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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.
An airport is a small city that never fully sleeps: tens of thousands of travelers a day, thousands of employees on shifting rosters, and somewhere in every terminal, right now, a person having the worst day of their life. A missed connection to a parent's deathbed. A soldier flying home to a funera...
Most senior living communities can staff dining, nursing, and activities, yet the questions residents carry at 2 a.m. belong to none of those departments. Who am I now that I cannot do what I did? Why did God let me outlive my husband? What happens when I die? Administrators of assisted living, memo...
When a tornado levels a neighborhood or a flood empties a county, emergency managers coordinate shelter, supplies, and search teams within hours. The spiritual and emotional weight of the disaster arrives just as fast, and it stays long after the trucks leave. Many emergency management agencies and ...
An EMS crew meets people on the worst day of their lives, then clears the scene and runs the next call. The stress does not clear with the scene. Agency directors know this, and many are considering a chaplain program. A chaplaincy partnership serves an EMS agency well only when the agreement is cle...
A hospice medical director signs a chaplain partnership expecting bedside visits and family support during active dying. What the agreement rarely spells out is who the chaplain answers to when the family's faith tradition conflicts with the interdisciplinary team's care plan, or when a patient revo...
A base commander signs off on a chaplain partnership expecting presence at memorial services and the occasional counseling referral. What the agreement rarely spells out is what happens at 0300 when a unit takes a loss overseas and the chaplain is the first call before the casualty notification team...
A volunteer fire chief invites a chaplain to start showing up at calls. Six months later the chaplain is doing death notifications, riding out to structure fires, sitting in on peer support debriefs, and fielding 2 a.m. calls from firefighters' spouses, all without a single line written down about w...
A police chief calls looking for a chaplain program. Six months in, without a written agreement, the chaplain is answering ride-along requests, notification duty, peer support, and community outreach all at once, and no one on command staff can say where the role ends. The partnership fails not beca...
A jail administrator does not open the doors to a chaplain the way a hospital opens them to a visiting member of clergy. Every clearance, every hour on the unit, and every conversation the chaplain has with an inmate carries a security and liability question the administrator has to answer before si...
An agency signs a chaplaincy agreement once and rarely opens the document again. The chaplain changes shifts, the department gains a new chief, a program that started as one visit a week becomes three, and no one revisits the paper that was supposed to govern the relationship. Most partnership frict...
A school does not need a theology department to know it needs a chaplain. Grief shows up in a hallway between classes. A student's home crisis spills into a third-period exam. A staff member burns out quietly for a semester before anyone notices. What most campuses lack is not the need, it is a writ...
