Hello All!
For the next week or so our webpage will be *Closed for Remodeling. Then for the next couple of months the site will be closed occasionally to accommodate our remodel. During that time we will be giving the website a new look and site navigation tools, updating our technology to accommodate our plans to start sharing some audio and video messages, and to simply clean up some of the website content with has been neglected.
You may have noticed some additional activity on our site these last couple months. The main objective of those posts was to get reoriented to the blogging process and the technology systems involved. I also wanted to let everyone know that we are still very active in our outreach work, but most of our work hasn’t been very visible except to our care recipients (see recent post for details). I intend to continue making posts during construction so that subscribers can be kept updated with our progress as we set the foundation for bringing more visibility to the mission and resources of the ministry.
Along with the updates listed above, it is my(our) intention to bring additional structure to how we pursue our primary mission of providing spiritual care and support services to police, fire and EMS professionals, as well as to their families and the communities they serve. Although I have learned a lot through my experiences of providing spiritual care over the years, I haven’t taken the time to organize and package those learning experiences, so that they can be shared in a way that is helpful to others. So, much of my time will be spent doing that.
One example of a current issue of interest (that definitely needs more remodeling before it’s livable), is the idea that spiritual and religious practices are in conflict with each other. Quite often I hear people describe themselves as spiritual but not religious. I also have conversations with those who say they are religious but not spiritual. So, just as an example (and the organizing and packaging this issue is in very rough draft form), I’m working on the idea of “How do we bridge the gap between the Spiritual and the Religious?” In reality, those two behaviors have more practices that are similar, than are different. But yet they are very divisive identities in our current culture. We’ve discovered that in addition to the past messages formats and styles shared on this website, there is much more we’d like to start talking about.
So again… stay tuned for more…
With Care, Chaplain Dan
