Clergy working around the flock

NOEL, Mo. -- Strolling through a maze of conveyors, blades and packing equipment, the Rev. C. Alan Tyson seems oblivious to the thousands of chickens whirling around him in various stages of dismemberment.

As Hudson Food Inc.'s chaplain, he is focused on an entirely different inventory: the private fears and woes of the 1,600 employees at Hudson's processing plant here in Missouri's southwest corner.

Many of the workers -- a mix of Ozark natives and Mexicans recruited from southern Texas -- simply smile or exchange pleasantries with Tyson and the Rev. Eulogico Navarro, a Spanish- speaking chaplain he hired in February. But as the workers chop and package the birds' carcasses, others talk about their battles with drinking or drugs, marital tensions, sick parents, runaway children and housing crises. Such chats frequently lead to private counseling sessions, hospital visits and other forms of pastoral ministry. "He doesn't care what religion you are or whether you even have one," said Nylena McFarlane as she packed drumsticks onto plastic trays. Fred Canter, superintendent of a processing line, uses his own experience to encourage troubled workers to visit with the chaplain. Fellow employees know how Tyson helped his family deal with a family member's drug problem, he said. "He came to our house many times," Canter said. "He helped me realize I wasn't alone." There is nothing new about chaplains' performing counseling services for military forces, universities, hospitals and other institutions outside the mainstream of commerce. And while businesses cannot discriminate on the basis of religious belief, the constitutional barrier to mingling church and state does not apply to religious activity in the private-sector workplace. Even so, most businesses have traditionally avoided activities that smack of spiritual faith -- beyond, perhaps, hosting Christmas parties or writing checks for the local YMCA. Today, though, a growing number of companies are overcoming their hesitations and are hiring ordained Christian ministers and priests to tend to their employees' emotional needs. Although the first record of ministers in the American workplace dates back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the early 1600s, the practice is most common these days in the South and the Midwest. Converts to the chaplaincy movement range from the giant United Automobile Workers union to small businesses like Hall Graphics, a Dallas printing shop with seven employees, which hires a part-time chaplain from Marketplace Ministries Inc., a not-for-profit company in that city. The UAW, which began with a pilot program involving one minister in a General Motors factory in 1985 in Flint, Mich., now has five full-time ministers and 300 volunteers in GM, Ford Motor and Chrysler plants. "Anyplace there's people, there's problems," said the Rev. Gil A. Stricklin, a former Army chaplain who founded Marketplace Ministries in 1984. With demand for pastoral care booming, his company now provides contract chaplains to 170 business sites in 30 states. Most of the growth has taken place the last three years, he said. There are no hard figures on how many companies use the services of chaplains, but the Rev. Diana Dale, president of the National Institute of Business and Industrial Chaplains, estimates their number at close to 4,000. To help meet the demand, the Dallas Theological Seminary, which trains ministers for Protestant denominations, last month began the nation's first Master's degree program for corporate chaplains. "My impression is that it is growing tremendously because the concept is broadening with chaplains getting extra training and going into all kinds of employee counseling programs and even mediation," said Dale, whose own chaplaincy in Houston is called the Institute of Worklife Ministry. Although nearly all the active industrial chaplains are Christian, most companies insist they leave their religious affiliations and any penchant for preaching at the plant door. Tyson has a cross on his hard hat but doubts that many Hudson workers know or care that he is a Baptist. "If people ask about our faith, we tell them and invite them to church," said Stricklin of Marketplace Ministries, who hires only evangelical Christians for his office staff. "But I have regular contact with other religious groups and will provide rabbis, Buddhist priests or whatever our client's employees request." The general expansion of the corporate counseling and referral services known as employee assistance programs may help explain the popularity of pastors in the workplace. Many of the companies that hire chaplains regard them as additions to -- or substitutes for -- assistance programs. Indeed, the Rev. Henry S. Lewis Jr., a former Baptist pastor and university chaplain now in his 19th year at R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., a unit of RJR Nabisco Holdings, says he is not so much a chaplain as a minister who happens