Military, hospital chaplains face similar challenges

Posted: 11/10/06

Military, hospital chaplains face similar challenges

By Alison Wingfield & Bob Perkins Jr.

Cooperative Baptist Fellowship

ATLANTA (ABP)—As a children’s minister many years ago, Julie Rowan felt stuck in a rut. Now Rowan, a chaplain in the military, rarely stays in one place. And that’s just how she likes it.

“I absolutely love it,” she said. “There’s excitement because you do something different every day. If I got out of this, I’d be bored.”

During her 10 years in the military, Rowan, 41, has served all over the world. In addition to stateside assignments, she has been deployed in Germany, Afghanistan and Iraq. She currently is deployed for a three-month stint in Iraq.

While in Afghanistan, Rowan spent most of her time working in a hospital on the base. She led services at the Bagram Air Base chapel every Sunday and worked with locals in humanitarian projects. She and her staff also distributed shoes, clothing and gifts sent from churches in the United States.

In her role as a brigade chaplain in Iraq, Rowan travels from post to post ministering to between 500 and 1,000 soldiers at each stop. In addition to handing out Bibles, Rowan provides counseling and leads worship services wherever there is space available—even from the back of a Humvee.

“You pull it up to an area that’s safe, pull the back down, and that can be the altar,” Rowan said. “You do what you’ve go to do under the circumstances.”

Ronald Howard is a chaplain both in an Alabama hospital and in the Navy Reserve. He applies many of the same techniques in patient care as he does in managing staff for the Navy. The biggest difference, he said, is that at the Navy headquarters in Washing-ton, he ranks as a captain. “The saying goes that as a chaplain in the military, you wear two collars,” Howard said. “Knowing when to be a chaplain and knowing when to use your rank as a senior officer is invaluable.”

A senior reserve chaplain, Howard spends one week every two months working at the Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, the headquarters command for Navy medicine. His role is to serve as an adviser to the surgeon general on religious and moral issues, as well as to manage the deployment and utilization of reserve chaplains.

As a military chaplain, he faces the challenge of leading services consistent with tradition but respectful of other beliefs.

As associate director of pastoral-care services for DCH Health System in Tuscaloosa, Ala., Howard faces many similar issues. Recently, a Muslim patient was in critical care when Howard offered to help his family.

“I spoke to his wife and told her that we realized it was important for his bed to be facing towards Mecca,” Howard said. “When I offered to have him moved to another room, her jaw dropped. Some of the staff were griping about the move, but I think we showed that by showing respect and concern to other people, we gain their ear.”

Keith Parker, a pastoral counselor and analyst, treats patients holistically to unlock deep-seated emotional problems, even using dream analysis as a tool for healing.

Parker, like military chaplains Rowan and Howard, is endorsed by the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. But he has a private practice with Connestee Counseling in Brevard, N.C. He also works at the Brevard Cancer Center. He recently worked with a terminal cancer patient who had suffered much and finally found peace about dying. Unfortunately, a member of the patient’s family thought the patient had quit believing in God’s ability to do miracles.

“The family member was making it much more difficult on the patient,” Parker said. “But we were able to build some bridges. Usually you are dealing with folks who (have) a lot of guilt and shame from other times in their lives. The thing I try to do is to help them realize that they shouldn't put more guilt on any other member of the family. And we try to help the patient deal with death with grace and dignity.”

And after spending 23 years in Europe training chaplains, Parker said he still feels as strongly as ever about the importance of chaplaincy and counseling in the medical field, both in the hospital setting and in private practice.

“It’s very clear that the entire spiritual dimension is crucial in both physical health and mental-health problems,” he said. “It may not mean that the problem goes away; it may be something the patient learns to live with.

“Going through the process of finding hope is very exciting as a counselor. You get down in the trenches with them and minister to them, not preach at them or get into their heads.”