Create the Pastoral Care Center that your flock needs! Contract Pastoral Care and Education: The Trend of the Future? provides clergy of all faiths and pastoral care students with insight into the shifting role of chaplains in today's health care environment and explains why many of these positions are disappearing. Examining alternatives to working at hospitals and health care agencies, such as establishing independent contract centers that are commissioned by health care organizations, this book examines the many questions that chaplains are more frequently asking about the stability of their profession. Comprehensive and current, Contract Pastoral Care and Education offers suggestions and models to help you plan your own pastoral care center and continue serving individuals with spiritual care. This honest and informative book contains discussions with chaplains and educators about nine of these care centers in operation, as well as the responses of five chaplains who offer compliments and constructive criticism of these organizations. Exploring the reasons for the decrease in opportunities for pastoral caregivers, such as the decrease of rural populations and the increase of community-based services, Contract Pastoral Care and Education provides you with tips and suggestions that other centers use in order to be effective and successful, including: raising funds from the community, state, and government for operational fees appointing internal, structure-diversified board members who serve without compensation and officers and memberships with specific terms and functions responding to the growing numbers of patients by training lay persons under clinical supervision generating support groups consisting of patients and family members from multiple bereavement groups or organizations to offer comfort and care to others Full of insight and immediately useful techniques, Contract Pastoral Care and Education will help you keep serving patients and assist you in pursuing a growing facet of the pastoral care field.