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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.
A container ship ties up at 06:00 and sails again before midnight. In those eighteen hours, a crew of twenty-two, most of them nine months from home, has one chance to reach a store, a phone signal, and a friendly face. On the dock stands a port chaplain with a van, a pocket full of SIM cards, and t...
Airports are built for going somewhere, which makes them a hard place to fall apart. Yet that is exactly where bad news often lands: the phone call at the gate, the diagnosis you are flying home to face, the funeral at the other end of the boarding pass. If a journey has ever collapsed on you mid-tr...
At Gate 14, a young soldier waits out a two-hour delay before the flight that starts her deployment. Three gates down, a man is flying home to bury his father, and the phone call that changed his week came while he stood in the security line. Behind the counter, a gate agent has absorbed a full morn...
The Ministry of the Long Hallway
Most chaplaincy settings are built around an episode: a hospital stay, a deployment, a crisis call. Senior living is different. The chaplain who serves a retirement community, assisted living facility, or skilled nursing floor may walk the same hallway past the same ...
Moving a parent into senior living may be the hardest right decision your family ever makes. The paperwork says relocation, but the heart says something closer to loss. Guilt, grief, and second-guessing often arrive the same week the moving truck does. A chaplain can walk this road with you, and you...
Down the hall of a senior living community, a resident is grieving a spouse of sixty years, a nurse aide is carrying her third resident death this month, and a family in the lobby is wrestling with a move-in decision that feels like a betrayal. A senior living chaplain walks that hall every week and...
When the Campus Phone Rings at 2 a.m.
A student death, a suicide attempt in a residence hall, a car accident over a long weekend: campus crises arrive without warning and ripple through a community where thousands of young adults live, study, and grieve together. The education chaplain who has alrea...
When someone you love goes to prison or jail, the sentence lands on the whole family. There is the shock of the arrest, the strain of court dates, and then the long quiet stretch of visits, phone calls, and empty chairs at the table. Many families carry this in silence because the shame feels heavie...
No ambulance brings a community chaplain to the scene. They are already there. They live three streets over, know the pastors and the police shift commanders by name, and get the call when a family loses a home to fire or a neighborhood loses a teenager. Community chaplaincy is the quiet backbone of...
The Knock No One Wants to Make
Death notification is one of the few duties a chaplain performs where the ministry begins before a single word is spoken. The moment a marked unit and a chaplain walk up the driveway, the family at the window already knows something is wrong. What happens in the next t...
A dementia diagnosis changes a family twice. First comes the news itself, often after months of worry about missed names and repeated questions. Then comes the long road after, where the person you love is still here and yet keeps changing. Many families carry this alone. A chaplain can walk it with...
The tones drop at 2 a.m. An ambulance crew runs a cardiac arrest, a pediatric call, and a highway fatality before the shift ends. The patients go to the hospital or the morgue. The medics go back in service. Somebody has to care for the caregivers, and that somebody is an EMS chaplain. Donor support...
