Here come the chaplains ...

SPRINGDALE, Ark. - If business is going down the road of faith, it only stands to reason that faith would find its own business avenue.

Tyson Foods, the Fortune 100 meat producer with headquarters here, is by no means the only prominent company to offer chaplain services to employees. But it is one of the very few that developed, administers and pays for its program itself. Pilgrim’s Pride Corp., the Pittsburg, Texas-based processor that is Tyson’s biggest competitor in the poultry sector, goes the more common way: It outsources its program to one of the two companies that dominate the growing field of corporate chaplain providers.

Like Tyson, Pilgrim’s Pride has grown supersonically in recent years by buying up competitors. It’s acquisition of the poultry group of ConAgra Foods Inc. in 2003 doubled the company’s revenues overnight and culminated a period of growth in which its workforce tripled in five years. The first benefit it extended to the 16,000 new workers it took on was the chaplain program, said Jane Brookshire, Pilgrim’s senior vice president for human relations.

Why outsource?
Pilgrim’s Pride contracts with Marketplace Chaplains U.S.A., of Dallas, the biggest player in the corporate chaplain field, with 1,629 chaplains.

Gil Stricklin, the founder and president of the company’s parent, the nonprofit Marketplace Ministries, said he admired John H. Tyson and the chaplaincy program he had built at Tyson. But Stricklin says his approach has advantages for companies looking to open their workplaces to faith.

“What we do is cost-effective. You don’t have to pay benefits to our chaplains. It’s more cost-effective to do it with a third-party service contract.” 

And Stricklin adds, “it may be hard to fire the chaplain if he’s working for you, but with us, we have a contractual agreement, and that chaplain can be released on a moment’s notice on our contract.”

Dwayne Reece, the national director of field operations for Marketplace’s biggest competitor, Corporate Chaplains of America, identified another advantage: confidentiality.

“We’re not employees of the organization. We can’t breach confidentiality because there’s no employee fiduciary responsibility to the company,” Reece said from his office in Wake Forest, N.C.

Reece said all chaplain communications with workers were strictly confidential unless the worker revealed that he was a threat to himself or others. There is no exception — CCA says its chaplains would remain bound even if a senior executive, for example, were to reveal that he was defrauding the company.

“When a person is on staff, the line gets kind of blurred as to which side of the equation the weight falls to,” Reece said. “Does it fall to confidentiality or fiduciary responsibility of the employee to the company?”

Brookshire said confidentiality was a primary reason Pilgrim’s Pride founder Bo Pilgrim agreed to hire Marketplace 10 years ago after a “quite a few visits” from Stricklin. “Partners [workers] are more confident that with an outside chaplain, their confidentiality is going to be kept,” she said.

The confidentiality protects Pilgrim’s Pride as well as its employees, she said, because “it’s really a great relief for our HR managers to be able to say to a partner who is very nervous about disclosing a personal issue: ‘You can go talk to the chaplain. You don’t have to tell me about it.’ And I think our partners appreciate that, too.”

Reaching out past their horizons
Marketplace and CCA do business in another way, however, that bothers advocates of workers rights and religious pluralism: Both companies hire only evangelical Protestant chaplains.

Workplace chaplaincies are “a curious and problematic intersection” of workplace spirituality and Christianity, the Rev. Daniel A. Hicks, director of the Bonner Center for Civic Engagement at the University of Richmond, writes in “Religion and the Workplace: Pluralism, Spirituality, Leadership.” He has argued that the approach of hiring exclusively evangelical chaplains reinforces the dominance of “culturally established Christianity,” leaving little room for effective ministering to people of other beliefs.

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