Reimagining Chaplaincy for the Modern World
Picture a neighborhood after a hurricane has torn through it. Crews are already at work clearing debris and restoring power. Search and rescue teams move door to door. Insurance adjusters begin totaling losses. Every measurable problem has a professional assigned to solve it. Grief, on the other hand, doesn’t show up on a damage report. Neither does loss, nor the spiritual questions of how to keep life going after a disaster. Those wounds are just as real and deserve a response plan as well.
That’s exactly why the American Red Cross has built spiritual care into its disaster response protocol. With every response team deployed, the organization includes trained spiritual care providers to be present with people through the hurt. They are the ones who will hold space with someone standing in the wreckage of what used to be their home and help them explore the questions no engineer or adjuster can answer.
This need shows up far beyond disaster zones. From a young adult anxious about the planet’s future to an employee burning out at work, the defining challenges of the modern world raise existential questions that doctors, therapists, and other secular professionals cannot answer alone. While they may specialize in certain concrete and tangible aspects of human experience, people still need someone else – to help them navigate their deeper questions of identity, purpose, and hope.
This is where a chaplain comes in.
Historically, chaplains were associated with hospitals, the military, and houses of worship. In today’s world, they are increasingly working in places few people would expect, including airports, higher education, government settings, and prisons. Their work reflects a growing recognition that in addition to challenges around material needs, people inevitably wrestle with questions about the meaning of life. Chaplaincy is the profession that serves this need.
Understanding the Landscape of Human Need
When Trace Haythorn was 13 years old, his childhood friend died from leukemia. The loss motivated him to build a career around navigating life’s bigger questions. This included volunteering in hospice care and eventually becoming a pediatric chaplain. Later, during his term as CEO of the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education, he noticed that chaplaincy was spreading into new sectors of society. However, there wasn’t a clear picture of what the profession was becoming.
In 2018, Haythorn co-founded the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab (CIL), an organization built around gathering chaplains, educators, and researchers from clinical and theological backgrounds to think collectively about how chaplaincy and spiritual care actually function. As religious and spiritual life in the U.S. continues to shift, CIL’s goal has been to spark practical approaches that equip chaplains to care for people’s inner lives and ease the suffering they carry. “We wanted to explore the breadth, and the depth of what chaplaincy might look like, and the contexts where it happens,” Haythorn said. “It was really a journey of discovery.”
That discovery reflected a broader cultural shift. According to a report published by the Pew Research Center, 16% of U.S. adults identified as religiously unaffiliated in 2007, which meant they described themselves as atheists, agnostics, or ‘nothing in particular’ when asked about their religious identity. By 2023, that number rose to 28%. Research has also found that 67% of Americans say they attend religious services in person only a few times a year or less.
While participation in organized religion declined, a separate report by the Pew Research Center found that 70% of U.S. adults still identify as spiritual. Some seem to be seeking meaning outside traditional congregations, while others may not have a space to contemplate life’s bigger questions at all.
That gap between declining institutional religion and increasing spiritual need shows up directly in CIL’s own data. One national survey conducted in 2019 found that 20% of American adults had contact with a chaplain within a two-year period. Of those encounters, just over half took place in healthcare organizations, indicating that chaplaincy’s reach extends well past the hospital walls it’s traditionally associated with. Researchers confirmed the finding in a follow-up survey conducted in 2022, suggesting the need for chaplains is lasting.
The field as a whole is adjusting accordingly. More than a quarter of U.S. theological schools now offer degree programs focused specifically on chaplaincy and spiritual care, and most of those programs launched within the last twenty years. Additionally, Georgia State University recently became the first public university in the country to launch a graduate pathway built specifically for aspiring chaplains. The program is designed for students who may not pursue theological training and allows for a more diverse representation of chaplains, including ones with non-traditional and non-religious perspectives.
Chaplains, Haythorn claims, are uniquely positioned to meet people where they are, regardless of religious affiliation. “As the U.S. has grown increasingly pluralistic and congregational numbers continue to drop, people still report the need for spiritual care and still have big spiritual questions,” he shared.
In addition to the evolving landscape of religion in the U.S., challenges like loneliness and social isolation have only become more prevalent. Institutions across healthcare, higher education, business, and public service recognize that many of the struggles that people face extend beyond what their interventions or resources alone can address.
Unlike clergy, whose ministry is rooted in congregational life, chaplains are primarily situated in secular spaces. They connect with people across all walks of life and facilitate conversations around difficult topics like grief, uncertainty, and moral conflict. The very presence of a chaplain in a secular setting can send a signal that all aspects of a person’s lived experience, including the more existential and ineffable, are acknowledged and welcome and that support is available.
Allison Kestenbaum, Manager of Spiritual Care & Clinical Pastoral Education at UC San Diego Health, was drawn to the profession after studying sociology. While working alongside palliative care teams, she encountered healthcare chaplains whose approach to care offered something unique. “Healthcare is a common denominator that everyone passes through at some point, either as a patient or a caregiver,” she reflected. “Healthcare is a very sacred place.”
Healthcare became her entry point, but she soon realized the same need existed far beyond hospitals. Wherever people experience vulnerability and ask questions of meaning, chaplains would be needed.
A Profession Growing Faster Than Its Infrastructure
Years ago, Haythorn attended the Wisdom 2.0 conference, where attendees were asked to introduce themselves to the person sitting next to them. The woman beside him described herself as a spiritual life coach, which was a title that piqued his interest. “I had never heard of a spiritual life coach, so I was curious.”
