Assessing and Reimagining Chaplaincy Education

Assessing and Reimagining Chaplaincy Education investigated the pedagogical and theological foundations of chaplaincy education in healthcare, premised on the idea that the educational bases for chaplaincy education are several decades out of date. Chaplains may be in greater demand in coming years as fewer people claim formal religious affiliation and may, therefore, turn to individual spiritual or religious leaders in the midst of health crises.

The project first mapped the institutional landscape of education for healthcare chaplains in the United States, including all of the institutions currently offering education for healthcare chaplains. These programs range from Clinical Pastoral Education Centers to Masters-level programs in chaplaincy to online and other forums through which healthcare chaplains receive training. We gathered information about the institutions themselves as well as their curricula and certification processes to understand all of the training models for currently in use.

This project produced three papers: one focuses on institutional and degree options (including placement sites) available to chaplains; a second focuses on core aspects of curricula presently in use; and a third provides a brief overview of healthcare chaplaincy as a profession, with detailed attention to the changing religious demographics of the American population since the 1940s, when healthcare chaplaincy first emerged as a profession. This project ran from July 1, 2017 to June 30, 2019 and was supported by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation. The Luce Foundation also supports the successor project to this work, titled “Educating Effective Chaplains,” which runs 2019-2021. You can read more about that project here.

• Cadge et al. (2019). “Training Chaplains and Spiritual Caregivers? The Emergence and Growth of Chaplaincy Programs in Theological Education.”
• Clevenger et al. (2019). “Education for Professional Chaplaincy in the US: Mapping Current Practice in Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE).”
• Cadge et al. (2019). “Training Healthcare Chaplains: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.”