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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 Parish Has No Address
Most chaplaincy settings hand the learner a building: a hospital, a firehouse, a ship, a locker room. Street chaplaincy hands you a sidewalk. Your parish is a stretch of blocks, an underpass, a shelter doorway, a bench outside the library. The people you serve carry everyth...
The man on the bench outside the library has been there every morning this month. The camp under the overpass grew by two tents since last week, and the woman who used to sit near the transit station is gone, and nobody can say where. A street chaplain reads a neighborhood the way a hospital chaplai...
Living outside strips life down to hard questions. Where will I sleep tonight? Is my stuff safe? Who can I trust? When home is a tent, a doorway, or the back seat of a car, most people walk past without meeting your eyes. A street chaplain is someone who stops.
Street chaplains serve on sidewalks, i...
It is nine o'clock on a cold Tuesday night, and a man in his fifties sits on a flattened cardboard box outside a closed pharmacy. He lost a warehouse job, then an apartment, then contact with his daughter, in that order, over fourteen months. Tonight a street chaplain stops, sits down on the curb be...
