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Shepherding Employees

For years chaplains have served the military, hospitals, and sports teams. Now they are coming to a business near you.

In an effort to improve the holistic wellness of their employees, companies are hiring chaplains to pray for and counsel employees, and sometimes even officiate at weddings. If an employee has an ill child, has just suffered the loss of a parent, has a substance abuse problem, is in a rocky marriage, or is just under a lot of stress, he or she can turn to a corporate chaplain for support. Among the companies that have hired chaplains from various ministries are Coca-Cola, Tyson Foods, and Fidelity Bank in Atlanta.

Corporate chaplains, according to The Grand Rapids Press, are provided by outside contractors and operate within a business model similar to nondenominational army chaplains. And Christians are jumping in with both feet.

"We don't go in to preach or proselytize. We go in to pick people up when they are down," said Gil Stricklin, founder of Marketplace Ministries, based in Dallas. Marketplace Ministries employs 2,387 chaplains and cares for over 140,000 workers.

Stricklin, who was an army chaplain for 22 years, founded Marketplace Ministries in 1984. He wanted to offer the services and support usually associated with a church to those who may not have access to a local congregation.

David Miller, executive director of Yale University's Center for Faith and Culture and author of a forthcoming book, Workplace Chaplaincy, told Outcomes that chaplaincy programs could be very beneficial to many organizations, even Christian ones. "Religious communities often have a fear of acknowledging there might be a problem in the lives of their employees," Miller says. "These organizations would be bold to have chaplains."

But out of Marketplace Ministries' 400 contracted clients, only three are nonprofit Christian organizations. Many Christian nonprofits do not think they need chaplains because their employees go to church, Stricklin says. But he insists that even nonprofits and Christian companies need chaplains.

"When people who go to church have a moral failure, they most likely will not go see their pastor, but they will go to a work chaplain," Stricklin says. "We fill a different role than a pastor because a pastor does not have the time to see you at work and have coffee with you once a week. Our role is outside the church."

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