Many people are familiar with hospital and military chaplains. However, if you put the words community and chaplain together to form the title “Community Chaplain,” most often you will be met with a look of puzzlement and the obvious question: “What is a Community Chaplain?” Our desire is not only to answer this question, but to equip the prospective chaplain with the tools and training needed to serve the Lord in the greatest of mission fields – the sphere of influence in which God has placed YOU!
Background
Beyond the more traditional roles of chaplains in military and hospital settings, there are a growing number of professional chaplains serving in companies throughout the United States. While general business awareness is currently low, there are actually more than 4,000 chaplains serving in the American workplace today, and the trend toward the provision of chaplains caring for employees is on the upswing. Companies as small as Price’s Auto Body & Paint Shop of Raleigh, NC with 25 employees, and companies as large as Southeastern Freight Lines employing over 7,000, are seeing the benefits of caring for their most valuable of assets – their associates. However, it is not just private Christian-owned-and-operated companies fueling this trend. Even publicly held companies utilize workplace chaplains. Tyson Foods relies on 130 part-time chaplains serving in 242 plants to care for its workforce of 114,000. John Tyson, the grandson of the founder of the company and current CEO, is the driving force behind the program. This trend of receptivity to faith in the workplace is extending to other areas where people spend time: on little league sports fields, in community swimming pools and clubhouses, in book clubs, public school systems, city government and in neighborhoods throughout the country.
Community Chaplains of America
was born out of more than a decade of providing care in the workplace through Corporate Chaplains of America. The past eleven years of experience has been invested in accomplishing two things: first, serving the emotional and spiritual needs of employees and second, developing a process-managed system to provide a high level of standardized and repeatable care. These goals are being accomplished every day as chaplains traverse cubicle aisles, loading docks, and office buildings across America seeking to impact the lives of associates in crisis. Through Community Chaplains of America, this experience and knowledge base is now being applied to audiences beyond the workplace. It can be used to claim your community, your sphere of influence, for Christ. This process-managed approach to chaplaincy has been distilled into the Community Chaplain Empowerment Kit.The purpose of Community Chaplains of America is to train and empower those with a caring and compassionate heart to “build relationships with the hope of gaining permission to share the lifesaving good news of Jesus Christ in a non-threatening manner”.
What is a Community Chaplain?
Simply defined, a Community Chaplain is a personal and spiritual caregiver whose primary job is to serve the emotional, physical, spiritual, and personal needs of people in the community around him.
What is a process-managed approach to community chaplaincy?
A process-managed approach to community chaplaincy stipulates that chaplaincy care look the same in Raleigh, NC as it looks in Grants Pass, OR. Does this mean the chaplains look the same? The simple answer is no. Process management in chaplaincy means that the process of care provided to the community utilizes a consistency that spans culture, age, geography, and uniqueness of circumstances, in order to ensure that chaplains are responding in similar fashion throughout the various communities they serve. Process management is accomplished significantly through a proper training model, extends through the chaplain introduction process, and finds its completion through a consistency of response among chaplain team members to the variety of crises encountered.
Process management can be applied to community chaplaincy in this way: each chaplain has a specific mission field in which he serves. Relationships are built with those in his community, or mission field, over a period of time. As these relationships develop, the chaplain is positioned to serve as a pastoral caregiver to those found in their mission field. In essence, the chaplain is serving as a pastor to people who have no pastor. Care can include hospital visitation, marriage or family caregiving, and assistance with a variety of other difficult issues. The care provided is always at the initiation of the individual, and only after permission is granted by them. The community chaplain will act as a conduit of care between the church and those in the community.
Conclusion
The caregiving ministry provided by community chaplains is successful because it utilizes a very practical strategy to achieve a very focused goal. The goal is simple – the personal and spiritual care of people. The strategy is to reach people where they are by addressing their point of need during a moment of crisis.
In spite of the stress brought on by the competing demands of family and work responsibilities, people continue to ignore avenues such as counselors, employee assistance programs, and the church as sources of strength and support. Data from the Barna Research Group indicates that 60 percent of people do not attend church on a typical weekend. What this data indicates is that a significant majority of people encountered in the community environment have no pastor or other caregiver to turn to during a time of crisis. Perhaps an even more alarming statistic indicates that adults over age eighteen have only a 6 percent likelihood of accepting Christ as Savior. What this statistic tells us in simple terms is that only 6 percent are likely to discover a long term spiritual solution to the problems they face. It is the remaining majority that Community Chaplains seek to reach with the life-changing Good News of Jesus Christ.
Community Chaplain training is based on three foundational principals. First, a recognition of the importance of a biblical basis for chaplaincy. Second, our desire to provide tools to expand the work of community chaplaincy throughout the United States and eventually the world. Finally, to empower those people who have a care-giving heart to move out of their comfort zone and into what they already recognize God is calling them to do.
He felt great pity for the crowds that came, because their problems were so great and they didn’t know where to go for help. They were like sheep without a shepherd. He said to his disciples, ”The harvest is so great, but the workers are so few. So pray to the Lord who is in charge of the harvest; ask him to send out more workers for his fields” (Matthew 9:36-38 NLT).
