c. 2004 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) There was a time, more than half a century ago, when the chaplain at Willamette University in Salem, Ore., was a crusader for the faith in his various roles: campus preacher, religion instructor and pastor for keeping the majority of students true to their Methodist roots.

Today the Rev. Charlie Wallace holds the job, but he doesn’t recognize that job description. With just 5 percent of students claiming a Methodist heritage, Wallace ministers in a setting where much of his flock isn’t even Christian. Yet rather than evangelize as his predecessors of yesteryear may have, Wallace considers it his duty to discourage on-campus proselytizing of any kind.

“Oregon is the least-churched state in the lower 48,” Wallace said in a telephone interview with RNS. “A lot of people here are seeking their own way. The question for the chaplain is how to minister to them as well as to our Muslim and Jewish students, since we’re responsible for people of all faiths and people of no faith.”

In carving out a new niche for the old position of collegiate chaplain, Wallace is hardly alone. His colleagues across the country are reinventing their roles on increasingly diverse campuses. For some who minister on campus, the new ideals of maximal pluralism and tolerance have given birth to whole new ministries, yet others face the challenge of explaining why their job shouldn’t be cut.

Re-examination of the collegiate chaplaincy is so widespread that the National Association of College and University Chaplains dedicated its national gathering in February to the topic of members’ “changing roles.”

“The religious life structures at many colleges and universities often reflect a mono-religious community that no longer exists,” said the invitation from the hosting Garrison Institute in New York. “The classic old model of the minister, the priest and the rabbi no longer applies. The explosion in religious diversity … requires learning how to integrate spirituality into a diverse college community.”

New approaches vary. Wallace, who also serves as NACUC president, regards the position largely as a “director of religious activities” who does more coordinating than leading worship. His value to the university as an ordained person, he said, stems from “the need to have somebody who understands the whole area of faith and spirituality” in helping people understand one another’s religious traditions. He also helps the community “deal with death.”

Meanwhile at Johns Hopkins University, where emphases on science and research create an intense academic environment, Chaplain Sharon Kugler uses the job for more than counseling, worship leadership and planning memorials when tragedy hits campus. A portion of her budget sustains a bubble-blowing machine and keeps an ice cream cart stocked at the interfaith chapel site. Free ice cream and bubbles go a long way, she finds, to lighten the spirits of those susceptible to an all-work-and-no-play lifestyle.

“People come to the (chapel) space because it’s not like the laboratory or the lab,” Kugler said. “They might come talk to me or they might not. … On Sept. 11, I can’t tell you how glad I was to have that Good Humor cart, to offer something when the world was all chaos and confusion. That cart is probably one of the holiest things in there in terms of what it’s meant to people.”

Not everywhere, however, do campus ministries feel so playful these days. In the case of those funded by religious denominations rather than institutions of higher education, tight budgets are at times translating into less support for what can seem to be a nonessential ministry.

In Boston, for instance, the Boston-Cambridge Ministry in Higher Education pays the salaries of four ministers at area colleges, but their future is uncertain. That’s because two of the four supporting denominations have stopped funding the program in recent years. Directors in turn scrambled to drum up cash from fund-raising dinners and university coffers, but the problem of ambivalence toward a less-than-urgent collegiate chaplaincy remains.

“There’s no immediate payback for the congregation or the church that supports these ministries,” so the program might get cut when church budgets get tight, according to BCMHE board chairman Andy Parmelee. “That might be a little sarcastic on my part, but it’s true.”

Chaplains struggling to find their niche do so with irony at a time when American campuses are teeming with religious activity, according to authors of “Religion on Campus” (University of North Carolina Press).

“Students on campus shop for religious communities in a way that surprised me,” said Betty DeBerg, a “Religion on Campus” co-author and professor of religion at the University of Northern Iowa. “They also draw from a variety of spiritual traditions in a way that puts some chaplains in a tough position. Strong denominational identity turns students off, or (chaplains) are afraid it will, yet these ministers need to be true to who they are.”

Among those thriving on campus, DeBerg says, are those with no ties to a denomination, such as the evangelical Campus Crusade for Christ and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. The Roman Catholic Newman Foundation and Hillel, for Jewish students, have also seen participation grow in recent years. Chaplains with ties to these denominations are often involved in their worship life on campus and mission projects in surrounding communities.

Nevertheless, campus spirituality seems to have a life of its own, with or without a chaplain to guide it. Although scholars identified a surge of interest in Bible study on campus since 1980, for instance, few students feel a need to wait for an ordained person to lead them.

“They don’t hesitate to meet outside the boundaries of the chaplaincy,” said Conrad Cherry, another “Religion on Campus” co-author. “It’s not a matter of chaplains not having a place but of having to figure out what that place is.”

DEA/JL END MACDONALD