If the parish ministry is often regarded as at the heart of the life of the church, whether Anglican or otherwise, the more specialised ministry of chaplaincies within the church can sometimes touch lives more closely at formative or traumatic moments. This issue of the journal is largely devoted to essays by chaplains working in different institutions, reflecting theologically and pastorally on their work and vocations.
Chaplains in the educational sector have long occupied key roles in the life of schools, colleges and universities. As education becomes more and more secularised and our societies more and more religiously diversified, so the role of the Christian chaplain has changed and in many ways has become more complex. At a time when many might question the very need for a Christian chaplain, those called to such a ministry in schools and colleges often find themselves working alongside colleagues from other faiths and indeed none. Yet as our papers here indicate, the chaplain in such institutions frequently remains a key figure in the educational and social development of young lives, often the first person called upon in times of bereavement, stress or trauma.
Chaplains in missions to seafarers work to a greater extent hidden from the larger society beyond the often displaced world of seafarers. Yet such ministry can often provide a degree of security and stability in the lives of men and women who spend months away from their homes and families in often dangerous and difficult conditions. So, too, the work of chaplains in prisons and detention centres helps to give meaning and hope to lives that are often broken almost beyond repair. In prisons chaplains have to walk a delicate path between authority and the ministry of service in the church in conditions that can be dangerous and remote from the lives of most other people. The same things may be said of the work of chaplains within the armed forces as they Minister alongside men and women whose work is often dangerous and isolated.
A great deal has been written and spoken about the ministry of chaplains in hospitals and hospices, where the term ‘spirituality’ has developed new meanings and significance. Healthcare chaplains, both lay and ordained, often find themselves beside people in moments of enormous stress, pain and fear, and they participate in processes of decision making that may be literally matters of life and death.
Chaplains may be ordained priests and ministers, or they may be laypeople within the different churches and denominations of the Christian Church. In each of these testimonies and reflections, there is evidence of ministers working on the boundaries of the Church and exploring societies whose allegiance and engagement with the Church is often ebbing if not being rejected. As interpreters of such changes, their voices are all the more important in a period in which the Church, increasingly speaking to itself, fails to listen to those who no longer speak its language. The chaplain’s capacity for attentive and listening presence might, if these articles teach us nothing else, be a skill the wider Church would benefit from learning afresh if it is to offer meaningful answers to the questions of life and death that remain powerful and pertinent in the lives of the people chaplains serve.
As editors we are grateful for all our authors who have contributed to this issue.