How did the psychiatric education detailed in the previous chapter ultimately affect most young ministers? Did it usually lead them astray, as it appeared to do to Edward Moriarty? Did it leave ministers such as Reverend Dunshee – who later left the ministry for a career as a therapist – to stand in judgment of ardent evangelists such as Reverend Wood? Did the clinical pastoral education (CPE) students find, as did Charles Clayton Morrison, editor of the Christian Century, that after having “baptized the whole Christian tradition in the waters of psychological empiricism,” “what I had left was hardly more than a moralistic ghost of the distinctive Christian reality”? Morrison continued:

Morrison wrote that in 1939, at the movement's beginning. A shared CPE curriculum and standards were not yet in place. The pioneering Council for Clinical Training (CCT) was in its most radical stage, independent of religious institutions and answerable, in part, to doctors. However, chaplains and ministers soon took over the group. Furthermore, CCT's need for students and financial sustenance eventually forced it to forge closer ties with seminaries, to which it became increasingly responsible.