CIL Founder and Executive Director published by Studying Congregations

CIL Founder Wendy Cadge and Executive Director Michael Skaggs have published an article on Studying Congregations, a website dedicated to understanding why people of faith gather and how they do it. Cadge and Skaggs’s article comes from their research on the relationship between port chaplains and land-based congregations. An excerpt of the article follows:

Ninety percent of the consumer goods we use daily come to us through the global shipping industry, a sector invisible to most of us and rarely thought about by congregations. Growing attention focuses on the conditions under which goods are made, but what about the people who transport those goods to us?

Every day, across the United States and around the world, container ships and cargo vessels carry food, fuel, and a broad range of consumer goods into ports. In the United States, the Coast Guard and Customs examine the vessel and its cargo. Who cares for the crew? That work falls to port chaplains active at the majority of large ports in the United States and the United Kingdom as well as ports in Europe, Asia and parts of Africa.

Almost uniformly Christian, port chaplains date to the early 19th century in the United States and the United Kingdom. In Boston, for example, Edward Thompson Taylor and other leaders of Bethel Churches built inns where sailors stayed between voyages. They held educational programs, offered religious services in the sail loft over the arch on Central Wharf and provided religious libraries to departing vessels. Initially focused on both proselytizing and social services, port chaplains today work across religious traditions through the North American Maritime Ministry Association to meet whatever needs – be they spiritual or physical, existential or mundane – seafarers may have.