swiss non-profit organization and will duly file necessary tax reports, etc.)We are in the process now of updating our IASC web site, which will include an automatic membership signup/renewal link. The Board authorized payment to an independent contractor to do this work. We are aware that the web site is currently down while it is “under construction.” More details on how to post to this discussion board will be forthcoming, hopefully by early next year (2020). We will keep you informed as soon as updates are made.Please note the new email address for IASC is: intspircare@. Please feel free to contact us with any questions or comments!Finances: Bearing in mind fluctuations in the various currencies in which we currently hold accounts, our current assets = approx. $3,000 USD after the current meeting travel expenses.Conference expenses have run an average of about $15,000 per year, with conference fees and dues covering approx. 20% of the cost, and host institutions and grants covering approx. 80%. *Without the generosity of these institutions we would not have been able to run the four conferences to date.At the 2021 conference, we will hold elections for 3 new board members and a new President, anticipating the end of three current board members’ second terms (at the limit of 6 years stipulated by the Bylaws). Acting on behalf of the membership as permitted by the Bylaws, we are currently working to recruit at least one more board member ad interim to fill a mid-term vacancy, in order to improve our international and interreligious diversity.Your membership:We worked at this meeting to regularize membership fees and categories. Having received this email, you should consider yourself to be a current member until July 2020. All current memberships not paid by Aug. 31, 2020 will expire and be removed from the membership roster.Membership categories will be:Individual member: $65Student/retired member: $35Institutional member: $100(continued next page…)Renewals will be billed annually in July via Paypal. A link to the new Paypal account for IASC will be provided on the updated IASC web site.Benefits of membership:Reduced conference registration feesAutomatic/gratis journal subscriptionMembers-only online discussion board for scholarly interreligious, interdisciplinary, intercultural, international exchange Free access to IASC webinarsOpportunities to propose article publications, workshop/paper presentationsWe are excited by the new possibilities before us, and we hope that you will join us in shaping the future of our organization as we move forward with these plans. Again, we welcome your questions and suggestions at our new email address: intspircare@, and we look forward to your participation in our Webinar next summer.Blessings on your life and work,Pamela Cooper-WhiteIASC President---Dean and Vice President for Academic Affairs;Christiane Brooks Johnson Professor of Psychology and ReligionUnion Theological Seminary3041 BroadwayNew York, NY 10027, USA ................
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