Faith and the workplace

By Dick Hughes  

FEBRUARY 22, 2011 3:46 p.m. (0)

When Thomas Ray was going through a tough time in his personal life, he turned for support to Lee Moseley, a pastor who worked with his company as a chaplain.

“I had been through a terrible divorce, and it put a lot of stress and pressure on me that, through that, strengthened my relationship with God significantly,” Ray said about the time he asked Moseley for support.

“Being able to talk to him, another person of faith, helped me to share things from the word and was a tremendous help. It meant a lot to me in my own life and in my stress level.”

That convinced Ray, branch manager for Benchmark Mortgage in Greenville, to offer his 13 employees the same opportunity, and he became the first client of Business Chaplains of America (BCA).

At the time, Moseley, of Greenville, was in the process of joining Rick Wells of Greenville and Rick Kirby of Anderson to form BCA as the only locally owned chaplaincy business in the Upstate.

All are ordained pastors with advanced degrees in theology and pastoral counseling. While they define themselves as evangelicals in personal belief, they define their work as corporate chaplains as being based on spirituality, not religion.

“That’s the key word, we are not religion,” Wells said.

With less than two years in developing a clientele, they are small but beginning to grow having recently signed a new client in Anderson to begin service in March. The companies they work with include financial services, production and manufacturing.

They make regular visits to the workplace to talk to employees who want to see them. They are available 24/7 365 days of the year for whatever an employee wants or needs. “If asked, we will do hospital visitations. If asked, we will do funerals. If asked, we will do weddings,” said Wells.

For problems requiring specialized professional help, such as an employee’s child who is abusing drugs or alcohol, they find community resources to make referrals.

Wells said chaplains often are the stand-ins for supervisors not comfortable dealing with an employee or family in crisis. “A lot of CEOs will say, I wouldn’t know what to do if somebody came to me and said my daughter was in a car accident last night,” he said.

Wells said while corporate chaplaincy has been around since the 1940s, it has grown in the past five years.

He said growth has come as companies recognize that human resource and employee assistance programs are limited in the ability to offer spiritually based assistance and to do it in confidence, and because spirituality in the workplace is becoming more accepted.

Ray of Benchmark Mortgage does not know who among his employees has seen Moseley, the company chaplain. Knowing, he said, would defeat the purpose.

“It is not that I am able to justify some profit or some quantitative return from it. It’s just important to have something there for my folks. That alone tells me there is a significant benefit.”

Wells said, “We are really there to become their friends. It is a relationship business. We are there to serve the employee and their immediate family. We do not work for management.”

Critical is management’s agreement that such consultations are confidential and voluntary on the employee’s part.

The chaplain commits to serve anyone of any faith or of no faith. As Wells put it, “I guarantee you that if their daughter is out at 4 a.m. they’re not going to worry about whether the chaplain is Presbyterian or Jewish. They just want to know he always has been there for us.”

“There is never any question that we are coming from a Christian world view, but we do not evangelize or convert,” he said. “If somebody is not faith-based, hopefully they will see the work a chaplain does and see the reflection of Christ in that work. It is nothing more than we are a presence.”

As a business, Wells sees the Upstate as fertile ground.

According to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, evangelicals make up 40 to 50 percent of the state’s population, and 70 percent of the population say religion is very important in their lives. South Carolina ranks third in the nation in worship attendance, fourth in frequency of prayer and second in belief in God.

As Wells identified in the business plan, their target companies have 50-500 employees, which in the greater Greenville area has a potential of a $1.5-million business.

The standard charge is $10 per employee per month or “less than a movie ticket for service with 24-hour availability and all the things that go with chaplaincy.”

Wells said BCA has been limited in its ability to grow because “we really haven’t been able to find funding to get us to the point where we can do some of the things we want do.”

Nationally, two large corporations, Corporate Chaplains of America of Wake Forest, N.C., and Marketplace Ministries Inc. of Plano, Texas, dominate the business. Both are incorporated as nonprofits. Both have chaplains assigned to Upstate.

Comments

Add New

Leave a Comment
Comments are moderated and may not be posted immediately.
Name:
Email:	do not notifynotify
Title:
	Please input the anti-spam code that you can read in the image.

3.26 Copyright (C) 2008 Compojoom.com / Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."