Support group leader certification is the path to holding a room for people who arrive frightened, grieving, or freshly thrown out. Two gates in it are never waived for anyone. The full path is published below so you know exactly what you are agreeing to before you begin.
Support group leader certification is for people who can hold steady while someone else falls apart. That is a specific and unglamorous capacity: staying in the room, keeping time, letting a silence sit, noticing the participant who has gone quiet, and ending on time even when the conversation is good. Lived experience of what a group covers matters here and is genuinely an asset. It is not by itself a qualification.
It is not for someone still in the acute part of their own injury, and saying so is care rather than exclusion. Leading a group is not where you work out your own unhealed hurt. A room organised around the leader’s need — for the story to land, for the group to agree, for someone to be told off on the leader’s behalf — costs the participants the thing they came for. Most people who are told to wait are told to come back in a year, and a good number of them do.
It is also not a substitute for clinical training and does not pretend to be. A certified leader is not a therapist and is not asked to act like one. The skill being certified is running a peer support room well and knowing precisely where its edge is.
Enrolment is open and the first cohort is being received now. If the answer for you is not yet, you will be told that directly, with a reason, and the door stays open.
A written application and an unhurried conversation. Why this group, what you have lived through, where you are with it now, and what you would do in the first ninety seconds of someone disclosing abuse in your room.
Run before any contact with participants. A record does not end an application automatically; it triggers a documented review rather than a private judgement. Nothing here has a fee, including this.
Required — not waivableCompleted before you sit in a room as a leader and kept current thereafter. Oregon clergy and certified leaders are mandatory reporters under ORS 419B.010, and the training covers what that obliges you to do personally.
Required — not waivableFacilitation and time-keeping; boundaries; confidentiality and its limits, taught explicitly; religious trauma and what clergy harm does to a person’s relationship with a room like this; crisis recognition and referral. Taught from the written course of study, not improvised.
Against the published coursework, including scenarios: the participant who monopolises, the disclosure mid-session, the person who arrives intoxicated, the participant who asks you for therapy. It can be failed, and failing means repeating the material.
You co-facilitate with an experienced leader before you lead alone, with debriefs after each session. No one’s first solo room is their first room.
Required — not waivableTraining currency, a boundaries review, an honest conversation about how it is going, and a check on your own load. Certification lapses if renewal lapses, and lapsing is treated as ordinary rather than shameful.
What a certified leader may do
Hold the room, keep time, set and enforce the group’s boundaries, share their own experience where it serves the group, and connect people to resources and to the Chancery. Facilitation is the office; the participants do the work.
What a certified leader may not do
Provide therapy, diagnose, advise on medication or medical transition, take a participant into a private pastoral or personal relationship, handle a participant’s money, or promise a confidentiality the law does not allow. None of these become permissible with experience.
On referral
Referring a participant to a clinician is a duty, not a failure. A leader who refers has correctly identified the edge of their competence, which is the single most protective thing anyone in that chair can do.
On reporting
A disclosure of abuse goes to civil authority immediately, before and independent of any internal process, and no office of this church may delay it. Not dispensable by anyone, including the Ordinary. Oregon Child Abuse Hotline: 855-503-SAFE (855-503-7233).
What is said in a group stays in the group, with limits that are stated aloud at the beginning of every session rather than buried in a form. A leader must report suspected abuse of a child or a vulnerable adult. A leader will act where there is immediate danger to life. Nothing said in a support group is a sacramental confession, and this church reads the clergy-penitent privilege of ORS 40.260 narrowly — it covers sacramental confession and nothing else.
Saying that plainly at the start costs a leader nothing and protects everyone. A participant who knows the limits can choose what to bring; a participant who learns them afterward has been misled by omission. Leaders are taught the exact words and are expected to use them.
Groups are free, have no fee of any kind, and require no membership, belief, or documentation to attend. What a leader may never do is make attendance the price of pastoral care or assistance.
The first cohort of support group leader certification is being received now. Applications are answered by the Office of the Ordinary within two days.
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