LIKE love, chaplaincy is a many-splendored thing. Chameleon-like, it adapts into its setting, adopting many of the colours and textures of the institution that it serves, giving itself away only by sudden opportunistic moves.

This book celebrates the sheer diversity of expression of chaplaincy: from hospices to North Sea oil platforms, and from prisons to gyms. What unites them is the sometimes difficult relationship between a call to minister and the values and interests of the institution that pays their wages, or validates them as volunteers. Chaplains sometimes need to “run with the hare and ride with the hounds”, showing themselves to be “good citizens” by signing up to systems of appraisal, reporting, and professional development that may feel like nothing but a time-consuming distraction from their core purpose, while also advocating for service-users who may also be caught in the same procedural grind.

There can also be a fair bit of slippage between what the institution requires on paper, according to policy, and role description, and the actual practice of the chaplain. Most institutions would find it far easier if chaplains didn’t have awkward commitments to particular faiths or denominations. A “spiritual care provider” who could adequately provide for the needs of those “of all faiths and none”, according to some universal understanding of “spirituality”, would be a much more convenient model to overcome those sticky problems of diversity and inclusion.

Most chaplains, I suspect from this book, feel the pressure to collude with this, perhaps unspoken, institutional desire. They try to make themselves as non-specific as they possibly can, keeping their own commitments and loyalties very much on the “down-low” in order to be able to produce the stats that show how useful they are across the board. Others work in multi-faith teams, in a more honest acknowledgement that an individualistic non-specific “spirituality” works only for certain secularised Westerners and not for the majority of humankind. Here, at least, difference and traditions of faith are honoured, as far as funding allows, although it seems that there is still operational pressure on each member of the team to be a schooled practitioner in the art of being all things to all people.

This is not to criticise those in chaplaincy, who, as witnessed in this collection, are valiantly offering a human face, a listening ear, and a real presence to those who are being variously processed by their institutions. Chaplains are often the best at spotting gaps in provision, and there is evidence in this collection of the kind of innovation and responsiveness that can be transformative, providing ideas that the best institutions might then adopt.

But that does not take away from the sheer difficulty of an institutional landscape that can find no sensible metric to evaluate what chaplains do, which leaves chaplains in the uncomfortable position of trying to justify themselves to funding bodies that crave measurements to appease regulators. If those funding bodies or regulators have no faith commitment themselves (or are not supposed to), then this rapidly becomes a “crying in the wilderness”: speaking words that simply do not register.

That said, what is also witnessed to in this collection is the space that institutions have sometimes offered to those whose ministry in parochial and congregational settings would be unwelcome, or frowned upon. Those with protected characteristics under the Equality Act often find chaplaincy a sphere of ministry in which they are spared some of the game-playing, perhaps the naked prejudice and disadvantage, that they would face in more traditional ministries.

This book spreads its net wide, including new and innovative forms of chaplaincy, but it might be interesting to hear also from those with a long history, in various educational settings and in the military, for example.

“Singing with integrity” in chaplaincy, as one contributor puts it, is a constant challenge. There are no answers here, only valiant improvisations by those who seek to make love known on the margins of the Church.

The Revd Mark Birch is Canon Rector of Westminster Abbey and Chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons.

Chaplaincy: Contemporary and global perspectives
Grace Thomas and Kim Wasey, editors
SCM Press £35
(978-0-334-06621-7)
Church Times Bookshop £28