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(c) 2026 Marsh Institute for Chaplains. Chaplain Resource Network is an initiative of the Marsh Institute for Chaplains. All rights reserved.
Caring for an aging parent changes the shape of a family's daily life long before anyone calls it a crisis. The doctor's appointments multiply, the phone calls get harder, and the caregiver in the middle often stops noticing how tired they have become. A chaplain is one of the few people who shows u...
Corrections chaplains work inside a building designed for control, where a single unmanaged moment can escalate into a safety incident for staff, incarcerated people, and the chaplain standing between them. Working chaplains in this field carry a dual charge: hold pastoral presence steady while neve...
Military chaplaincy formation does not start on your first deployment. It starts long before, in the study and mentoring that shapes how you will carry yourself the first time a service member trusts you with something they have not told anyone else. Learners preparing for this field often focus on ...
A corporate chaplaincy program can go one of two ways. Done well, it becomes trusted infrastructure employees actually use in a hard week. Done poorly, it becomes a line item nobody understands, staffed by someone with no clear scope, no reporting boundary, and no relationship to HR. The difference ...
Most people meet a hospital chaplain only once, in the hardest hour of their life, and never think about who trained that chaplain to walk into the room well. Healthcare chaplaincy formation is invisible by design. The person at the bedside is visible. The years of preparation behind that presence a...
When a disaster hits your community, whether a flood, a fire, a storm, or something sudden and violent, help usually arrives in visible forms first: shelter, water, medical care. A chaplain often arrives quietly alongside all of it, and many families do not realize they can ask for one, or what a ch...
Most donors picture chaplaincy in a hospital hallway or beside a police cruiser. Few picture it behind a locked gate, inside a facility most people never see and would rather not think about. Corrections chaplaincy is one of the hardest fields to serve well, and one of the least resourced.
This gui...
A city agency, a nonprofit, or a neighborhood coalition that wants to add chaplain support usually starts with the right instinct and the wrong first step. The instinct is real: staff and residents are carrying more than the agency's services can hold. The wrong first step is recruiting a chaplain b...
Your first campus visit will not feel like the hospital rounds or ride-along scenarios you trained on. A hospital room hands you a reason to be there. A dorm hallway or a student union does not. You have to earn the reason yourself, in real time, with people who did not ask a chaplain to show up.
T...
A deployment does not test a chaplain once. It tests presence three separate times: before the unit leaves, while it is gone, and after it comes home. Each stage carries its own weight, and each one asks something different of the chaplain who walks with the service member and the family left behind...
Meeting a chaplain for the first time can feel uncertain. You may wonder if they will preach at you, report what you say, or expect you to believe something you do not. None of that is what a chaplain is for. A chaplain is a trained, confidential presence who meets you where you are, on your terms, ...
When you give to chaplain formation, you rarely see the moment your gift matters. You do not stand in the trauma bay at 3 a.m. or sit with the family in the quiet room. Yet your gift is present there, carried in the training, the supervision, and the standards that shaped the chaplain who did stand ...
