Calvin Ross – Ministry: Finding Purpose in Pastoral Care and Ethics

Calvin Ross

Calvin Ross earned a Master of Divinity (‘68) and Master of Theology (‘69) at Princeton Theological Seminary. He had chosen Princeton for a three year M.Div. in New Testament studies with Bruce Metzger, a world-leading authority in Paleography and Text Criticism. 

The biblically-centered studies were rewarding. Calvin became intrigued, though, with Pastoral Theology, so he took his academic pulse, checked his student budget, finished a refill at his favorite coffee shop on Nassau street, then quickly stepped toward another year in New Jersey and another degree. (Right, Calvin in 1960)

Following his graduations from Princeton, he meandered on an early career journey, eventually finding that pastoral care and biomedical ethics can count for something. After campus ministry at Carnegie Mellon and the U of Pittsburgh and then two congregational ministries, he earned a PhD (‘86) from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville with a Pastoral Counseling and Ethics residency in the Psychiatry Department at U of Louisville School of Medicine.

In 1986 Dr. Ross joined the faculty at Emmanuel Christian Seminary, TN in Pastoral Theology—including a stint as Academic Dean. Left, Emmanuel Christian Seminary)  While at  Emmanuel, he convened a community task force to establish a pastoral care department at the Johnson City Medical Center—now Ballad Health, an alliance of 21 hospitals in Tennessee and Virginia. 

On the search committee for the department’s first chaplain, Calvin promoted hiring a certified supervisor in Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), a well-established program for teaching pastoral skills. He noted that CPE would expand quality pastoral education in the four-state area and that some denominations require it for ministerial ordination. A Lutheran CPE supervisor was hired. 

Right, Johnson City Medical Center

After Emmanuel, Calvin joined the hospital alliance and the CPE faculty as Senior Chaplain. Favoring clinical settings for teaching, he contends, “There is no better place for pastoral care than being with a person whose life is coming apart, where personal faith itself can be intensively tested in the ICU.” He further believes that caregivers’ vulnerability and honest introspection can renew their own faith. “Waters run deep,” he says, “in an authentic presence for others in uncertain times of suffering, fear, loss, and spiritual search.”

On a regional scale, Calvin and colleagues organized a series of Faith and Medicine conferences for health care providers of all disciplines. One year he drew upon his training in narrative therapy to organize a conference, “Once Upon an Illness,” highlighting the potential healing power of stories. 

In the rich dynamics of hospital settings, Calvin became increasingly interested in biomedical ethics. Involvement in the Ethics Committee led to his supervising a team of physicians, chaplains, nurses, administrators, social workers, and community representatives set apart as ethics consultants. The consultants, scheduled for 24/7 on-call availability, identified ethical principles to guide complicated cases—often around decisions for cure or comfort care for patients of all ages, even at times involving prenatal issues. Most consultations (90%) were ordered by attending physicians for either another opinion on a difficult case or a cover for possible later litigation.

“I found providing and teaching biomedical ethics,” Calvin says, “was a natural fit for my values as a pastoral educator.” As an initiative to bring clinical ethics into the academic classroom, he co-created and co-taught an interdisciplinary, elective course for graduate students at Emmanuel, ETSU College of Nursing and Quillen College of Medicine.  “For a few years prior to retirement,” he says, “this course gave me further opportunity to explore ethics as a feature of narrative medicine.” Narrative medicine  values physicians’ learning how to listen carefully to a patient’s self-reporting and to accounts of other specialists for a more complete and accurate history and diagnosis.

Calvin and his wife Nancy, who taught at Milligan University, have endowed a biennial Ross-Smith Lectureship in Pastoral Care at Emmanuel for seminarians, pastors, ethicists, physicians, and other health care students and practitioners. For each event, a speaker from among prominent pastoral educators or medical experts across the country brings three lectures and interacts in other formats with the attendees. The  2019 lectures were on pastoral preaching by Thomas Long, whom Calvin had first heard decades earlier in a chapel service at Princeton. “During our negotiation with him,” Calvin comments, “it came as no surprise when I read that Baylor University had named Professor Long as one of the twelve most effective preachers in the English-speaking world.”

Now retired, Calvin has found a setting for teaching which tops it all for satisfaction and fun—ski instruction with grandkids at nearby Beech and Sugar mountain resorts in NC. (“Nice snowplow turns, Marin! You can teach Taj and Dev. Next, we’ll practice stem christies on Lower Flying Mile. You and Maia get in the lift line together. I’ll ride with Charlie.”)

Calvin shared “a pastoral moment” from his practice.