By Annie Howard
On Feb 6, Vestavia Hills kicked off a chaplain program unlike anything else in Alabama.
The new chaplain force will serve all city departments as well as Vestavia residents.
“We set out to design a program that would be responsive to four constituencies: the Vestavia Hills fire department, the Vestavia Hills police department, the city of Vestavia employees not in the VHFD and VHPD, and the citizens of Vestavia Hills,” said the Rev. Butch Williams, a chaplain and pastor at Vestavia Hills United Methodist Church.
Williams helped shape the new chaplaincy, researching other programs around the country.
“What we found is that a program focusing on all city departments was almost unheard of in the U.S.,” he said.
Sharing a chaplain force is a new concept. Most chaplains are specific to one department – for example, a city fire chaplain.
Vestavia’s program serves multiple city departments, plus residents. It also unites the VHPD and VHFD, which oversee the chaplaincy.
Sgt. Randall Jones and Lt. Don Williamson manage the joint program. Jones is an officer with the VHPD and the program’s chaplain coordinator; Williamson is with the VHFD, previously the main VHFD chaplain.
Only a couple of years ago, they were total strangers.
“Funny enough, we never talked,” said Jones. “We didn’t know each other existed.”
Both Jones and Williamson, however, began to notice the same gap in the “critical incident” system.
“When we would run a death in the field or if a citizen of Vestavia got killed in a car accident and the police had to make a death notification to a survivor, we really didn’t have anybody to help them through that process,” Williamson said. “We didn’t have anybody to help cover the gap between the notification and (the survivor’s) personal support system getting in place, like their church or family members.”
Jones remembered an officer death in which the officer’s close friends had to notify his family.
“There was no one there to go visit the family. And I’m thinking, this is not right,” he said.
In 2015, two local ministers, one of them Williams, approached the VHFD to talk about ways to help the department. The two got in touch with Williamson, and together they brain- stormed the chaplain program. Jones joined up soon after and helped to realize the program, contacting ministers in the area to gauge interest.
“It was pretty much between (Williams), myself and Don. We reached out to every single church in Vestavia Hills. It was literally just sitting down and calling every single church,” Jones said.
The city’s chaplains will help fill in the critical incident gap, ministering to city employees and assisting with death notifications and deaths in the field. They’ll also be available to residents if “a crisis happens involving police or fire,” Williamson said. Vestavia’s chaplains will assist city employees first and foremost, but will remain on call for residents as well. Jones calls it a “two-prong system.”
Williamson cited the need for a program like this in aiding with “critical incident stress.”
“The firemen that responded to the Oklahoma City bombing had a 99 percent divorce rate,” he said. “At that point is when they realized that critical incident stress – job stress, the day-to-day things that we see and do – eventually wears on you. It takes a toll on families and everything else.”
Vestavia’s chaplains have been trained in critical incident stress management. They also are cross-trained by the fire and police department in basic first-response skills. They learn first aid, CPR and fire extinguisher use, and they take Federal Emergency Management Agency courses that help with incident command, Jones said.
Feb. 6 was the culmination of a year of training for the first chaplain class. By the end of March, Vestavia will have six newly certified chaplains. They will soon be joined by more; a second class cycle is starting up next month.
Williamson and Jones hope the program will benefit the community as well as strengthen ties between their departments and residents.
“Nobody calls the fire department unless they’re having a bad day – nobody calls the policemen if they don’t need anything. So when life gets really tough and reality hits, we will have a level of service that we can provide to our citizens to give them sup- port until their support system can get in place,” Williamson said.
“Any time you call the police or you come in contact with the police, 99 percent of the time, it’s bad,” Jones said. “For (citizens), they’re realizing that, ‘Hey, when I lost my loved one, to think that this police officer stayed here, got a chaplain for me, and was just there when I really needed somebody,’ that will never leave that person.”
The chaplain program is open to all religious affiliations and denominations. Williamson encouraged any interested ministers or chaplains to contact Jones.
