Is Your Chaplaincy Program Ready for Court?
Pierce County Case Serves as a Wake-Up Call
By Chaplain Dan Nolta
The phone call from our attorney brought relief and rejoicing. With that call the nine-year battle with the ACLU ended in April of 1997.
The time was up and the ACLU had not appealed the decision of the Washington Supreme Court that favored chaplaincy. The ACLU had challenged the Pierce County Sheriffs Department Chaplaincy program and lost!
Those were grueling years with an almost constant temptation to look over our shoulders and see if the ACLU was even more closely scrutinizing us. For those who have never had their every report; every policy, every procedure scrutinized by attorneys on both sides of the issue, let me tell you how uncomfortable it is.
First, your attorney asks a lot of questions, all of the "how and why" questions, probing for legal weak points in your program.
Next comes the discovery process where every report and every "paper" you have touched is turned over to the opposing side. They will shout with legalistic glee over any mention of spiritual activity until you feel guilty that you every prayed with anyone and even more sorry that it was mentioned in a report.
Then comes the deposition ¾ the weighing of your every word; the invasive probing of action and motive. Finally, some years later the court date and your program ¾ and perhaps your future ¾ hangs in the balance.
Remembering the pain of those times makes me ask: "What lessons did you learn at our expense?"
We went through the trial, the scrutinizing of our program . . . did you learn from it?
Did you learn enough that you took the time to scrutinize your own program, not from a sentimental, "We do really good things!" viewpoint, but look at it like the court would?
These are but some of the questions each and every chaplaincy program in the country needs to be asking of itself.
"Five minutes before the prom is no time to learn to dance!" seems an apt bit of advice to those programs who might one day be faced with a lawsuit. To expect that the ACLU or some such group will never attack your program is to have your head in the sand.
To believe that because you do so much good that no one will ever question you could be a mistake that proves fatal to your chaplaincy ministry.
Chaplains, chaplaincy executives, get your program as "bullet proof' as you possibly can. Ask the hard questions, take the proper legal steps, conduct your ministry circumspectly in the light of the "separation of church and state" and survive to do more eternal good in each tomorrow.
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Chaplain Dan Nolta is with the Pierce County, WA, Sheriff's Department and serves as ICPC President-Elect. This article first appeared in the ICPC Northwest Region newsletter, March 2000.