Today we’d like to introduce you to Rachel Hartman.
Hi Rachel, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
Growing up south of Atlanta, my Christian faith has always been central to my identity. When one of my siblings experienced a health crisis at a young age caused by a genetic condition, I experienced the caring response of our community through babysitting, prayer, and casseroles. This formative experience, intertwined with engagement in the fine arts as a child, cultivated personal values of love, grace, justice, faith, empathy, and belonging.
When I arrived on campus at Mercer University, I was still discerning my life’s purpose–having transferred out of the Engineering major and into an Undecided Liberal Arts major. I quickly encountered a clergywoman who became not only a trusted mentor but a dear friend. Through her work at the Wesley Foundation, a United Methodist campus ministry, she provided spiritual guidance and mentorship during my time at college. Towards the end of my junior year at Mercer University, I found myself discerning a call to ministry. I applied to the South Georgia Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church’s Young Clergy Program and was accepted to complete the program at a local church. I encountered another clergywoman mentor during this experience who helped me excavate my call to ordained ministry. I followed this call to seminary and decided to focus on the ordination path with a focus area of compassion and justice in the United Methodist Church.
While enrolled in seminary at Vanderbilt Divinity School, I interned at a local church, a college ministry, and at a hospital as a chaplain. Walking the hallways of the hospital evoked familiar sights, sounds, and smells of my sibling’s long hospital stays as a child. I felt an innate sense of meaning in this role that provided Christian care to patients and their families in those vulnerable situations. I followed this sense of God’s direction throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, ministering to patients, families, and healthcare professionals alike as the world navigated love, care, empathy, and safety during an unprecedented health crisis.
Following a couple of years in the healthcare field, an opportunity came up to return to middle Georgia using my gifts in a College chaplaincy setting–gifts that had been shaped by my experience as a hospital chaplain. At Wesleyan College, I serve as a chaplain to the college community and enable the campus to live out its values through service. Since beginning this role, my life, my family, my career, and my community have flourished. These people and my place in Macon are sources of rich meaning, purpose, and love.
These days, I spend most of my time being a mom to a two-year-old little girl, being a wife to an incredibly supportive spouse, and being a chaplain to the Wesleyan College community in Macon, Georgia.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
One of the most significant struggles in my journey was the COVID-19 pandemic. Recently graduated from seminary, I was accepted into a hospital chaplaincy residency (called CPE). This program challenged my faith, my perspective, and my understanding of life and death. Beyond that, all healthcare professionals, families, and patients I interacted with were grappling with a global crisis of unprecedented death. As I visited patients in quarantined parts of the hospital, I held up an iPad as loved ones said their goodbyes, virtually, to spouses, parents, and siblings. I provided pastoral care to loved ones who rushed to the ER and trauma bay, only to be told devastating news. I heard stories of adventures and of pains, of joys and of diagnoses, of lives that were well-lived and of lives that ended too soon.
Through my experience as a healthcare chaplain, I grounded myself in my faith and faith community. However, the longing for closeness to my family and our community in Georgia called my family back home to Macon in 2022. With this leap of faith, a new opportunity working as a College Chaplain in Macon emerged, and this new chapter of life came to fruition.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
An aspect of my work that I am incredibly proud of is that of being a ‘storycatcher.’
Through my CPE residency, I learned many models for spiritual care. But the one that resonated with me the most was that of the chaplain as a ‘story-catcher.’ Coined by Chaplain Rebekah Schmidt and written about by Rhonda S. Cooper, the model of ‘story-catcher’ describes the role of the chaplain as someone who is fully present and attentive to the telling of another’s narrative.
Through my chaplaincy practice of ‘story-catching,’ I have the honor and privilege to practice this sacred listening of others: students, staff, faculty, and community members in the middle Georgia area. Through this ‘story-catching,’ I walk with others on their spiritual journey as they search for hope, meaning, joy, purpose, and calling.
Being a ‘storycatcher’ for Wesleyan College is deeply meaningful and impactful. My unique gift is to invite others into genuine personal reflection that permeates all aspects of one’s life. Through this reflection, the individual opens themselves to transformation, deeper relationships, and more connection.
However, I discovered that as I journey with others, I find my own life enriched. Holding space for these sacred stories of their lives, I am more connected, more loving, and more empathetic than ever before.
Can you tell us more about what you were like growing up?
I have always been a people person! I am extroverted and outgoing. As a child, I loved performing in choirs and theater musicals and plays. By encountering diversity and forming relationships across different lived experiences within artistic and creative communities, my theology and spiritual understanding of the world were expanded as a young teenager. I credit these relationships with opening my heart and mind, which led me to where I am now.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.wesleyancollege.edu/studentlife/faith/Faith-On-Campus-Home-Page.cfm
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachel-paul-hartman-9b46b7108
Image Credits
Courtesy of Wesleyan College
