Becoming a Chaplain Researcher: Reflections on Earning a PhD in Health Sciences

How a Chaplain Becomes a Researcher

For years I told people that chaplaincy needed more research. Then one day I realized I had never really done any myself. I had spent a decade supervising students, leading chaplaincy programs, and advocating for evidence-informed spiritual care. I knew there was a will in the profession. I wasn't sure there was a way. If someone had asked me to design a study, analyze data, or conduct rigorous research, I wouldn't have known where to begin. That realization eventually led me to pursue a PhD in Health Sciences from Rush University, which I completed in April 2025 under the mentorship of Dr. George Fitchett.

This week I watched a Transforming Chaplaincy webinar called "This Is What a Chaplain Researcher Looks Like." Three newly minted PhD chaplains, Drs. Dana Faulkner, Martin Shaw, and Petra Sprik, sat with Dr. Fitchett and talked about why they pursued their degrees, how they paid for them, what they studied, and where they're headed. It was the kind of conversation I wish I'd been able to watch before I started. As I listened, I found myself answering the questions in my head. This post is me answering them out loud, for any chaplain who has been "noodling" on the idea, to use Dr. Fitchett's word, of doing the same.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yw7gl0-mX_0

Why I Did It

I was the Senior Director of Chaplaincy Services and CPE at HealthCare Chaplaincy, the nonprofit in New York, back in 2015. I had come there as a student in their ACPE supervisory education program, what's now called the Certified Educator Candidate program, which was partly funded by a John Templeton Foundation grant. That grant-funded program did two things for me. It taught me that research matters for chaplaincy, and it planted the seeds for how to actually do it.

More than any single lesson, though, what HealthCare Chaplaincy gave me was an ethos. There's an old adage that more is caught than taught, and in a research-rich environment like that one, I caught it. Research worked its way into my chaplaincy DNA. That's something I think we often miss. Researchers are not a different species of human being. Most of us become researchers because we spend time around people who ask good questions, care about evidence, and make inquiry part of the culture. That's what happened to me.

Then came the aha moment. Ten years in, I found myself constantly advocating for more research in chaplaincy and realized I had never really done any myself. I knew there was a will. I needed to find a way.

So I left for Mount Sinai's Center for Spirituality and Health, which also had a strong research ethos and the resources to back it up, and I jumped right in. I made a lot of mistakes because I genuinely didn't know what I was doing. But I knew the clinical method of learning from CPE -- action, reflection, revised action -- so I just acted. My first study was called "Do Journal Clubs Work? The Effectiveness of Journal Clubs in a Clinical Pastoral Education Residency Program." Looking back, I had far more enthusiasm than methodological sophistication. It was not a great study. But it got me in the game.

What that study taught me was that research is a lot like chaplaincy. You don't learn it by waiting until you're ready. You learn it by doing it imperfectly, reflecting on what happened, and trying again. And I kept at it. I researched, wrote, and published, getting a little better each time, always working alongside colleagues and more senior researchers who could guide me. I was willing to do the grunt work if they were willing to support me, and they did. After a number of publications, I could finally see clearly that if I wanted to do research with real impact, I needed to learn how to do it properly.

How I Chose the Degree

Around that time, the Transforming Chaplaincy grant project came along offering funding for an MPH. I considered applying but ultimately chose not to. I already had two master's degrees, an MDiv and an STM, and I didn't want a third. A lifelong dream of mine was a terminal degree: a Doctor of Ministry (DMin) or a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD).

So I went looking, and I ruled things out as I went. I was accepted into a DMin in chaplaincy research but decided it didn't offer the rigor I needed. I explored a PhD in Practical Theology and decided against it, too. It would not teach me to do chaplaincy research the way I wanted to do it, the program chair was clear I'd only learn qualitative methods, and frankly I didn't want another theology degree. That pointed me toward a PhD in Health Sciences.

I first heard about it from Dr. Fitchett, with whom I'd have the occasional conversation about doctoral work. At a chaplaincy conference once, he looked at me and asked, "David, when are you going to get your PhD?" I took it as inspiration, and we kept talking it through over the years, first whether to do it, then what field.

AI-generated recreation of a memorable conversation between George Fitchett and David Fleenor. While not an actual photograph of the moment, the exchange depicted reflects a real question Dr. Fitchett asked during David’s journey toward a PhD.

Dr. Fitchett mentioned that Rush, where he spent his career, had a PhD in Nursing that was increasingly admitting people from outside nursing. I looked hard at it, but the coursework wasn't a fit. While I was on that website, though, I stumbled onto Rush's PhD in Health Sciences: coursework built around education, leadership, and research. A perfect fit.

How I Made It Work

I want to be honest about the money, because that's what stops a lot of people. I knew from the start I wasn't going to quit my day job. This would be done on the side. I also knew I probably wouldn't get much financial support, and I didn't. I paid for most of it out of pocket.

