Professional Chaplaincy in Contemporary Times

In contemporary times, professional chaplaincy is becoming a household word. Professional chaplains can therefore take their rightful positions in the scheme of things. Professional chaplains usually operate and offer chaplaincy services from their experiences and reflections to provide solutions to problems of humanity.

Professional chaplains are expected to be able to discover and feel the need for chaplaincy services in any life issue. This is what qualifies one to be truly a professional in his or her field.

Chaplaincy is the profession that gives us the opportunity of thinking of meeting with various needs of others. Chaplaincy is also the profession that gives us the opportunity discovering the emotional and spiritual needs of others and seek how to support them in meeting such need for them to live a fulfilled life.

It is only on the platform of professional chaplaincy that we have the opportunity of providing wholistic care services to others that bring wholistic healing and recovery for wholistic health and wellbeing.

Chaplaincy profession cannot be substituted for any other takings or profession, it complements all other professions in their labour for wellbeing of humanity. It will be therefore unwise to dumpchaplaincy for any other taking or new idea.

In the healthcare sector, amongst the healthcare professionals, chaplains cannot be relegated to the background because of the pastoral care, spiritual care and psychospiritual care they offer to patients, their families as well as the healthcare staff and healthcare organizations.

Spiritual care association has been making an effort to make an inroad into the healthcare sector, offering spiritual care to patients, patients’ relatives and staff of the hospitals as well.

High qualified and educated professional chaplains swung into action, engaged themselves in researches and came out with the findings that both the soul and the spirit of humans have needs that must be met if humans would be health and well wholisitcally and that these needs are not same. A psychospiritual approach is what is needed in meeting with such needs.

Bravo, to the highly educated chaplains who were able to defend the stand of chaplaincy calling and practice for us all to ensure continuous professional development in the ever changing world.

Professional chaplains must learn not to run away from research works, conducting of research and participating in research works as part of what professional chaplaincy development entails, reviewing what has been going on in professional chaplaincy practice and how best such can be improved upon. This is the starting point of research works and conduction.

It is mandatory for practicing professional chaplains to be highly educated, highly professionally educated and skilled with competencies to enable them attend to diverse callings of theirs in a sophisticated world with its attendant challenges.

We live in an ever changing world and situations with sophisticated problems staring at us in the face on daily basis so we need to develop our profession, its practices, service delivery and how to develop ourselves as professional practioners to meet up with the rate of advancement and sophistication in the field of our chosen profession.

No other professionals will do it for us without displacing us. Beware! Arise and let us build together our choice profession “Chaplaincy” to an enviable position and status. God bless you all.

Chap. Prof. David Mike