"What do you do?"

I never quite know how to repond when I am asked that introductory question: "So you're a chaplain. What do you do?"

On the one hand, I want to say "nothing!"

The gift chaplaincy to an institution is availability. The danger of being involved in programs, of 'doing things', is that one can easily be tied up at the precise moment when one is called upon to be the chaplain - to be available to an individual in need, to a crisis, to draw aside for prayer and reflection...

Yet contact with people, of 'being there' with others in their day-to-day, is also important.

So what does a chaplain do?

My first rule of thumb has been that the chaplain does not do what the university does.

The chaplain is not a counsellor because the university already has a counselling service. I don't do welfare because we have other people in the University who do that.
The effect of this rule is that I pose no competitive challenge to other members of the university. Competition, says Henri Nouen, is the enemy of compassion.

Rather, the chaplain provides a complementary resource. The chaplain may provide spiritual or religious perspectives and a wider range of support networks to exisiting university agencies. But it doesn't seek to provide an alternative.

Secondly, 'not doing what the university does' helps the chaplain not become bogged down in situations which are beyond his or her competence or authority, but remain free to be available to respond to people.

Put positively, the chaplain does what others are not able to do.

This may not always be "spiritual".

I remember getting a visit from a mature age international postgrad student. She had been sent my way by the International Student Services Unit. She did not have transport, and could I help her pick up a TV from a second-hand shop? She needed it to help keep her daughter occupied while she studied - and it would help improve her English.

Helping this person in such a simple way has opened a wonderful friendship.

My second rule of thumb is that where an area of common concern emerges and the chaplain is invited into the conversation, as it were, the chaplain should look for partnership, offering what the chaplaincy has to give but invariably taking a subservient role.

An invitation by Counselling to be engaged in Mental Health Week, for example, may result in chaplains offering meditation sessions and using their networks to find volunteers. But the Counsellor remains the 'artistic director'.

This attitude within partnership promotes the authority, recognition and status of the other - so it is of itself an act of chaplaincy.

But it also saves chaplaincy from getting bogged down in administrivia, particularly financial arrangements- this is not what chaplains do!

Uni Chaplaincy - "Between Towns"

David Malouf’s poem “Between Towns” describes the enormous darkness between towns; the unfamiliar, uncharted expanse between the travelers’s point of departure and the destination. Whether that town is a new town, a new culture, or a new civilization.

On the north-west highway stranded, in open country near
Dunedoo a shadow by flashlight mends a wheel, the sky
turns slowly west over north. In frosty paddocks, lights, a
fettler’s camp or boys at early milking.
It might be Sydney or Babylon we left just after noon and how
far is it to the next town (I don’t mean Coolah ) that glows
ahead, or the next star we’ll leap to over the ditch of dark.

Malouf also speaks about darkness in other verses of the poem. This darkness is not deserted however; something very important is held in trust. He also talks about the town as a meeting place where groups of neighbours, before setting forth into unknown country can sit at a trestle table together, gain rest and wait a while.

What does it mean to lead in the type of transition or darkness that Malouf is alluding to, and to witness from that in these times? Something is dying and the new is emerging.

The church in transition is dealing with many issues of global change and uncertainty, and its own issues related to identity, mission and commitment as it seeks to serve Christ in the world.

What kind of response occurs when we pay attention to the call of God in this transition? Even more than developing new vision statements, structures and strategic plans, the type of discernment suggested has a more encompassing focus. This is a call to transformation, to use a language different
from the “management of change”. What does it means to wait? What does it mean to tend the embers of heeding and fanning the sparks of new flames that are appearing and what do we know of God and each other at this time?

We might use the concept of a “larger God” to begin to with. We might need a renewed and radical commitment to “each other” and to the “other” because the church is witnessing to something so very different in an increasingly polarized world. We might suggest that this kind of leader is able to name the theological, spiritual and practical nature of transition times.
God transforms people as they are led through this darkness. This kind of leader names endorses and mobilizes people where the many new sparks of Christ’s life occur. The leader focuses the church outwardly on this “larger God” and the “other”. Marks of this kind of leadership are an authenticity lived though a Christ-led life and something which in the contemporary life in the church we are not that good at — i.e. accepting suffering as the inevitable price of being a contemporary leader.
For leaders in these times the next town is “still in our saddle bags”.

Glenda Blakefield
UCA Assembly Associate General Secretary

Tampere 2008

Confronting issues

In discussion with Thay yesterday, we settled on three areas that confront us as we seek to move forward togther as a chaplaincy team. We realised that we need to formulate the questions that may help us confront the issues before us.

1. Leadership
Do we need a "coordinator" or figure with whom the university may communicate and who may respond on our behalf?
What of the distinctions between the Chair of the Religious Centre Committee (who is also the Manager of the Religious Centre) and the "leader" of the chaplaincy team?
What kind of leadership is required?
What are the conflicts between having a leadership role and being a chaplain offering pastoral care?

2. Voluntarism.
The pro's of being voluntary are that one "wants to be here". Volunteers are less dependent on university ie minimises conflict of interest between religious role and the university.
The cons are that it is too easy to be anarchic and nothing gets done.
How can we find a way to resource chaplains without losing the spirit of voluntarism?

3. Taking multifaith seriously
The recent Compass programs on the emergence of multifaith underscore the significance of the movement toward interfaith understanding in our world today. While Multifaith chaplaincy provides a channel for exploring and expressing multifaith, to what extent are we still caught within a past paradigm when we were only concerned with our own sectional interests? How can we continue to be representatives of our religious tradition while also working cooperatively and generously together?

Religious change according to Bouma

...where Australian religion and spirituality are being taken seriously, they are being taken seriously in a distinctively Australian way. These Australian characteristics include a tentatively curious exploration involving listening, attending, venturing with the whole person and being true to one's experience.

(Gary Bouma, Australian Soul p1)

Chaplains will immediately recognise these characteristics. They are at the heart of today's chaplaincy.

...Pastoral Care is a caring resource at the client’s point of need. It allows the client to ‘set the agenda’ with the chaplain being available to journey with the client as a vulnerable, caring, listening fellow human.

(SA Heads fo Christian Churches Chaplaincy Committee)

I once heard a remark that the "best ministers" were becoming chaplains, creating a problem for filling ministry vacancies in parishes. And more recently, a retired Anglican priest insisted to me that every parish priest should spend some time in his career as a chaplain.

Bouma's insights suggest why chaplaincy might be becoming a preferred option for, or way of, ministry - namely that there is something going on in Australian society that resists the traditional way of presenting 'answers', particularly if there is only one 'answer'! We are more at home, he suggests, with quesions. We value exploration.

I've only read the first chapter, but his new book looks like being an invaluable contribution to understanding the religious and spiritual shifts taking place among us.