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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.
The Long Middle of a Disaster
Most training prepares a chaplain for the first hours of a disaster: the staging area, the initial death notifications, the shock. Fewer chaplains are prepared for the long middle, the second and third week when the cameras leave, the adrenaline fades, and families are ...
Nothing rearranges a family faster than a child in a hospital bed. Meals happen in waiting rooms, siblings stay with neighbors, and parents learn a new vocabulary of monitors, rounds, and specialists. Most families accept every clinical resource offered to them. Fewer realize that the chaplain who s...
Hospice chaplains work where every other service has finished its list. The medications are ordered, the equipment is delivered, the schedule is set. What remains is the part no checklist covers: a person facing the end of life, and a family learning how to sit beside it. Donor support is what keeps...
Addiction rarely announces itself on its own timeline. It surfaces at a holiday dinner, in a phone call from a hospital, or in the quiet moment you realize someone you love has been lying to you for months. In that moment, families often reach for a counselor, a program, or a support group. Few thin...
A fire company does not know which alarm will be routine and which will be the one that changes a crew for good. That uncertainty is the job. It is also why fire departments that keep a chaplain on call are not adding a courtesy position. They are closing a gap that shift work cannot close on its ow...
The waiting room outside surgery has its own kind of silence. A phone stays face-up on a knee, in case the surgeon calls. Coffee goes cold. Someone keeps checking the clock on the wall against the clock on their phone, as if one of them might move faster. Nobody in that room can do anything to chang...
A workplace chaplain rarely gets advance notice. A supervisor calls because an employee just took a phone call about a parent in the ICU. HR calls because a warehouse team lost a coworker to an overdose over the weekend and the shift starts in an hour. A chaplain who is already credentialed, already...
The Announcement Nobody Wants to Give
Layoffs rarely arrive with warning. HR schedules a series of short meetings, security escorts start at the end of the hall, and by mid-afternoon half a department is gone. A workplace chaplain does not attend to stop the layoff. That decision was made in a board...
Public safety chaplaincy runs on a schedule that does not stop for fundraising cycles. Police, fire, and EMS crews rotate through nights, weekends, and holidays, and a crisis does not check a chaplain's coverage roster before it happens. A department that can only afford a chaplain for business hour...
Fire service chaplaincy runs on two very different clocks. Most of the work happens in the slow hours: sitting in the day room, riding along on routine calls, learning a crew's names and inside jokes. Then, without warning, the clock changes. A structure fire, a firefighter down, a line-of-duty inju...
When a doctor says the word "hospice," most families hear it as a countdown. It is not. Hospice is a shift in the goal of care, from curing to comforting, and a chaplain's role inside that shift is to make sure no one walks through it alone.
If your family is facing this season, here is what a chap...
Education chaplaincy rarely shows results in a single semester. A chaplain who walks a campus for years builds the kind of trust that lets a student open up in the first five minutes of a crisis instead of the last five minutes before they leave the office. That trust is the product of sustained pre...
