Date of Award

3-2022

Document Type

Project Portfolio

Degree Name

Doctor of Ministry (DMin)

Department

Seminary

First Advisor

Phil Newell, DMin

Second Advisor

Dan Lioy, PhD

Third Advisor

Leonard I. Sweet, PhD

Abstract

With dwindling church attendance in the State of Maine, people’s spiritual needs are often unattended to, especially in times of struggle. Clergy are serving shrinking congregations with shrinking budgets, leading to reduced hours. They don’t often have time to provide pastoral care to their flock, let alone people outside of their flock. This project creates a mechanism to organize a chaplain team and make them available by contract to organizations and their staff and clients. I have conceptualized, designed, and birthed a community-based per diem chaplain/spiritual care organization that can match the world’s soulful need with professional, competent chaplains.

The initial focus of the project identified this same problem but approached the solution by creating a training program that would place chaplain trainees in community-based organizations (cbos) to meet the need for ministry in the world. As I moved the idea from concept to design, a stakeholder pointed out that the need in the community-based organizations would continue after the chaplain trainee had completed their unit of training and moved on. I realized that my project could have a greater impact if it addressed placing professionally trained chaplains and spiritual care givers in organizations on a longer-term basis beyond the 400 hours of a unit of clinical pastoral education/training.

The project transformed into creating and launching a nonprofit organization to provide a contracting mechanism to place professional, compassionate, clinically trained clergy in service of outside organizations. The benchmarks were based on creating a nonprofit to act as a contracting mechanism to recruit and screen ministers and chaplains with clinical training to provide care in community-based organizations. This project portfolio will detail my journey from discovery, design, prototype, and project for launching Spiritual Care Services of Maine.

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