The following is an article written by one of the 20 volunteer denominationally-elected Commissioners that serve the Presbyterian & Reformed Joint Commission on Chaplains and Military Personnel (PRJC). The PRJC is the endorsing agent for 6 reformed denominations (see a list of the PRJC denominations at the end of this article).

CH (COL) Chris Wisdom is a member of the OPC Committee. He shares here a vision for how PRJC Churches have the opportunity to provide a 2-year internship to a Chaplain Candidate right out of seminary, thereby providing him a place to gain the 2-years of pastoral experience required for military active-duty chaplaincy.

When in 1973, as a recent Christian college graduate I was considering whether I was being called by God into foreign missions and what seminary I should attend, a candidate secretary from one denomination’s mission board helped my future wife and I think it through by using the analogy of digging a well. I will paraphrase what he said: “Where you go to seminary depends on how long and deep a ministry you want to have. If you want to be able to draw water out for yourself, your family, and those to whom you are called to minister, you can’t draw much water out of a mud puddle that anyone could drink; you have to dig a deep well deep enough so that you can draw out enough water for a lifetime of ministry.”

This is what our military chaplains need to do for our spiritually thirsty troops. And this is why the PRJCCMP is irrevocably committed to sending called men with sound reformed seminary training in residence into significant ordained pastoral experience in our churches prior to their entry into the service chaplaincies. For in order to qualify for military chaplaincy, each of those seminary-trained men must have at least two years of ordained pastoral service prior to commissioning as a chaplain, by Department of Defense requirement.

Where, then, can these men prepare, who are needed to bring God to our warfighters, and our warfighters to God, in order to receive this required post-ordination pastoral ministry experience? Two years may seem too long to some for a pastoral internship, and to others it might seem like too short a time for most to hold an associate pastorate.

If we are serious about developing mature pastoral leaders into military chaplains, and not just filling empty chaplaincy positions, I would challenge churches and presbyteries represented in our commission to “dig a little deeper”. Consider a ministry model that a few of our PRJC churches have adopted and supported for over two decades: create opportunities for men to serve as military ministry interns, establish calls for men to serve as evangelists to the military, or as an associate pastor for military ministry as a commissioned chaplain.

I have labored joyfully under such a call from one of our churches for almost twenty-five years. For nearly a quarter of a century, wherever we have been assigned in the world, my family and I have received church bulletins every week, been prayed for every Sunday, been sent sermon recordings and transcripts, and even been visited by the pastor at least once while I was deployed to stable allied countries like Germany and South Korea. This also has ensured stable support from the same presbytery.

Similarly, in the last five years, one of our reformed seminary graduates with a military service background came under care of presbytery, and became a pastoral intern and a church member with his wife and children in one of our congregations. After a missions conference where one of our military chaplains spoke, out of this intern’s prior enlisted military service experience as a tank driver, he shared with his church session his growing sense of calling to military ministry during the course of his internship. The session responded by praying with him, and worked with the intern and his family while the intern remained under care of the presbytery, was examined and licensed to preach, and ultimately was called, examined, ordained an installed as the church’s associate pastor for military ministry while on active duty. He, like me, continues in such a call to this very day.

What makes these pastoral calls from these congregations remarkable is that they were not extended by mega-churches with expansive budgets and large pastoral staffs who could easily afford such a leader development ministry. If small churches can do this, then why, as another commissioner has observed, can’t our larger congregations who may have opportunities to reach out to nearby military installations also consider such a ministry model?

Currently, our PRJC chaplains enjoy a large measure of senior leadership influence at the highest levels of our military services and their chaplaincies disproportionally great compared to the size of our commission and the number of our chaplains. The current Joint Forces Command Chaplain is a senior Navy Chaplain ordained in the PCA. Similarly, the current Force Chaplain for Marine Forces Command is a senior Navy Chaplain ordained as an OPC minister. Right now, two of the six Colonels at the US Army Chaplain Center and School are PRJC men (Two OPC and one PCA); one of them is the Director of Training; the other is the Assistant Commandant. The current Tenth Mountain Division Chaplain deploying to Afghanistan is a Lieutenant Colonel ordained and called as a chaplain from the RPCNA. The current speechwriter for the Army Chief of Chaplains is a PCA chaplain; his predecessor was an OPC Chaplain. That predecessor has just been promoted to Colonel, and is now Senior Chaplain at a key installation that hosts a frequently deployed infantry division.

Likewise, two PCA chaplains at the Air Force and Navy Chaplain schools, respectively, are currently exercising significant influence over chaplaincy training as senior leaders in positions of critical importance. Another one of our PCA chaplains, who is a senior Colonel in the Army Reserve, has been instrumental at Departmental levels in leading the Army’s “Strong Bonds family training program, comprising tens of millions of dollars in Army funds. And these examples do not begin to exhaust the instances of God’s providential placement of PRJC chaplains “for a time such as this.”

How have these remarkable opportunities for PRJC Chaplains come to be? More importantly, how can we sustain this level of senior ministry leader influence across our military services? I would submit that such leaders are best grown by God’s grace in our churches as interns and associate pastors. They should be trained by our seminaries and sent out as evangelists by our presbyteries from congregational internships and associate pastorates that will provide them with the requisite ordained pastoral experience to serve successfully in our military forces at the highest levels over the course of their careers.

How “well” (no pun intended) will our chaplains share the water of life with our warfighters? That depends, by God’s grace, in part on the depth and breadth of the wells our churches and presbyteries are willing to help them to dig as they begin.

The Presbyterian and Reformed Joint Commission endorses chaplains for:

Korean American Presbyterian Church (KAPC)
Korean Presbyterian Church in America – Koshin (KPCA),
Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC),
Presbyterian Church in America (PCA),
Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America (RPCNA)
The United Reformed Churches in North America (URCNA

This article first appeared in the 1st Quarter 2011 Guardian, the newsletter of the PRJC, and is used with their permission. To sign up to receive this newsletter contact Gary Hitzfield at [email protected]