Facing A Frozen Chaplaincy: One Ordained Southern Baptist Woman’s Dilemma. -- By: Rachel Coggins

Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 16:3 (Summer 2002)
Article: Facing A Frozen Chaplaincy: One Ordained Southern Baptist Woman’s Dilemma.
Author: Rachel Coggins


Facing A Frozen Chaplaincy: One Ordained Southern Baptist Woman’s Dilemma.

Rachel Coggins

Rachel Coggins is a chaplain (major) in the U.S. Army Reserves, serving with the 483rd Transportation Battalion on Mare Island, Vallejo, CA. She is a speaker and author for Rachel’s Well Ministry; she has been a hospital chaplain, religious education director and teacher, choral director, prison minister, and a short-term missionary. Coggins is presently working on a D.Min. in Women’s Studies with Trinity Seminary. She and her husband are now affiliated with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.

Snow covered the ground of the still sleeping German town as I trudged toward the chapel. Stepping swiftly, more from fear than from cold, I arrived safely at my destination: a beautiful, gray stone church built nearly 200 years ago. It was the United States Army’s Community Chapel in Aschaffenburg, Germany.

The giant wooden door creaked as I pushed it open, then locked it behind me. Walking through the sanctuary on the way to my office, I stopped to sing a prayer. The acoustics in the stone cathedral-styled church were magnificent, and the sound of the sung praise reverberated from the high ceiling and stone walls. As light began to peep through the stained-glass windows, I felt the presence of God. I felt the pain of mothers weeping for their sons fallen in battle, and I felt the peace that had sustained me through this very trying period.

The following Sunday, military guards carrying M-16 rifles stood on each side of the entrance to the chapel. They checked people as they arrived for worship services that morning. Saddam Hussein had promised to rain terror on Americans in retaliation for air strikes. The threats were effective: We were terrorized.

Called To Duty

Two months earlier the United States Army had called me to active duty. I was one of a group of thirty-three army reserve chaplains assigned to support army posts in Germany. Most of the soldiers on these posts, including their chaplains, were on the front lines of Operation Desert Storm (1990-91). Left behind on the installations were the families of those soldiers, who, with few exceptions, were women and children.

Of the thirty-three chaplains, I was the only female, and the only one with a spouse also deployed. My husband, a U.S. Air Force chaplain, was also in the war area. When I said to the women at Aschaffenburg, “I understand,” they listened, for they knew I did. I understood the intense loneliness and the gripping fear of being left behind in a foreign country while your spouse goes forward to a battlefield from which he may never return. In ways that my male counterparts could not do, I held the hands of the women who were there an...

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