No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
Throughout its 50 years, the Christian Association for Psychological Studies (CAPS) has had several outstanding individuals at its helm. On the occasion of CAPS' golden anniversary, the two remaining past directors came together to offer their memories of CAPS' history, and comment on some of the challenges that have given form to the current organization. From 1956-1990 by J. Harold Ellens, Ph.D. I had the accidental, distinguished privilege of being present at the founding meeting of the Christian Association for Psychological Studies, which at that time was struggling with naming itself something like the Reformed Conference of Theology and Psychology. The inspiring force behind it was Dr. Klaire Kuiper. He had an incredibly generative mind. He wrote a letter to several leading people in the Christian Reformed Church, of which he was a member and an elder, and to their counterparts in the Reformed Church of America. Most of those present at the first meeting were from the Christian Reformed Church. They included people like Professor John Daling, who was on the faculty of Calvin College and was the chair of the psychology department at that time, Dr. William Hiemstra, who was a chaplain at Pinerest Christian Hospital, and represented the Reformed Church of America, and the Reverend Mr. Henry Schultze, president of Calvin College, who put his blessing on that founding meeting, held in the Calvin College Campus Center. Other founding members included, I believe, the Reverend Mr. Edward Heerema, who functioned as the second executive secretary; and Dr. Gordon De Young. In the early years the executive secretary was elected each year. The initial gathering met for a day or two at Calvin College, and that was the accidental occasion for my having been there. I was walking from Calvin Seminary with the Reverend Mr. Harold Dekker. He was professor of missions, and we were heading for a cup of coffee in the Campus Center. He suggested that there was a meeting going on there about psychology and theology; and proposed that we poke our heads in there to see how that was going. We stood in the back of the room for about an hour while Dr. Klaire Kuiper explained his vision for an association of scholars and practitioners who would study together the relatioinship between psychology and theology. Dr. Hiemstra responded with what that vision looked like from the point of view of a chaplain in a mental hospital. Thus it was that CAPS was established in 1956 and I was inadvertently present on the occasion. That year I graduated from the seminary, went off to the Army chaplaincy, and eventually actually became a formal member of CAPS in 1962. The early years were sparse years, organizationally and administratively. On the average, for the first 5 years, the number of people associated with CAPS would have been about 100. It is interesting that immediately they began to publish the proceedings of the Christian Association for Psychological Studies. I think it was William Hiemstra who came up with the title, CAPS, and got it into the record, even before he became the executive director. Thus CAPS got its name early in its history, thanks to his thoughtful wisdom, and has held it ever since. Within a decade of when I became a member of CAPS, we had a convention in the Detroit area with about 150-200 people attending. When I took over as the executive director in 1974, there could not have been more than 350 members. The thing I want to make very clear about that period between 1964, when CAPS was really on the road, and 1974, when I became executive director, was that the quality of presentations subsequently published in the proceedings was unusually scholarly and thoughtfully theological. Any one wishing a good education in the interface between psychology and theology would do well to go back and read those early published lectures. In those years, the lecturers were very carefully selected and invited to address the convention. …
Loading…
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.