As I believe that every somehow educated Nigerian should know, the various churches and religious bodies provide chaplaincy services to the military forces in every nation of the world. Two reasons necessitate these services.

First, whenever these men are involved with fighting, as the primary reason for the profession and their formations (properly, to defend or protect the people of their countries), they are in danger of dying; and so always need to be spiritually reminded and helped to live each day as if it was going to be the last.

However, besides that, and especially in peacetime and other non-fully full-scale wars where they are used to do more than the civic duties of the police, they are used to doing all kinds of forceful extortions and other associated evils; and with all amounts of impunities. So, they need to be helped always – in peacetime as well as in war times – to avoid such easily lived evil lives. Even Jesus the Christ, in his earliest spiritual ministrations when the people asked him what they are to do in order to respond well to the repentance of which he spoke about, talked about soldiers not forcing all sorts of intimidation on the people. That is the very basis of this ministration; because it is a perpetual human problem; as ready and as perennial as the grass!

With these military services, the understanding of the life of these soldiers is of such importance in providing this ministration that it requires for the ministering priests of these various religions, to become soldiers themselves. So, these ministers are true, members of those armed forces; and in the more civilized countries of the world, rising up to the ranks of generals before they are retired. However, in our not so civilized Nigeria, by the time they become colonels, they usually retire them! And they are happy, as a country, to continue with that primitivity. However, “God day shaa”, as they say; and one day He will save us and bring us out of these primitivities – as long as we keep recognizing them, calling attention to them, and doing all we can to educate ourselves that such primitivities and stupidities will not take us anywhere as a country! In the same light, we must keep praying for these religious leaders to be truly spiritual and not just other evils worse than they have been called to reduce in these places as we see them doing all over the places!

One other place that the religious bodies run chaplaincies is in hospitals where we are always confronted with people in situations of life and death, where the necessarily highly and widely knowledgeable medical doctors, in the face of these threatening life and death conditions, are always confronted with many temptations to do less than the optimal good with this knowledge and skills! This is the reason that the profession has to admit them to solemn oaths never to consider such alternatives to the utmost health of the patient (such as money, politics, religion, popularity, sex, etc) before they will ever be licensed to practice the profession! So, both the patients confronting the imminent possibilities of death and the doctors (and their closest workers, the nurses and midwives especially) with the temptation of doing related evils with such dire situations, need to be serviced with such chaplaincies, to help them live as ought. However, the nature of these two conditions does not need anybody being inside them to be able to minister to either the patients or these health workers. So, unlike in the armies, the spiritual ministers never needed to become patients or medical doctors themselves to run these chaplaincies.