Westserve

Chaplains or secular counsellors?

Last time I looked, the concept of a ‘chaplain’ is that of someone like an ordained person or similar attached to an institution or body.
They traditionally do things like lead in prayer at public events, conduct religious services for that body or institution and similar overtly religious activities.

A couple of months ago the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, announced a $90 million scheme to provide funding to place “School Chaplains” into any public school that wanted one. The federal Education Minister, Julie Bishop said that the chaplains were “an invaluable service to the spiritual and emotional wellbeing of school communities”
Given that statement, and the common understanding of the concept of chaplains, why on earth do we read the following in Today’s SMH?

“School chaplains will have to sign a code of conduct that… bans the preaching of religion, under a controversial $90 million government scheme…
...Chaplains must acknowledge that proselytising is not appropriate, and avoid using theological language that “assumes people have the same beliefs”

(Read the full article here)
How can you provide spiritual guidance and welfare to students if you can’t use theological language, or speak to them in a way that could easily be regarded as “proselytising“ or “preaching“?
For Christian chaplains, helping people understand God’s great love for them as shown in Jesus Christ is a pretty central component of what they do. It’s what drives them to be there, and it’s the ultimate ‘big answer’ to people’s biggest problem – sin.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that Jesus is rammed down people’s throats by chaplains. But we can’t separate the truth of the gospel from the “spiritual welfare” that chaplains are to offer. True ‘spiritual welfare’ comes when we enter into a saving relationship with the Lord Jesus.

So if we are to put chaplains of lots of different flavours into public schools, lets do it properly – whether it’s Christian, Islamic, Buddhist or whatever, let them at at least have the freedom to provide services consistent with their beliefs.
As it stands, this is among the silliest of policies pandering to whims of political correctness, and especially the idea that all religions are fundamentally the same, are all equal, all ‘true’.
They are not, and I admit my bias:
There is such a thing as the Truth, and His name is Jesus Christ

My real concern is that this will spark such a backlash (even in this emasculated form), that our SRE privileges will be negatively impacted, and the good work going on an so many schools in the Scripture program will be compromised. In which case, I would much prefer a secular counselling program be offered in place of the ‘chaplain’ programme.