IF YOU took your lead from the more disheartening corners of social media, you might think that humans could never get on with people different from themselves. I am lucky to have regular reminders that this is untrue — because I work in a university chaplaincy. This really hit me after the far-Right riots of summer 2024 (Comment, 9 August 2024). That September, students of many backgrounds, faiths, and nationalities turned up at our university and undermined all the far-Right’s myths in the first week of term.
One day that week, in the chaplaincy, I saw a student in a kippah and a student in a hijab chatting about the differences between halal and kosher. The next day, a student with colourful hair and revealing clothes sat alone at a board-games event before a group of conservatively dressed Muslim women invited her to join their game.
At our weekly philosophical discussion group, I have watched students with passionately different views on the British Empire restrain themselves from interrupting as they listened to one another. Members of a generation routinely patronised in the media show a greater ability at dialogue than politicians three times their age.
SEVERAL academic studies show that Christian chaplains in higher education (HE) still outnumber chaplains of other faiths put together, but the numerical dominance is declining. There seems to have been a particular buzz around Muslim chaplaincy recently, with new books, conferences, and courses.
Christians have nothing to fear from multifaith chaplaincy: following Christ surely leads us to serve our neighbours of all faiths and none. Some students who come to our chaplaincy seek reassurance that our purpose is not to convert them. When we focus, instead, on meeting their needs, they are left with a much better impression of Christianity; and some end up asking about Christian faith.
The Revd Dr Jenny Morgans, an Anglican chaplain at King’s College, London, and author of Christian Women at University (Books, 20 February), reports that “chaplaincies particularly serve students experiencing isolation, including international students and LGBTQIA+ students, who may feel marginalised in other religious spaces”.
This echoes my experience. I am asked about Jesus and faith by students who would be unlikely to go to church — including some who would be afraid to do so — to ask such questions. Yet, I know one senior church leader who advocated withdrawing chaplaincy funding because it did not result in more people turning up at his churches.
The threat to Christian chaplaincy in HE does not come from Muslim, Jewish, or Humanist chaplaincy: it comes from university funding decisions — and from attitudes in churches.
SINCE the HE sector is facing funding problems, axing chaplaincy budgets can seem — to the sort of university managers who cannot fit pastoral care into a spreadsheet — a quick way to save a few pounds. But not all chaplains are funded by universities themselves. Traditionally, about half of the funding for Christian chaplains comes from churches. Some of that money is drying up.
It is not easy to find up-to-date statistics: several denominations are astonishingly bad at providing them. Go to a gathering of HE chaplains, however, and you will find that the mood of enthusiasm for our work is marred by a thread of sadness about cuts and under-appreciation.
The funding picture is varied, but some trends are visible. While academic research is inevitably a few years behind, experience suggests that it is no longer as unusual as it was in England to find a university without an Anglican chaplain.
Having spoken with several chaplains who are wrestling with funding negotiations, I do not want to put their chances in jeopardy by naming specific universities; but the examples are not hard to find.
The withdrawal of denominational funding can happen quickly and have significant consequences. A recent Roman Catholic decision to scrap the funding for both RC chaplains at a large redbrick university left the university’s chaplaincy team almost halved, putting significant strain on the other chaplains.
In the Midlands, meanwhile, an informal deal between the Methodists, Baptists, and United Reformed Church has broken down. There was a “gentlemen’s agreement” about which denomination would fund a Free Church chaplaincy post at which universities. But, as new people in each denomination faced pressure over budgets, they did not feel bound by a deal that sounded as though it had been written on the back of an envelope in a pub two decades before.
There need to be more than clearer structures and accountability, however: there need to be changes in culture so that chaplaincy is truly valued. Churches can learn from chaplaincies, and so can the world as a whole.
It is not true that difference must lead to prejudice, and disagreement must lead to hatred. It is true that God has created human beings different from one another and yet able to live and learn together. Many university chaplaincies testify to this truth through their everyday work. It is work that churches can do much more to support.
Symon Hill is a Baptist chaplain at a university in the West Midlands. His books include The Upside-Down Bible: What Jesus really said about money, sex and violence (Darton, Longman & Todd, 2015).
