Emeritus Educator

Rev. Mary Martha Thiel

ACPE is pleased to announce that Rev. Mary Martha Thiel has been named as the 2025 Emeritus Educator Honoree.

Midwestern by birth, the daughter of a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution an Estonian refugee from World War II, and a lesbian, Mary Martha learned early to be curious about and empathetic towards other people's stories and trauma. Throughout her career, she has kept expanding her worldview and boundaries in ways that are congruent with her history.

She has been a UCC minister since 1985 and a board-certified chaplain in APC since 1988. She was certified as a CPE Supervisor in 1997 and has worked as a CPE educator since then. She is now retiring as Director of CPE from Hebrew SeniorLife. Her career has been rich and full.

It has been a privilege for Rev. Thiel to contribute to the field of chaplaincy. She began her chaplaincy career at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx, and end-of-life care has remained a theme throughout her professional years. She then transitioned to supervisory training with Bill Nisi and Sr. Dorothy Cotterell at Interfaith Health Care Ministries in Providence RI. From there, she was hired at Massachusetts General Hospital, where she served in leadership of the department and as CPE supervisor for 11 years. With her colleague, Sr. Sheila Hammond, she helped create CPE for Healthcare Professionals, the first program funded by the Kenneth B. Schwartz Center. Training healthcare professionals to incorporate a generalist level of spiritual care into the practice of their disciplines has been another theme of her career. The work has involved CPE units for non-chaplains, workshops in various hospitals, and online courses through CSU Shiley Haynes Institute for Palliative Care and Union Theological Seminary in New York.

Mary Martha did CPE at Havenwood-Heritage Heights and Beverly Hospital and then settled into 17 years at Hebrew SeniorLife. While at HSL, she co-taught an Interfaith Chaplaincy course with her colleague Rabbi Beth Naditch at Andover Newton Theological Seminary. It has been a justice commitment of hers to create a CPE program centered in Judaism and care of elders – another professional theme.

Curious about how many Jewish Americans consider themselves "not religious," she applied for and received a Louisville Institute Grant in 2014-15 to study spiritual care of the nonreligious. This turned into a fourth theme of her career, an APC Chaplain Symposium presentation in 2016, and numerous speaking engagements – including for an ACPE conference, a series of three PlainViews articles, a series of three webinars for the ACPE Academy, and co-teaching a course on the topic at Boston University School of Theology and Union Theological Seminary.

This work then led her to consider another demographic group disproportionately unaffiliated: the LGBTQ community, especially elders. This became a fifth theme of her chaplaincy career, and she has written and taught widely on the topic, including in a 2020 webinar for ACPE that is still used in some CPE programs.

For ACPE, she served on the Finance Committee, several annual conference committees, and for seven years on the Certification Commission, during which she was the first Theory Integration Mentor. Since 2019, she has been an active member of the Anti-Bias Working Group. She also serves on several PAGs and on the Senior Advisory Board for the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab.

Rev. Thiel has had the privilege of contributing to CPE and chaplaincy in creative and diverse ways. We invite you to join us in honoring her exceptional contributions to our field. Mary Martha will be recognized at the Opening Commencement Ceremony on May 19, 2025, during the 2025 ACPE Annual Conference in Minneapolis, MN.