Differentiating Professional Chaplaincy Practice from Traditional Chaplaincy Practice

At your stage of professional development, practice and service delivery, it is expedient and pertinent for you all to be acquainted with the differences between professional chaplaincy and traditional chaplaincy practice, in clearer  term, the difference between professional chaplaincy practioners and traditional chaplaincy practioners.

While traditional chaplaincy practioners are clergies or clerics of various religions and faith groups who are seconded by their faith group leadership to offer religious chaplaincy services to people of their faith groups in various institutions, organization and establishment where they work, such as:

1.     Education sector – schools, colleges, universities whether private or government owned.

2.     Healthcare sector – hospitals, health centers, home care, hospice care whether private or government owned.

3.     Correctional centers – prisons, juvenile centers.

4.     Sporting industries – sports clubs of various sports whether private or government owned.

5.     Family sector.

6.     Other workplaces including marketplace whether private or government owned.

Professional chaplaincy practioners are equally clergies or lay person who have been adequately trained and equipped in professional chaplaincy practice and service delivery and have passed through the CPE or CCPE study programme, the professional chaplaincy education and were certified and licensed to practice chaplaincy professionally in both private and public domain.

Traditional chaplaincy practioners do not undergo the professional chaplaincy training and are limited in the services they would offer to people they are made to serve.

Again their services are mainly religious focused and limited to people of their religious and faith group in the institutions or organizations where they serve. Their services are more of ritualistic services of their various religions and faith groups.

While professional chaplaincy practioners offer their services to all people of various religions and faith group, including people of no religion and faith group. Their services is more of interfaith and interreligious in nature that meet with the pluralistic nature and setting of the society they found themselves and operate.

Count yourself lucky to be a professional chaplain.

Professional chaplaincy practice entails mandatory evidence based clinical practice with active observation and documentation at every stage which is lacking in traditional chaplaincy practice.

Evidence-based clinical practice and service delivery is mandatory and inescapable for professional chaplains who have chosen to practice chaplaincy professionally.

Chap. Prof. David Mike-Jacobs