Pastoral Care Resources for Faith Leaders and Chaplains

Ministering in the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) Pandemic

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PDF: Tips on Telechaplaincy

Chaplaincy Innovation Lab Shares Resources for

Chaplains Encountering Coronavirus

Updated March 25, 2020

The Chaplaincy Innovation Lab invites all spiritual care providers, educators, and others to take advantage of the following resource, which we are gathering and passing along for the use of all.  If you have resources and strategies you would like to share, please send them to us using this link. We will update this page as more resources become available.

We know you are busy, so we have organized the information in summary form here. For more info on any topic, follow the links below and feel free to print out and share the resources.

As telechaplaincy becomes more critical, please take a moment to review  our resources on telechaplaincy here.

Strategies for Caring for Ourselves and Our Chaplain Colleagues

• Become familiar with the information and resources available at the CDC's COVID-19 website.
• Request to join our Facebook group for chaplains. The group is set to private so it can remain a space for chaplains to discuss resources, needs, etc. amongst themselves and with a degree of privacy; please simply request to join if you would like to join the discussion.
• View recordings of our town-hall webinars.
  • David Lewellen, editor of the National Association of Catholic Chaplains newsletter, helpfully provided a summary of our first town hall on March 17. Tahara Akmal, CPE Educator at MedStar Washington Medical Center and one of our panelists on the town hall, has also provided a follow-up piece. You can view the full recording of the webinar here.
  • The full recording of our March 24 webinar is available here.
• Register for our regular webinars, always offered free and open to all.
• Check out ideas from, and share ideas with, chaplain colleagues:
  • For those of you moving teaching online, share tips here.
  • For chaplains in any setting, click here.
  • For chaplains in educational settings, click here.
  • For chaplains in healthcare, click here.
  • For chaplains in correctional settings, click here.
• Explore using online tools like Vennly. Vennly is an app that offers a safe, inclusive place for people to explore themes related to spirituality and everyday life through the perspectives of respected spiritual and community leaders across different backgrounds and traditions. The company has very generously offered a free month of service (which is $4.99) to CIL listeners who use this link; the subscription can be cancelled at any time, including within the free month. The app is available on iPhone now and will be available for Android next week.
• Read Micky ScottBey Jones' "An invitation to brave space"
• Check out Spiritual Wellness Practices, provided by Heidi Kugler of the Bureau of Prisons.
• Take advantage of another Facebook group: Clergy & Spiritual Communal Responses to COVID-19
• Check out Carrie Doehring's "Coping with moral struggles arising from coronavirus stress: Spiritual self-care for chaplains and religious leaders"
• Read Doehring's "Using spiritual care to alleviate religious, spiritual, and moral struggles arising from acute health crises," Ethics, Medicine & Public Health (2019)
• Download The Hastings Center's two documents to assist those working in healthcare: Ethical Framework for Health Care Institutions Responding to Novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) and Guidelines for Institutional Ethics Services Responding to COVID-19:Managing Uncertainty, Safeguarding Communities, Guiding Practice
• Take a moment to read Stress management tips from Sojourn Chaplaincy
• Join the Sacred Design Lab by Zoom daily at 12:30p Eastern / 9:30a Pacific for "family chapel," a gentle, 25-minute intentional experience of shared reflection. You can also join their weekly "Wisdom for Troubled Times" call, Tuesdays at 3:30p Eastern / 12:30p Pacific.
• Check out Calm's free resource page with meditations, stories, music, talks and more to support your mental and emotional wellness.
• Participate in the International Buddhist Chaplains Foundation's Project Metta by submitting videos, artwork, messages, song, music, poems, etc. as a way to amplify hope, beauty, inspiration, and goodwill during this time.
• Check out the Schwartz Center's COVID-19 resource page for healthcare professionals that contains information and strategies on topics like caring for patients in quarantine and maintaining resilience.
• Register for the Schwartz Center's free Compassion in Action Webinar: Caring for Yourself & Others During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Managing Healthcare Workers' Stress on Tuesday, March 24 at 1 pm EDT with Patricia Watson, PhD, of the National Center for PTSD and Schwartz Center Chief Medical Officer Beth Lown, MD. Register here.

Strategies for Caring for Those in Need

• General
  • Watch the videocast of a prayer that Chaplains David Hottinger and Maia Twedt from Hennepin Health Systems created to support healthcare providers (also available as a PDF here).
  • Check out the example of a prayer created by Hottinger and Twedt to support visitors who have been turned away and cannot visit their loved ones (also available as a PDF here).
  • Utilize and share Jennie Thomas of NCH Healthcare's breakfast tray communication that patients can use when chaplains and others are not able to enter rooms.
  • Check out Alex Kern's "Caring for Self and Others in Times of Trouble"
  • Review the resources available here from the Zen Caregiving Project
  • Check out the Schwartz Center's COVID-19 resource page for healthcare professionals that contains information and strategies on topics like caring for patients in quarantine and maintaining resilience.
  • Offer online support through the Vennly app. This is available to anyone for $4.99/month and is ideal in these times of limited personal contact.
  • Join the Sacred Design Lab by Zoom daily at 12:30p Eastern / 9:30a Pacific for "family chapel," a gentle, 25-minute intentional experience of shared reflection. You can also join their weekly "Wisdom for Troubled Times" call, Tuesdays at 3:30p Eastern / 12:30p Pacific.
  • Check out Calm's free resource page with meditations, stories, music, talks and more to support your mental and emotional wellness.
• Crisis Spiritual Care
  • Download a copy of Presbyterian Disaster Assistance' Light Our Way, ( 1-2 copies available at no charge, here). This resource by National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disasters (NVOAD) informs disaster response volunteers, first responders and disaster planners in the areas of emotional and spiritual care giving.
  • Check out resources from the National Disaster Interfaith Network on crisis spiritual care.
• Telehealth Chaplaincy
  • Watch our webinar from Friday, March 20 on telehealth chaplaincy, with a conversation facilitated by Petra Sprik (Atrium Health) and Deborah Ingram (Advocate Aurora). A text summary of the webinar is available here.
  • Review our tips on telechaplaincy.
• Grief and Funerals
  • Read this article from the Washington Post on ways funerals are being addressed.
  • Download this PDF on grief in the age of COVID-19 from the Center for Complicated Grief at the Columbia University School of Social Work.
  • Explore the series of podcasts on the resource page on funerals and grief in the era of COVID-19 created by the team at Good Grief.

Remember in these challenging times to care for yourself as well as for others.  If you have some tips, ideas or practices for providing effective spiritual care, share them   here . We are all in this together.

PDF:  Tips on Telechaplaincy