Browsing by Subject "Chaplaincy"

This thesis will examine hospital chaplaincy and its role within the changing paradigm of population health by addressing the question of what chaplaincy looks like beyond the walls of the hospital. The thesis will include several moves that account for the development of the profession and possible areas of growth in dialogue with public health and behavioral health. The first move is historical. This section will cover the development of chaplaincy at Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist and its relationship to counseling, community engagement, and accrediting bodies. It will also discuss the formation of FaithHealth as both a divisional identity as part of Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist and a distinct department of community engagement. The second move will be to present the role of chaplain manager within the division of FaithHealth of Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist and its pioneering work of integrating chaplaincy, community engagement, and licensed counseling. The third move will describe the function of chaplain managers during the coronavirus pandemic and the structure that allowed the model to adapt to a changing landscape. The final move will evaluate the role of chaplain managers from the individuals that assume these roles and leaders within the medical system and provide a snapshot into future possibilities for this role and innovative ministry opportunities.The purpose of this work is threefold: 1) to provide a model for integrating spiritual care, behavioral health and population health into the role of chaplain manager; 2) to advocate for the profession’s continued expansion by adapting chaplaincy’s skillsets in community health; 3) to begin a conversation about modifying educational and professional bodies to best prepare graduates and professionals for the changing landscape of healthcare. Such a model could provide clearer vocational pathways for dual degree divinity school programs and forge new partnerships between public health and divinity schools. Furthermore, given the reinstated associational connection between pastoral counseling and clinical pastoral education, this model of integration could create new associational paths to certification. The connection between pastoral counseling and chaplaincy that thrived before managed care will be revisited as it shows different, yet complementary, fruits of deeply rooted spiritual care.

This is a book about life-in-death work, what the Christian tradition has often called salvation or atonement. How does the life, arrest, trial, conviction, execution, and release from state-supervision of Jesus Christ enact the salvation of the cosmos. How does that one carceral life-in-death link up with life in the face of prison death today? I have sought to answer these questions by taking my body in and out of prison as a prison chaplain while conversing with other prison chaplains, theologian Karl Barth, and the biblical witness to Jesus Christ. In the tradition of theological ethnography, this work brings together theological and biblical reflection with data from a two-year, collaborative ethnography on current and former prison chaplains. This is the first nation-wide study of prison chaplaincy based on an interview protocol rather than a survey, and it provides a wealth of narratives on the complexities of prison chaplaincy, an understudied profession. Karl Barth serves as a conversation partner throughout because he enters the witness box as one who knows and writes the incarcerated Christ, has been arrested and convicted himself, and practiced prison chaplaincy as a volunteer chaplain at Basel Prison from 1954-1964.As a practical soteriology, this work describes how prison chaplains follow the arc of Jesus’ life and work. Chaplains follow Jesus’ incarnation in their ministry of presence, embodying the way that Jesus’ prophetic work threatens social divisions and death-dealing authorities. They receive the same death-threats that Jesus received and bear the impact of prisons in their bodies, being made sin for the sake of salvation. They stand with Jesus and others in carceral death, and they participate in Jesus’ resurrected life-after-death, sometimes while still in prison and sometimes having been freed from it. The architecture of this book follows that story line – the arc of Jesus’ incarnation, prophetic ministry, arrest, death, and resurrection – what Christians confess to be the arc of salvation. That salvific scaffolding is then filled up with the narratives of chaplains – historically, from within this study, and from my own professional experiences. The words of chaplains become the eyewitness accounts to life-in-death work, i.e., to the texture of salvation.