to be running an employee assistance program. Though Reynolds chaplains themselves say they consider tobacco to be a legitimate business and their company dedicated to making its products safer, they listen sympathetically to questions about the morality of making a product that has been linked cancer and other deadly health problems. Such questions are very rare, said the Rev. Rodney Brown, who recently retired after 29 years as chaplin with the company. Like other chaplains, those at Reynolds mostly encounter anxieties about family matters, substance abuse and workplace fears of layoffs and feelings of burnout. Professional counselors with no church connections are trained to deal with such problems, of course, so where does God come in? While chaplains make no claim to be smarter about diagnosing the roots of their clients' distress, they can add a spiritual element -- for those who seek it -- that is missing from a purely secular approach. And some workers do seek it. "Being able to pray together in our home with Chaplain Alan really helped a lot," said Shelly Gass, a sales department administrator at Hudson who recently married a longtime boyfriend after their rocky relationship improved with the premarital counseling Tyson offered. Chaplains also tend to spend much less time cloistered in offices than other counseling professionals, making them more approachable for some workers. And they are more likely to venture beyond the duties listed in their job descriptions. Stricklin recalled how one of his chaplains went to the home of a client's employee to clean the blood left by the suicide of a relative. Business ethics experts say that in an era when new technology is expanding employers' ability to monitor what workers do, say and write on the job, some workers might see a chaplain as another sign of their bosses' getting too close to their personal lives. On the other hand, a chaplain is often regarded as more likely to protect confidences than other human-resource experts. "Rightly or wrongly, we all believe that a chaplain's first loyalty is to God, not the employer," said Laura Pincus, director of the Institute for Business and Professional Ethics at DePaul University in Chicago. Still, there are situations in which workers see a corporate chaplain as less a representative of God than a tool of management. Tyson sorrowfully recalls being shunned by many of the workers laid off when Hudson closed a pork-processing plant in Topeka, Kan., last year. The guilt-by-association with headquarters, however, did not extend to the Rev. Deann Smith, the local minister whom Tyson had hired to serve the plant between his visits. "People would really shut down when they saw Alan coming near me, but they would talk with me," Smith said. "They saw me crying with them and knew I was losing a job, too." Hudson said that in normal circumstances, its chaplaincies, which complement its other employee assistance programs, help retain workers and make some more productive. Even so, it figures Tyson and the 15 part-time chaplains he retains and supervises at company operations around the country are, on balance, a financial drain. "You have to feel it's the right thing to do or you wouldn't spend the money," said James T. Hudson, chairman and chief executive of Hudson Foods, who hired his first chaplain in 1975, three years after he founded the company. Tyson took over the program in 1993. The cost is not just Tyson's salary, which he describes as "in the $50,000 range," his liberal travel and training budget or the more than $100,000 annually that goes to the part-time chaplains. Tyson has also lobbied for Hudson to build housing in Noel, where many transplanted Hispanic workers have been crammed into dilapidated buildings. "They are living in conditions we don't like," Hudson said, adding that the company had invested more than $2 million in 20 new duplexes and hopes private builders will follow its lead. Whether Hudson should do more is a question that will not go away soon, whether or not Tyson pursues it. "Poultry processing is one of the lowest paid and most dangerous jobs in the country," said Kimberly Bobo, executive director of the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice in Chicago. "As an industry, it has a long way to go in improving conditions for workers." On a recent drive from Noel to Pea Ridge, Ark., to visit a terminally ill former plant supervisor, Tyson mused about how business deals with competitive pressures. He acknowledged that he sometimes wonders how workers cope with the unending monotony of their jobs. But he believes Hudson is setting a good example by keeping its wages among the top third in the industry. And, sounding more like a member of the board than a man of the cloth, he argues that drastically increasing wages would be short- sighted. "I've developed a real appreciation of the importance of profits to keep everything going," he said.

Copyright 1996
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