What is a chaplain?

Chaplains were originally priests or ministers attached to a chapel, military unit, ship, prison, hospital, college or other institution in order to provide a specific population with spiritual support. Today, a chaplain is an ordained member of the clergy who is assigned to a special ministry within their community. Although Christianity was one of the first to embrace chaplain ministry, other traditions such as Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism recognize and encourage the particular gifts of chaplains.

According to a recent American Red Cross survey, people in crisis situations look to their faith leaders for help in understanding and coming to terms with what they are experiencing. This is especially true when a major disaster or emergency occurs. DCS responds to the need for spiritual first aid by immediately deploying chaplains trained in both crisis intervention and spiritual response.

Our volunteer corps is made up of 170 disaster-relief chaplains who represent 28 faith traditions. As one chaplain described it, they are a ‘web of spirituality’ that covers the entire tri-state area, offering support and compassion to help people in the midst of deep loss.

Who are DCS chaplains?

In addition to their vocation as disaster-relief chaplains, many DCS chaplains work in related fields such as psychiatry, counseling, emergency management, and congregation based ministry. As chaplains, they are members of a broad spectrum of faith communities and traditions, including American Baptist, American Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion, Church of God, Episcopal, Evangelical Lutheran, Interfaith, Jewish Conservative, Jewish Orthodox, Jewish Reform, Muslim, Pentecostal, Presbyterian Church, Roman Catholic, United Church of Christ, United Methodist, Yoruba, Zen Buddhist, and others.

DCS chaplains also come from a diversity of ethnic backgrounds and are fluent in multiple languages, including American Sign Language, Bengali, French, German, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swahili, Twi and Yiddish.

To meet the needs of the diversity within the New York metropolitan area, we believe that spiritual care must be wide-ranging and inclusive. Thus, DCS continuously and proactively seeks out new partnerships with faith traditions and communities, traditional first-responding and other disaster-relief organizations and professional, skilled volunteers.