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Care
Comment
Education
Hospitality
3 min read

University turmoil makes the case for chaplains

Creating space, offering time, across cultures.
A cup of coffee is offered across a table to a hand that is hesitant.
Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash.

As the university sector convulses, what’s the point of their chaplains? 

The university chaplains fulfil a role which calls for a unique set of skills, including pastoral imagination, flexibility, and creativity as they respond to various, often unpredicted, challenges. Chaplains occupy a place between highly professional Students Services colleagues at the university - think counsellors, experts on emigration and finances, and local parishes representing diverse theological viewpoints.  

Every year, while meeting and greeting international students, one of the earliest tasks for the chaplains is to explain their role, as in non-European languages and cultures there is no equivalent of a “chaplain”. Are the chaplains sort of “spiritual gurus”, “life coaches”, “champions of wellbeing”? What is the real difference for the students and the staff in a secular academic institution, between approaching a chaplain and a professional counsellor?   

In addition to all these initial questions that a student might ask, other observers question the role of chaplains in a secular academic institution, for being counterproductive. Why provide and finance a chaplain without any measurable outcomes of his or her work? Whether it is counting confirmations, ensuring Christian faith and values as clearly pronounced, or/and conducting regular acts of worship for the students and staff? 

Looking at my daily engagement with the international, diverse community of the students and the staff, there are at least three areas of presence (rather being than doing, adapting famous Gabriel Marcel’s distinction), which illuminate this unique type of vocation.  

First, currently British universities are going through a very painful, dramatic time of saving money and redundancies. Chaplaincy is becoming a visible space for emotional support to those who are worried about their immediate future. Students and staff are going through a period of uncertainly, if not confusion, so chaplaincy holds the unique space on the campus to show empathy to those who cry, and to offer time for those who need to speak about their pain.  

Secondly, chaplaincy has the privilege of being very creative in the ways of engaging with the local academic community. The memorial services for the students and the staff who died recently are not the formal funerals: yet they allow the participants to speak, play the music, show videos about the departed.  There is a real celebration of life, brings consolation to academic colleagues, families and relatives.  

Thirdly, unlike other professional services, only chaplaincy is able to show the generosity of time to anyone who comes through the door. That’s because those  individuals are welcome as the ‘image’ of God. The rest about that individual is accidental, he or she finds ‘home away of home’ in the space of chaplaincy, because through the eyes of Christian faith: he or she is precious and unique. 

What about proclaiming the message about Jesus Christ? There is a story about St Francis of Assis who said to his brothers, while approaching an Italian city: “now we will proclaim the Gospel to all who live in this city”. After that he and his companion marched through the streets in silence. When they left the city, one of his brothers, rather surprised by lack of preaching, asked: “Francis, when did we proclaim the Good News?”. “Our way of walking was the proclamation of our faith”. The way how we greet, spend time with students, talk, joke and pray – reflects that proclamation.     

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Easter
Politics
4 min read

Amid the power plays the Passion of Zelensky stands out

How to respond to the Trumps and Pilates of this world?

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

President Zelensky, wearing black, sits silently.
White House via Wikimedia Commons.

It started with prime minister Keir Starmer’s shameful toadying to President Donald Trump in the Oval Office at the White House, when he flourished a letter from his King inviting Trump for his second state visit to Britain. 

My first thought was what Starmer was going to produce for Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky when he visited London shortly afterwards. A Fortnum & Mason voucher? My second thought was marginally more profound. Thirty pieces of silver came to mind. And I wondered why. Was it possible that Starmer was betraying Ukraine for the trinkets and baubles of our monarchy, just to stay in favour with the world’s most powerful man? 

As we have just slid past Ash Wednesday into the season of Lent, these thoughts take on a fiercer focus as the ends of our stories look like they’re in our beginnings, as the cast of characters in Passiontide ahead of Easter seem to take their places in our world politics now. 

Is US Vice President JD Vance a little like the Temple high priest of Jerusalem, Caiaphas, when he demands rhetorically: “It is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish”? Isn’t the price of bringing Zelensky down and appeasing Russia’s Vladimir Putin worth it for peace in Ukraine? 

It might be customary in a column such as this to continue to ascribe characteristics of the cast of the Passion of the Christ to the leaders of today’s great powers. But that’s too easy and doesn’t really work. Starmer is no Judas. His courtly flattering of Trump preceded the attempted humiliation of Zelensky in Washington and since that event Starmer is widely applauded across the political spectrum for playing a blinder and not putting a foot wrong. 

He is no betrayer of Zelensky, quite the reverse. And, anyway, casting him in that role risks the sacrilege of deifying Zelensky, who is definitely not the Messiah. Indeed, you don’t have to be a devoted Trumpian to invoke Monty Python’s Life of Brian and note that his performance before Trump and Vance was not messianic, but that of a very naughty boy. 

Such comparisons are not going to get us very far. Maybe it’s better to turn them the other way around. Of greater value, perhaps, is to use the power plays that we’ve just witnessed on our global stage better to understand the one we’ll shortly be commemorating from a couple of millennia ago in Jerusalem. 

In doing so, we may even begin to peek into some insights that demolish any case that the historical events of Passiontide are of no relevance today. And this isn’t just about politics, it’s about our human capacity for abusive power. 

Like Trump, Pilate just wanted to make a deal to keep the peace. Like Trump, he told Jesus that he wasn’t being sufficiently appreciative of what he was trying to do for him.

Take that scene in the Oval Office when Zelensky was bullied by the two most powerful figures (Elon Musk excepted) in the new US regime. It’s a classic weapon in any domestic abusive relationship to blame the victim. So it was that Trump/Vance sought to blame Zelensky and by extension his nation for his and its oppression by Russia. 

And so it was when the Nazarene stood before Pontius Pilate, the mouthpiece of the most powerful man on earth of his day, the Emperor of Rome, Tiberius. The similarities between the two situations are striking. And not just because one can reasonably doubt that Jesus of Nazareth wore a suit on that day either. 

The latter, a battered artisan and preacher from the provincial hills and a man described as being “without sin”, was a classic subject of victim-blaming. Like Trump, Pilate just wanted to make a deal to keep the peace. Like Trump, he told Jesus that he wasn’t being sufficiently appreciative of what he was trying to do for him. Like Trump, he told him that he had absolute power over his fate. And, like Trump, he is certain that truth is anything he wishes it to be in the moment when he asks contemptuously: “What is truth?” 

The intriguing question is how this tells us to respond to the Trumps and Pilates of this world. In the immediate circumstances of interrogation in both the Oval Office and the praetorium, the answer seems partly to be silence. The Christ chooses it; Zelensky has it forced upon him by the coercive control of his interlocutors. 

Again, I make no claim for a Christ-like Zelensky. But silence as a human response invariably has its source in humility. In the most worldly of senses, that is now very apparent in the conciliatory words of the Ukrainian president towards his bully, calling his leadership “strong”, regretting how the meeting turned out and expressing willingness to return to the table. 

Humility isn’t weakness. It brings the power of peace and enables the triumph of love. That’s the lesson from two thousand years ago. And the lesson is also that no good can come from a total lack of it, just as for Trump as it was for Pilate. 

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