Is your ministry about doing—or being?

What chaplaincy taught me about the heart of ministry

What I thought chaplaincy was

When I was training as a hospital chaplain several years ago, I understood the role primarily as emotional support or crisis response—something closer to a social worker than a minister.

Part of that was probably my Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) training. Part of it was that I was training during the chaos of the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. And part of it was simply my own misunderstanding of the role.

It wasn’t until I stepped away from chaplaincy, returned to parish ministry, worked in social work, and then came back to chaplaincy that I began to understand the difference.

Learning to “be”

Along the way, Ellen Corcella’s memoir Walk with Me helped put words to what I had begun to experience.

She writes:

“CPE is the process of discovering the ‘how’ of bringing ourselves into the room and making ourselves selflessly available to the other… Learning to be vulnerable amid suffering is a process requiring an internal excavation of the soul that frees us to be the empathic creatures God made us to be.”

Later she contrasts parish ministry and chaplaincy this way:

“A pastor is a bundle of ‘to dos.’ A chaplain is merely ‘to be.’ Chaplains merely present themselves to others in the whirlwind of their pain. I had to learn ‘to be’ and not ‘to do.’”

That distinction has stayed with me.

Doing versus being

This week in Substack Seminary, we’re asking what makes our ministry actually ministry.

Corcella’s insight offers one helpful way to think about it: the difference between ministry as doing and ministry as being.

Much of what we celebrate in ministry is measurable. We count impact, budgets, participants, and outcomes.

Chaplaincy pushes in another direction.

It teaches to enter spaces in need of ministry stripped of agendas, productivity, and to-do lists.

To simply be a visible reminder of God’s love, presence, and grace.

Corcella puts it beautifully:

“Chaplains get to take a person’s spark of hope and turn it into a flame burning in love. The sick, injured, ill, and traumatized need witness to their suffering, and they need witness to the survival, not of the body, but of the sacred spirit.”

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The deeper question

I wonder if this is one of the best questions we can ask of any ministry.

Is its value found primarily in what it produces? Or in how it embodies the love and grace of God?

Corcella reminds us that faith points to “a transcendent being—God—who is at our side offering unconditional love and unending compassion.”

That doesn’t mean ministry never does anything.

It means that everything ministry does should flow from who it is.

Why this matters for Substack Seminary

This is the kind of discernment we’re cultivating in Substack Seminary.

Not simply building better ministries, but becoming the kind of leaders whose work flows from God’s presence rather than endless production.

If your ministry has begun to feel like an endless list of things to do, perhaps it’s worth asking whether God is inviting you to recover the ministry of simply being.

Join us.

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