Army Chaplaincy » Corps News & Info

Captain Dale Goetz, Chaplain

admin — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 16:25:12 +0000

Captain Dale Goetz cared about the soldiers he served as an Army chaplain—both their physical and spiritual needs.

“He had a great burden for the soldiers,” said Jason Parker, pastor of High Country Baptist Church of Colorado Springs. “His specific prayer request was to see 300 soldiers come to Christ. He was also praying for God to call 10 of those soldiers into the ministry. That was one of his specific prayer requests.

“God was using him. He was very actively witnessing. He didn’t want to be just a social worker. He wanted to see soldiers hear the Gospel and trust Christ.”

Goetz, a 1995 Maranatha graduate, died Monday morning, Aug. 30, in Afghanistan while serving as an Army chaplain. Parker said Goetz was one of four men killed by a roadside bomb while traveling in a convoy near Kandahar Province in southern Afghanistan. His death was also confirmed in an Internet posting by Ralph Colas, Executive Secretary of the American Council of Christian Churches. Goetz was one of the group’s approved chaplains.

Army Staff Sgt. Christopher T. Stout

admin — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 16:27:02 +0000

Christopher Stout had a beautiful singing voice and could belt out the tunes in a church choir or a more casual karaoke setting.

“I believe he could have made it professionally,” said his uncle, James Stout. “But he thought of others rather than thinking of himself.”

That’s why he joined the Army. He was a chaplain’s assistant and hoped to one day become a minister in the Pentecostal church, which he was raised in, James Stout said.

Stout, 34, of Worthville, Ky., was killed July 13 in Kandahar City, Afghanistan, when insurgents attacked his unit. He was assigned to Fort Bragg.

Read more from the Associated Press

Alabama National Guard in need of more chaplains

admin — Wed, 05 May 2010 07:17:47 +0000

The chaplain’s corps of the Alabama National Guard is growing, but adding additional chaplains is still a critical need.

Six Guardsmen recently completed the Army’s Chaplain Training Course at Fort Jackson in South Carolina. One already has completed seminary and the others are attending seminary.

The Alabama Guard currently has 19 chaplains assigned to the more than 11,000 troops and their families statewide. The state has 31 total chaplain slots, Col. Robert Hicks said. He’s the state Air Guard chaplain and the full-time support chaplain at the Guard headquarters in Montgomery.

Conservatives insist ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ repeal will harm chaplains

admin — Sat, 01 May 2010 22:50:41 +0000

Conservative groups predict tight restrictions on chaplains’ religious speech if the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” law is overturned, with some evangelical Christian groups contemplating pulling their ministers out of the ranks.

“The approved gospel will be a politically correct gospel,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, a Christian lobbying group that deals with marriage and family issues. “If chaplains are limited in the moral teachings they can present [because of a repeal], you will see orthodox Christian chaplains leaving the military.”

Religious leaders in and outside the military doubted those predictions.

Air Force Chief of Chaplains Maj. Gen. Cecil Richardson said he thinks a repeal will be a “difficult transition,” but “I don’t know a single chaplain who wants to get out because of that issue.”

READ MORE from Stars and Stripes

Retired chaplains warn against reversing ‘Don’t Ask’

admin — Sat, 01 May 2010 22:47:00 +0000

The careers of many if not most military chaplains will end if the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy against open homosexual service is overturned, more than 40 retired military chaplains contend in an April 28 letter to President Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

The letter warned that reversing the policy will negatively impact religious freedom and could even affect military readiness and troop levels because the military would be marginalizing “deeply held” religious beliefs.

Military chaplains, the retired chaplains said, “are integral to maintaining high morale.”

READ MORE from Baptist Press

Bridge named for Major Watters

admin — Sat, 01 May 2010 22:45:36 +0000

A small group of people, many of them veterans, braved the dreary weather Sunday, April 25 to huddle under the span of the Route 3 bridge over the Passaic River in Rutherford as it was dedicated to a hero of the Vietnam War, the Rev. Major Charles Joseph Watters, an army chaplain and one-time parish priest at St. Mary’s in Rutherford.

Training and celebrating military spouses

admin — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 13:13:47 +0000

On March 23 to 25, the 442nd Signal Battalion Unit Ministry Team sponsored its second Spouse Seminar. The seminar consisted of three days of training to equip military spouses with the knowledge and resources they will need to care for their immediate family and to create vibrant Unit Readiness Groups to care for their larger military family. Our first Spouse Seminar was held in November of 2009 with 18 spouses participating in the training. This past March, 11 spouses participated including spouses from our Warrant Officer Basic Course, the Signal Basic Officer Leaders Course, the Signal Captains Career Course, and our spouses of our permanent party personnel.

READ MORE from The Signal

Chaplain officiates funeral from Afghanistan

admin — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 13:51:36 +0000

Doris Jean Bailey worried that her grandson, an Army chaplain, would be deployed overseas when she died and wouldn’t be able to officiate her funeral service.

Capt. David A. Hicks indeed was in Afghanistan on Monday, the day of Bailey’s funeral; he tried, but wasn’t able to fly home. Nevertheless, through a live stream over the Internet — with an adjustment of a large monitor to the right so he could see his mother — he was able to read from Scripture and talk about his grandmother to those packed into a chapel of Brown Funeral Home in Elizabethtown.

“I would have loved to have been there,” Hicks said in an interview after the service, taking time out from visits with others who stood in front of the Apple computer screen. “I’m so grateful to be able to do this. This is the next best thing.”

READ MORE from The News-Enterprise

Chaplain Ministers Through Near-death Experience

admin — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 04:28:50 +0000

CONTINGENCY OPERATING BASE MAREZ, Iraq – Army chaplains provide many different religious services for Soldiers, but they also provide a sounding board for those dealing with difficult situations in both their personal lives and military careers.

Capt. Geoffrey Whitaker, the garrison chaplain at Contingency Operating Base Marez, Iraq, with the Regimental Fires Squadron, 278th Armored Cavalry Regiment, 13th Sustainment Command (Expeditionary), has used his own near-death experience and unlikely recovery to reach out to his Soldiers.

“I was a SEAL team officer in my former life,” he said.

READ MORE from DVIDS

Campaign seeks to raise monument in Arlington to Jewish chaplains

admin — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 13:16:44 +0000

After the Nazis torpedoed the U.S. transport ship Dorchester in February 1943, Rabbi Alexander Goode and the three Christian chaplains on board gave up their own life preservers to help other servicemen to escape.

As a result of their heroic acts, Goode, Methodist Rev. George L. Fox, the Roman Catholic Priest John P. Washington, and the Reformed Church in America Rev. Clark V. Poling drowned as the ship sank.

All four chaplains were posthumously awarded the Purple Heart and the Distinguished Service Cross, and Congress created The Four Chaplains’ Medal in 1960. At Arlington National Cemetery, however, where three memorials stand in honor of military chaplains, Goode’s name is not to be found, nor has any memorial been erected for this country’s Jewish chaplains.

Sol Moglen of Caldwell is working to change that.