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.
The Parish Arrives by Sea
Most chaplaincy settings let you build trust over months. A ship gives you hours. A vessel ties up, a crew of twenty steps ashore after weeks at sea, and by tomorrow night the berth is empty again. The engineer who has not seen his daughter in nine months, the deck cadet on...
A container ship ties up for eighteen hours, works cargo around the clock, and sails. Aboard are twenty crew members who may not have stepped on land in weeks, who are months into a nine-month contract, and who carry family news, good and bad, that arrived over a patchy connection somewhere at sea. ...
Most of the world's goods arrive by ship, carried by crews who spend months at a time away from everyone they love. If you are a seafarer, or you love one, you know the particular weight of that distance: birthdays missed, bad news arriving over a patchy connection, and a contract that does not end ...
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...