Your offering supports the ministry of our chaplains.
Chaplaincy and Care Ministry has a blessed history. The chaplains who served in World War Two and those in our Christian Healthcare Centers expanded the ministry horizons of our church and cast a vision of ministry to children of God in special settings. Chaplains struggled with doing ministry outside the comfortable walls of the church and the ordered and structured life of familiar institutional patterns. They were in the unfamiliar territory of another’s institution. God blessed their ministry and many became experts in pastoral care.
We are rejoicing that God continues to work in congregations to call men and women to this ministry. Chaplains carry the love of Christ to people who are on battlefields, in hospitals, in prisons, in distress and pain, and in the shadow of death. We continue to thank God that the spiritual or religious dimension of human life is recognized by secular institutions as vital to a person’s life and health, which needs attending to by chaplains who are specially trained in pastoral ministry. God has given us the blessing of being a keeper of sacred things.
Currently we have ninty-four active full-time chaplains, twenty-one part-time and twenty-three students. We have been blessed as a church to have many of our chaplains in leadership positions in the institutions in which they work and in the professional chaplain organizations in which they have membership. The reputation for excellence in pastoral care of our denominational chaplains should be celebrated as a wonderful gift from God to men and women in the institutions where our chaplains minister.
Our numbers in the military chaplaincy are shrinking especially in the reserves. We currently have in the active services: two United States Air Force chaplains, seven Army chaplains, seven Navy chaplains, and three in the Canadian Military. In the reserves: one Air Force; and four Army. Many of our military chaplains have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. As I write this, we have two Army chaplains deployed; one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. We are thankful to God for these chaplains, their families and their ministry to the men and women in the armed services of the United States.
National Guard and Reserves components of our military services offer the possibility of living in two great worlds of ministry: continuing service to a local congregation, while also ministering part-time in the armed forces. We encourage pastors to prayerfully consider this vital and rewarding ministry.
Thank you for your support.