I started cautiously. In fall 2019 I took two graduate level education courses at the University of South Dakota's Health Sciences program as a non-degree student, just to test whether I could carry six credit hours online on top of running a CPE department. It was inexpensive, my employer's tuition reimbursement covered nearly all of it, and it turned out I could handle the load. More importantly, I loved the material. I applied to both USD and Rush. Rush got back to me quickly and admitted me. I was the first chaplain ever accepted into the program.

Rush cost about $1,000 per credit hour, and the program runs about 54 credits. I finished in five years, so roughly $10,000 a year, against tuition reimbursement that was capped at $2,400 at Mount Sinai and about $2,000 at Stony Brook, where I worked the last two years. That left me paying $7,000 to $8,000 a year out of personal savings. It was a real investment. It was also, for me, worth every dollar.

The Mentorship

I can't overstate how lucky I feel that Dr. Fitchett was my dissertation mentor.

Rush has you find your own research mentor and join their work, but Dr. Fitchett said from the beginning that he'd rather I pursue my own agenda than his, and that's what we did. He helped shape and guide it, read everything faithfully, gave great feedback, and pushed and challenged me in exactly the ways I needed. We met weekly for about two years.

What surprised me most was that even Dr. Fitchett didn't know everything. What he had was enough knowledge and enough humility to tell me when we'd reached the outer limits of what he knew about a given area. Modeling that mattered as much as anything he taught me. There's a nice symmetry here, too. George earned his own PhD in epidemiology later in life, working among faculty who knew nothing about research on religion and health but everything about method. We both found our way into this work sideways, and we both leaned on people who knew things we didn't.

What I Studied

My dissertation asked what would happen if we reimagined healthcare chaplaincy education from the ground up, taking inspiration from a speech that Dr. Wendy Cadge gave at the 2012 Association of Professional Chaplains conference.

The dissertation came together as three connected studies: one on how prepared early-career chaplains felt by their degrees and CPE, one on what hiring managers actually look for in new chaplains, and a Delphi study building expert consensus on curriculum standards for chaplaincy degrees.

Across them I kept finding the same three problems: fragmentation, generalization, and variation. I proposed three corresponding answers: integration, specialization, and standardization. Put simply, chaplaincy education often asks students to assemble their preparation from disconnected pieces, teaches them in broadly generic ways, and varies dramatically from one program to another. My work explored what it might look like to create a more integrated, healthcare-specific, and consistent educational pathway. The work was supported in part by ACPE's 2023 Research and Innovation Grant and by Transforming Chaplaincy throughout.

On Imposter Syndrome

Something Dr. Martin Shaw mentioned in the webinar was imposter syndrome, and it really resonated. I still feel it, more than a year out. The great gift of a PhD is that it shows you precisely how much you don't know. I took advanced biostatistics and then used only descriptive statistics in my dissertation, so I'm keenly aware of how much rigorous statistical method I haven't mastered. But I have enough of a foundation to know where to dig when I need to. And, just as important, I know people who do know, whom I can call on to collaborate. That, it turns out, is most of the job.

If You're a Chaplain on the Fence

If you're a chaplain considering becoming a researcher, there's a lot to weigh: cost, the toll on your family, the workload, and you should take all of it seriously. But here's the thing. It looks harder than it is. Two pieces of advice carried me. The first: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. A PhD is a "chipper." You take the next step and keep chipping. The second came from a theology professor: "My smartest friends don't have PhDs, but my stubbornest ones do." Intelligence isn't the deciding factor. If you've finished a graduate degree, you can almost certainly finish a PhD. The deciding factors are persistence and discipline. You have to stay at it.

What's Next

I didn't want a tenure-track post at a seminary or university. So today I'm the president of Fleenor Consulting, working for myself at the things I love: CPE, consulting, coaching, and research. I get to choose the projects that interest me and answer to the hunt for the work and the funding. I like the hunt. I'm still chasing grants to extend the dissertation work on transforming chaplaincy education. I'd love to do for PhDs what Transforming Chaplaincy did for the MPH, maybe even fund a cohort of CPE educators to earn doctorates and seed the field with educator-researchers, the way that earlier project seeded it with practitioner-researchers.

I also want to test an assumption I share with Dr. Fitchett: that many of us back into this profession on our way to congregational ministry, the way a single mandatory unit of CPE redirected both our lives. Is healthcare chaplaincy really an accidental profession? If we build degrees specifically for healthcare chaplains, will there be a pipeline to fill them?

What I keep coming back to is something Dr. Fitchett said at the close of that webinar: that being curious at a sophisticated level is not inconsistent with being a loving, caring, compassionate chaplain. For a long time I'm not sure I believed those two things could live in the same person. Chaplaincy sometimes treats research and compassion as if they belong to different tribes. One asks questions. The other accompanies suffering. But the best chaplains I know do both. They care deeply enough to stay with people in their suffering, and they are curious enough to keep asking how we can do that work better. Research, at its best, is simply another expression of care.