After 250 years, Chaplains remain indispensable “points of light”

 By Maj. Gen. Doug Carver (ret,) - Posted at Baptist Press:

Published July 29, 2025

The military chaplaincy began 250 years ago on July 29, 1775 when the Second Continental Congress, at the request of General George Washington, established the Chaplain Corps. General Washington believed that military chaplains were indispensable “points of light” to a soldier’s religious, moral, and spiritual health.

I first learned about the military chaplaincy 65 years ago during a Sunday service at my home church in Rome, Georgia. Up to that point, I’d never met a chaplain. The only thing I had heard from others was that a pastor who couldn’t preach often left the ministry to become a chaplain. That humorous perception has been proven wrong countless times.

When the Air Force Chaplain, home on leave from his assignment in South Korea, stepped into the pulpit that day, he expounded God’s Word with such passion and authority that I immediately began praying for the Lord to send me one day into the military chaplaincy.

My next encounter with a military chaplain occurred several years later during ROTC Summer Camp at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. One of the camp chaplains, Southern Baptist Army Chaplain Jerry Reynolds, invited me to his chapel service and afterwards for lunch with his family. Jerry had just returned weeks earlier from a tough combat tour in Vietnam. I was humbly honored and convicted to listen to his stories of how God used him countless times to share the Gospel with lost Soldiers, to give words of comfort to the wounded and dying, and to speak words of encouragement and hope to those struggling with the deaths of their fellow soldiers killed in combat.

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