For Chaplain (Captain) William Dykes, ministry is a shared experience of entering fully into the lives of the people he serves.
Dykes is a student in the Vanderbilt Divinity School’s Doctor of Ministry in Integrative Chaplaincy program and an active-duty Army chaplain in the 3d U.S. Infantry Regiment (The Old Guard) at Arlington National Cemetery, the oldest active-duty infantry regiment in the country. He currently serves as the chaplain for Soldiers of The Old Guard.
“There is no reason a chaplain needs to be jumping out of a plane. There’s literally no functional reason for me to do that,” Dykes said about his time as a paratrooper chaplain in a Special Operations Airborne unit. “But it’s the same thing Christ did for us.”
Military chaplains do not carry weapons into combat, but they do carry vital skills for the spiritual and mental well-being of service members. This framework is central both to the Divinity School’s Integrative Chaplaincy program and to how Dykes views ministry.
Vanderbilt Divinity School’s D.Min. enrolls the highest percentage of the University’s active-duty and veteran military students. The program launched in 2020 under the leadership of Melissa Snarr, director, and Keith Meador, founding director of Mental Health and Chaplaincy within the Department of Veterans Affairs, Ann Geddes Stahlman Professor of Medical Ethics at VUMC, and director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society. It equips chaplains to integrate mental health care practices into their work across healthcare, military, and community settings while collaborating with medical and mental health professionals.
“The D.Min. in Integrative Chaplaincy reimagines the chaplain’s role in today’s care systems,” said Jason Nieuwsma, associate director of Integrative Mental Health at the Veterans Health Administration. “It blends research-informed insights and evidence-based practices with spiritual care while positioning chaplains as trusted collaborators and leaders on clinical teams.”
Integrative approach to mental health care
Enlisting in the military at age 17, Dykes has worked as a chaplain in children’s hospitals, as a paratrooper, and at cemeteries. Combined with his own experiences, theological education has given him the language, practices, and approaches needed to minister to service members during some of their most difficult moments.
This lived practice is what makes integrative chaplaincy an important tool for chaplains in these contexts. Military chaplains are often among the first responders to crises and the only completely confidential space for those who are struggling. As service members continue to experience high rates of suicidality, post-traumatic stress disorder, and moral injury, integrated spiritual care remains especially urgent.
Moral injury is the psychosocial-spiritual impact that many service members report after experiencing events that violate their deeply held values, explained Nieuwsma and Jen Wortmann, adjoint assistant professor in the Divinity School and a clinical psychologist in Integrative Mental Health at the VHA.
“Moral injury and related concepts such as moral distress and moral pain have been studied in military service members, veterans, healthcare providers, first responders, and other populations and resonate with many who find that the symptoms of PTSD do not fully capture their experiences,” Wortmann said.
“Such experiences can contribute to both psychological problems as well as religious and spiritual struggles,” said Nieuwsma. “Because of this, we believe it’s crucial to equip spiritual care providers to work with mental health providers to jointly address moral injury.”
Permission to grieve
Much of chaplaincy work involves creating space for grief, even among military leaders trained to suppress emotion.
During his two years serving with The Old Guard at Arlington National Cemetery, Dykes has facilitated over 60 funerals.
After one particularly difficult funeral, Dykes watched as the Officer in Charge knelt before two young daughters of a slain Soldier and placed folded American flags into their hands. As the chaplain, Dykes had offered the homily and read the Soldier’s citations, but the OIC carried the sacred weight of the flag presentation. Afterward, the two leaders, Chaplain and Commander, bonded over the shared responsibility and secondary trauma of honoring the fallen while standing so close to the grief of the living.
“My primary task was to give him permission to grieve,” he said. “I think a lot of leaders just don’t feel like they have the permission to have a bad day.”
Carrying forward with collective grief
“It is very difficult for [soldiers] to translate what they are carrying and explain it to their spouse or their families,” said Dykes. He encourages families and civilians to “take the role of a chaplain” by sitting down and trying to understand the challenges and struggles military members face.
“Our alums serve across the nation and world to support service members and their families in their toughest times,” noted Snarr. “With a dedicated partnership for fifteen Veterans Administration and seven Navy chaplains joining other branch and community enrollees every year, this degree is making system-wide impacts on the quality of care for active-duty military and veterans.”
For Dykes, the work ultimately comes down to a simple mission embodied by the chaplain creed.
“Nurture the living, care for the wounded, and honor the fallen. Those are our three things that we do,” he said. “At Arlington National Cemetery, in The Old Guard, where else do you honor the fallen like we do here?”