The Professionalization of Prophetic Ministry: Time to Rethink Our Approach?
Joel Pacyna, MA-Biblical Studies, MA-Bioethics, Senior Health Services Analyst, Mayo Clinic
The professionalization of the hospital chaplaincy has accomplished several important things. Professional chaplain societies have provided definition to the role of soul care in the hospital and they have formed a professional identity and home for their members. Professional chaplain societies have provided a significant service to medicine by vetting the preparedness and quality of applicants and commending the best chaplains as spiritual guides in the service of the sick. Finally, professional societies have established a line of communication with secular medicine—a conversation with a mutually commensurable vocabulary—that upholds the notion that spiritual care is a vital adjunct to the healing goals of medicine.
As much as these accomplishments seem compelling, they must also be evaluated for the trade-offs they require. What concessions have been made in the process of bringing religion and its devoted practitioners into the structures which have governed the medical field? What fundamental qualities and aims of spiritual care have been restricted, redacted, or re-purposed to accommodate the procedural, utilitarian aims of institutional medicine?
This paper will engage the audience in a thought-experiment—a caricature of the institutionalized chaplain—as a way of stimulating dialogue around the potential effects of professionalizing a role whose theological heritage has been chiefly characterized by the free exercise of prophetic voice. This quasi-satirical caricature will cast the profession as an establishment that has stripped the prophet of his enigmatic presence; subjugated the message of the spiritual guide to the hierarchical authority structures in medicine; redesigned spiritual care by rendering it a non-directive therapeutic “service line” of the imminent realm rather than a prophetic ministry rooted in a transcendent conception of reality; and failed to accommodate diversity of theological belief, ironically, through secularized commitments to diversity.
Do any of the elements of the caricature have a kernel of truth? Does the professionalization of spiritual care need to be re-evaluated? This paper will suggest that chaplaincy could be cast not as the work of spiritual care-giving, but as spiritual triage—uniting the sick with the common, enigmatic prophets embedded in communities outside the walls of medicine, whose message is not constrained by institutional concerns or commitments and whose life is unencumbered by the ravages of quantification, quality, standardization, and cosmopolitan ethics that dehumanize the medical enterprise. Practically, this triage could facilitate an elaborate network of telechaplaincy, uniting parishioners with non-professional spiritual guides most suited to provide theologically nuanced prophetic ministry to the sick.
It is not expected that professional chaplain societies will embrace the notion of an entire profession dedicated to spiritual triage. However, professional societies could perhaps take a long look at their aims and accomplishments and ask whether the work of legitimizing the prophet in the medical setting hasn’t also introduced limitations to prophetic ministry in strange obeisance to the medical establishment, rendering its theologically astute members not as prophets, but as therapists who answer not to God, but to the medical institution.
The professionalization of the hospital chaplaincy has accomplished several important things. Professional chaplain societies have provided definition to the role of soul care in the hospital and they have formed a professional identity and home for their members. Professional chaplain societies have provided a significant service to medicine by vetting the preparedness and quality of applicants and commending the best chaplains as spiritual guides in the service of the sick. Finally, professional societies have established a line of communication with secular medicine—a conversation with a mutually commensurable vocabulary—that upholds the notion that spiritual care is a vital adjunct to the healing goals of medicine.
As much as these accomplishments seem compelling, they must also be evaluated for the trade-offs they require. What concessions have been made in the process of bringing religion and its devoted practitioners into the structures which have governed the medical field? What fundamental qualities and aims of spiritual care have been restricted, redacted, or re-purposed to accommodate the procedural, utilitarian aims of institutional medicine?
This paper will engage the audience in a thought-experiment—a caricature of the institutionalized chaplain—as a way of stimulating dialogue around the potential effects of professionalizing a role whose theological heritage has been chiefly characterized by the free exercise of prophetic voice. This quasi-satirical caricature will cast the profession as an establishment that has stripped the prophet of his enigmatic presence; subjugated the message of the spiritual guide to the hierarchical authority structures in medicine; redesigned spiritual care by rendering it a non-directive therapeutic “service line” of the imminent realm rather than a prophetic ministry rooted in a transcendent conception of reality; and failed to accommodate diversity of theological belief, ironically, through secularized commitments to diversity.
Do any of the elements of the caricature have a kernel of truth? Does the professionalization of spiritual care need to be re-evaluated? This paper will suggest that chaplaincy could be cast not as the work of spiritual care-giving, but as spiritual triage—uniting the sick with the common, enigmatic prophets embedded in communities outside the walls of medicine, whose message is not constrained by institutional concerns or commitments and whose life is unencumbered by the ravages of quantification, quality, standardization, and cosmopolitan ethics that dehumanize the medical enterprise. Practically, this triage could facilitate an elaborate network of telechaplaincy, uniting parishioners with non-professional spiritual guides most suited to provide theologically nuanced prophetic ministry to the sick.
It is not expected that professional chaplain societies will embrace the notion of an entire profession dedicated to spiritual triage. However, professional societies could perhaps take a long look at their aims and accomplishments and ask whether the work of legitimizing the prophet in the medical setting hasn’t also introduced limitations to prophetic ministry in strange obeisance to the medical establishment, rendering its theologically astute members not as prophets, but as therapists who answer not to God, but to the medical institution.