‘We are All Disaster Chaplains Now’: Pastoral Accountability and Planning Care in Pandemic Reality

ABSTRACT

Disaster chaplains are there to support the temporal mission of disaster response and recovery, and the spiritual realities of symbolizing the presence and care of the divine. These two dimensions of chaplaincy speak of a systemic accountability. This article focuses on the formation of pastoral accountability in seminary education, chaplaincy practice, and disaster spiritual care. Drawing on the work of Carrie Doehring, it discusses the need to foreground safety and accountability during the COVID-19 pandemic, where religious leaders are called on to practice in ways more familiar to chaplains, being dually accountable to the temporal realities of pandemic protocols as well as pastoral realities, requiring acts of both compassion and assertion. The COVID-19 disaster highlights the need in seminary education to teach not just a trauma-informed approach, but a ‘disaster-informed’ approach, highlighting a systemic accountability needed in the long haul of disasters that require both immediate and sustained response.

KEYWORDS:

• disaster chaplaincy
• pastoral accountability
• CAIRA
• pastoral care
• COVID-19 pandemic
• disaster-informed approach

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See Swain, “The T.Mort. Chaplaincy at Ground Zero”, regarding the formation of the SAIR team.

2 Serban, “Attending to the Dead,”255–6.

3 Swain, CAIRA.

4 Doehring, The Practice of Pastoral Care: A Postmodern Approach, Revised and Expanded.

5 Doehring, The Practice of Pastoral Care.

6 Ibid.

7 Herman, Trauma and Recovery.

8 Doehring, The Practice of Pastoral Care, 133.

9 Fortune and Poling, “Calling to Accountability”. Fortune is most known for Is Nothing Sacred: When Sex Invades the Pastoral Relationship (San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row, 1989).

10 Doehring, The Practice of Pastoral Care, 174.

11 https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-pandemic-h1n1.html Last accessed June 22, 2021.

12 “Clergy Ethics,” 162.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Storm Swain

Storm Swain is a leader in the field of Disaster Spiritual Care and has been an invited lecturer in Australia, Denmark, New Zealand, and the United States, being most known for her book Trauma and Transformation at Ground Zero: A Pastoral Theology, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011).