PART ONE 

Why This Community Must Be Free. 

We began with a good intention.

We wanted to build a website that could bring chaplains together. 

We wanted a place where people engaged in the hard, holy, and often lonely work of care could find one another. 

We imagined a community where chaplains could share ideas, deepen their practice, grow professionally, and receive support from others who understood the particular burdens of this calling. 

We also hoped the site might generate some income so the work could be sustained. That seemed reasonable. It seemed practical. It would cover the costs of the platforms. It seemed like the way things are supposed to be done.

But somewhere along the way, a deeper truth emerged.

A community for chaplains cannot be built first on monetization. It cannot be shaped primarily by subscriptions, paywalls, barriers, or tiers of access. It cannot ask people who are already carrying so much to prove they can afford to belong. It cannot place even small obstacles in the path of those who are searching for connection, wisdom, encouragement, and care. What we came to realize is this: if the goal is truly to build community among chaplains, then belonging itself must not come with a price tag.

That realization changed everything.

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PART TWO 

Are We Alone? 

Chaplains spend their lives showing up for others in the most vulnerable moments of human existence. We walk into hospital rooms, crisis scenes, funerals, combat zones, prisons, nursing homes, shelters, and family emergencies. We sit with grief, trauma, moral injury, fear, loneliness, and spiritual confusion. We help other people make meaning in the middle of suffering. They offer presence when words fail. We carry stories that do not leave them easily.

Yet, we are often profoundly isolated.

Many of us work in systems that do not fully understand what we do. Many are asked to be steady, wise, calm, and available while having few spaces where we can be held. Many of us serve in settings where they are the only chaplain, or where the pace of care leaves little room for reflection, collegiality, or renewal. Even when chaplains are surrounded by people, they can still feel deeply alone in the work.

That is why community matters so much.

Chaplains do not only need tools. We need relationships. We do not only need resources. We need reaffirmation. We do not only need information. We need a place where we can exhale, wonder, wrestle, laugh, learn, and be reminded that we are not carrying the weight of care by ourselves. We need a community where belonging is not something we purchase, but something we are given and something we help create.

We are not relaunching this community because the needs of the hurting public have diminished. Quite the opposite. The needs are immense. The grief is widespread. The loneliness is real. The moral and spiritual strain in our public life is unmistakable. This is exactly why chaplains need one another now. 

Not later. 

Now.

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PART THREE

Why This Community Is For You

We want this to be a place where chaplains can find one another across geography, tradition, specialization, and context. A place where military chaplains, hospice chaplains, hospital chaplains, community chaplains, prison chaplains, ministers, educators, and spiritual caregivers can meet as fellow travelers. A place where practical wisdom can be shared freely. A place where the burdens of care can be spoken aloud. A place where people can grow in courage, imagination, and compassion not in isolation, but together.

If chaplains are to care well for others, they must also have places where they themselves are connected, nourished, and strengthened. Community is not a luxury for chaplains. It is part of what sustains faithful care. It reminds us that we are not solitary experts, but members of a living body of people committed to tending sorrow, bearing witness, and keeping company with those who suffer.

Th relaunch of the Chaplain Treehouse comes from a changed understanding, but also from hope.

We hope that a freer community will be a deeper one.
We hope that when barriers fall, relationships can grow.
We hope that chaplains who may have stood at the edges will now come closer.
We hope that this space can become not just a website, but a genuine network of care, trust, learning, and mutual encouragement.

And we hope this realization will move you to join us.

Not as a consumer.
Not as a subscriber.
But as a participant in a shared community of care.

If you are a chaplain, or someone called to the work of spiritual care, we hope you will come. Bring your questions, your wisdom, your fatigue, your humor, your experience, your uncertainty, your hope. Bring your stories from the bedside, the unit, the congregation, the classroom, the prison, the street, the shelter, the home. Bring the part of you that has been carrying too much alone.

This community is being transformed because we believe chaplains need a place to belong.

Free of encumbrances.
Free of barriers.
Free to gather.
Free to learn.
Free to support one another.
Free to strengthen the work of care in a hurting world.

That is the vision now.

And if it speaks to something in you, we hope you will join this community and help us make it real.

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So we are refocusing this community with only one agenda:

to build relationships among chaplains and share our reflections, tools, revelations and dreams for our chosen call to serve and meet the needs of our fellow humans who are hurting. 

That is our purpose.
That is our center.
That is the work.

JOIN US.

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