Subscribe to CRN blog updates
Choose the audiences you want to hear from. Select All for every audience, or select one or more individual audiences.
(c) 2026 Marsh Institute for Chaplains. Chaplain Resource Network is an initiative of the Marsh Institute for Chaplains. All rights reserved.
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 ...
A chaplain scope-of-role agreement is the quietest document in your agency and one of the most important. It tells staff, volunteers, and the people you serve exactly what a chaplain does and does not do. Without it, a chaplain drifts into roles they were never trained for, and trust erodes on all s...
The hardest door a new chaplain opens is the one no one asked them to knock on. A cold visit, walking into a room where the person did not request you, tests every instinct a learner has. You feel like an intruder. You are not. You are an offer the person is free to decline, and learning to make tha...
Conflict at the bedside rarely starts with the patient. It starts with a frightened family, a hard prognosis, and two relatives who love the same person in opposite ways. The chaplain who walks into that room carries no authority to decide anything, and that is exactly the strength. Your job is to l...
You can talk to a chaplain even if you are not religious. A chaplain is not there to convert you, correct you, or pray over you without asking. A good chaplain meets you where you are and follows your lead, faith or no faith.
Many people assume chaplains are only for the devout. They are not. Chapl...
Chaplain formation is a long-term investment, not a one-time gift. A single training event produces a certificate. Sustained formation produces a chaplain who can sit with a dying stranger at three in the morning and know what to do. Donors who understand the difference fund the second thing.
The t...
Agency partners often ask a fair question: how do we know chaplain care is working? You can answer it honestly without ever breaking a confidence. Measure the pattern of care, not the content of any conversation, and you protect both accountability and trust.
Leaders need evidence that a chaplaincy...
Learning to sit in silence is one of the hardest disciplines a new chaplain faces. The urge to fill a quiet room with words is strong, and it usually serves the chaplain's discomfort, not the person's need. Presence, not speech, carries most of the work.
Silence feels like doing nothing. In chaplai...
