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 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...
The Setting Is Different From Any Classroom
Public safety chaplaincy puts a learner in rooms no textbook fully prepares for: a fire station bay at 3 a.m., the back of a squad car after a bad call, a briefing room before a shift no one wants to work. If you are stepping into this field for the first ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Every CPE learner writes a first verbatim, and almost every learner writes it wrong in the same way: they hand in a transcript that reads like a play script, then wait to find out what they missed. The verbatim is not a performance record. It is a formation tool, and supervisors read it looking for ...
EMS chaplaincy does not happen in an office. It happens in the back of a moving ambulance, on a curb after a call has cleared, or in the twelve minutes between a code and the next dispatch. A chaplain who cannot function in that environment cannot serve EMS crews at all, because that environment is ...
Miscarriage and pregnancy loss carry a grief that often goes unacknowledged. Friends may not know what to say, and the loss can feel invisible to a world that never met the child you were already loving. A chaplain is one of the few people trained to sit with exactly that kind of grief, without rush...
