The Mission of CPE is experience-based theological education which combines the practice of Spiritual and Pastoral Care with qualified supervision and peer group reflection and which is grounded in a person-centered approach to religious ministry.
 

An added richness of the CPE program here at MSHA is the location. As this excerpt from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appalachia) shows, there is some dispute about exactly what constitutes the Appalachian region. 

“The first major attempt to map Appalachia as a distinctive cultural region came in the 1890s with the efforts of Berea College president William Goodell Frost, whose "Appalachian America" included 194 counties in eight states.^[4] In 1921, John C. Campbell published The Southern Highlander and His Homeland in which he modified Frost's map to include 254 counties in 9 states. A landmark survey of the region in the following decade by the United States Department of Agriculture defined the region as consisting of 206 counties in 6 states. In 1984, Karl Raitz and Richard Ulack expanded the ARC's definition to include 445 counties in 13 states, although they removed all counties in Mississippi and added two in New Jersey. Historian John Alexander Williams, in his 2002 book Appalachia: A History, distinguished between a "core" Appalachian region consisting of 164 counties in West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia, and a greater region defined by the ARC.^[2]” 

 
However the region is defined, Mountain States Health Alliance serves the people who live in the “heartland” of the Appalachian culture and geography.  Our patients, families and team members are from a rich culture and our CPE program explores the uniqueness of healthcare in this “place” and with this “people.”