What happens when ministry sits ‘between’ institutions, identities and places – the shop floor, the towpath, the prison landing, the ICU bedside? In this episode, the team explores chaplaincy’s liminal nature and how ‘in-between’ spaces can become sacred places of honesty, hope and (sometimes) celebration.
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The Guests
Tim Dixon
Tim is Deputy Head of Chaplaincy at Tees Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust, a large mental health trust in the North of England. Tim recently completed a doctorate looking at the pastoral care of remand prisoners and the role of the prison chaplain, having spent a number of years in prison chaplaincy in the North East. He is an associate staff member at King’s Church Durham, and has a wife and two young children.
Elaine Hutchinson
Bio coming soon…
Chris Upton
Chris is a Baptist minister who loves boats. He grew up on an island on the East Coast, worked as a boat builder and fisherman before being called to the ministry. After 23 years as sole minister in Haworth, West Yorkshire, he became the lead to the Waterways Chaplaincy and also works as a Pastoral Supervisor and runs the local community cinema.
The Episode
- Liminal by nature: Chaplaincy as an “in-between” ministry – often a guest rather than a host – and why that creates both vulnerability and creative freedom.
- Movable safe space: How chaplains “bring the chapel” – creating trust and room for honest lament and re-orientation wherever people are (cell, corridor, shop floor, towpath, bedside).
- From grief to joy: Marking transitions with ritual – sitting with loss (retail post-COVID, church closures, remand) and celebrating new life, recoveries and homecomings.
- Language and power: Thin places, “being guests,” and why chaplains’ acknowledged vulnerability helps others take off the mask.
- Who gets to speak? Diversity in chaplaincy – hearing from a Black woman chaplain on representation and professionalisation.
Highlights and themes
- Guest not host: “Being a chaplain as a guest rather than a host seems to work for me.”
- Where people really are: Retail chaplaincy among workers whose lives are anything but “perfect behind the perfect shopfront.”
- Theory that travels: Liminality from Victor Turner and van Gennep (rites of passage) helps name what chaplains see daily in prisons, hospitals, retail and on the waterways.
- Psalms of disorientation: Drawing on Walter Brueggemann, chaplains help give voice to lament – and sometimes the psalm ends still in darkness (think Psalm 88).
- Movable sanctuary: “Sometimes when I’m speaking to the chaplain, I feel for a minute like I’m not in prison anymore.”
- Space and architecture: From ICU bays and back-corridor prayer rooms to Lindisfarne and Ely Cathedral – what turns a place into a thin place?
- Roots and resilience: Holding the paradox – chaplains are both stable anchor points and mobile ministers; practices that “nourish roots” matter.
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