The conversation left him with a larger question. As new professions emerged to address people’s spiritual lives, where did chaplaincy fit? What distinguished a chaplain from a spiritual life coach, or other emerging roles that focused on spiritual care? These questions exposed a challenge the profession had yet to answer.
Unlike other career pathways, chaplaincy has never developed a unified professional infrastructure. Training processes and credentialing systems vary widely and research remains dispersed. Oftentimes, chaplains work as the only spiritual care professional within their organization. Without a shared body of knowledge or regular collaboration with peers, it has been difficult to exchange field notes.
To better understand the field, CIL recently convened a Delphi panel, a research method that surveys experts in multiple rounds to build toward consensus. For this panel, CIL brought together leaders from across chaplaincy to identify where the field agreed and where it didn’t. Participants agreed that chaplains provide spiritual care in secular settings, but they could not agree on what “spiritual care” actually means. “We had no two people in the panel agree,” Haythorn recalled.
That lack of shared language makes it difficult to explain the profession to the public, which introduces another obstacle. For many Americans, the title still carries a narrow association with hospitals and end-of-life care, a perception that Haythorn saw reinforced during the COVID-19 pandemic. “People often assume that if a chaplain shows up, somebody is dying,” he said. “That is not the case.”
In hospitals, chaplains are just as likely to celebrate birth, support exhausted clinicians, help families navigate difficult decisions, or accompany patients through life-changing diagnoses. Outside healthcare, their breadth of work only expands. Chaplains do not replace other professionals like physicians or social workers but rather complement these professions by focusing on questions that require time and presence. That kind of attention is scarce elsewhere.
For instance, a 2023 study found that the average U.S. primary care visit lasts just 18 minutes, which leaves little room for the stillness and silence that spiritual care needs, especially during difficult health-related experiences. Research in clinical, spiritual, and pastoral care settings have also found that silence itself functions as a form of care, as it gives people room to process rather than rush them toward resolution. “So much chaplaincy training is developing a tolerance for silence. It’s about really making and protecting space so someone can come to their own wisdom,” Kestenbaum shared.
Building the Foundation
While there may be opportunity for a governing body to support the field, Haythorn clarifies that CIL was never intended to take on that role. Instead, he describes the organization’s mission with a metaphor: “We’re trying to develop the loam underneath all of this. To nurture the soil so things can grow, not to actually build the thing itself.”
That philosophy has shaped CIL since its founding.
Rather than issuing credentials, CIL serves as a convener, researcher, and educator. For instance, with support from Templeton Religion Trust, CIL has spent several years mapping the landscape of chaplaincy in the US, producing research, case studies, books, and national convenings that help educators, employers, and practitioners better understand the field. According to a testimonial from the website, one CIL webinar participant shared, “That hour gave me a sacred space of hope that also allowed for tears. I carry the insights and spirit of that hour with me and share it with others.”
Part of that mapping work means grappling with questions like the one Haythorn encountered during the Wisdom 2.0 conference — what actually separates a chaplain from other spiritual care professions. Board certification, supervised clinical training, and institutional accountability set chaplaincy apart on paper from other fields like coaching. But the field of chaplaincy still hasn’t agreed on what spiritual care itself means, let alone how to draw a clean line around who provides it. That question means looking closely at where the field’s existing knowledge has and hasn’t reached.
Much of the existing scholarship on chaplaincy has emerged from healthcare settings and Christian traditions. CIL has expanded that lens to include higher education, public service, workplaces, and other emerging settings while also bringing together practitioners from Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and other faith traditions. “We’ve really tried to explore what chaplaincy looks like in non-Christian faith traditions. People from different traditions have a place to explore what chaplaincy might look like within their tradition, rather than us telling them how it’s supposed to look,” Haythorn shared.
For Kestenbaum, that openness is one of CIL’s defining strengths. The Lab could have become a repository of chaplaincy resources curated from a variety of diverse sources, but Kestenbaum believes its work goes much deeper. “There is a rigorous process behind the scenes. They ask what does the Jewish chaplaincy community look like? And they actually map that, so the programming that they offer aligns with what is happening in the field. I’ve always admired that approach.”
This approach lines up well with the profession’s long history of adaptation. Chaplaincy first expanded beyond congregations in the early twentieth century as clergy entered hospitals through the nascent field of Clinical Pastoral Education. Today, the profession is evolving again as secular institutions increasingly recognize that people bring questions of meaning into every aspect of life.
That evolution is already extending into new territory. Through a project called Mapping Spiritual Innovators, led with Glean Network, CIL is now studying the newer, less traditional spiritual leaders emerging alongside chaplains. Rather than dismissing these roles or competing with them, CIL is trying to understand what they offer, where they overlap with chaplaincy, and what a fuller picture of “spiritual care” in America might include.
Meeting those needs will require more than placing chaplains in new settings. It will require stronger research, connected community, and broader public understanding of what spiritual care actually is. This is what CIL hopes to achieve. “I think of [the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab] as a sandbox,” Haythorn said. “A place where chaplains across sectors, across religious groups, across different kinds of training can come and explore new ideas together.”
As chaplains come together to better understand their role in society, the shape of that work often comes down to something as simple as staying in the room. That may be sitting with people through silence, uncertainty, and their toughest moments, so they don’t have to face life’s most sacred questions alone.
Picture that same neighborhood after the hurricane. Months later, the debris has been cleared, power restored, and insurance claims settled. Every measurable problem has been addressed. And for the families still carrying the harder questions, they have a chaplain to call.
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