This could be very significant for Chaplaincy.
All chaplains needed to be “credible representatives of their faith”; they needed comprehensive knowledge and the skills and access to support to do their job. They needed good English and another language to communicate with their clients, a commitment to providing pastoral care to everyone as though they were members of their own tradition, and they needed to be neither judgemental nor discriminatory, respecting the rights of others.
The real difficulty is holding onto both the need to be a ‘credible representative of their faith’ on the one hand and the need to be ‘neither judgmental nor discriminatory’. It depends on what that latter bit means as to whether it is actually feasible that credible representatives of missionary faiths can be non-judgmental. On the other hand, if certain ways of enacting ‘non-judgmental’ are followed, credible representativity is compromised.
via Church Times – Best-practice report for Muslim chaplains held up as model for others.