Accredited chaplain
An accredited chaplaincy background, with pastoral and spiritual care offered across school, community and correctional settings.
A stream of Spirit Led Counselling
Chaplaincy & Spiritual Formation
Presence. Care. Formation. Support for the people who support others.
Chaplaincy is often less about having the right words and more about being a steady, safe and appropriately boundaried presence. This space is for chaplains, pastoral carers, spiritual-care practitioners, schools, youth settings and anyone who accompanies people through ordinary life, distress, transition, grief, and questions of meaning and faith.
Background
Where this comes from.
Sharon Mackenzie's chaplaincy and spiritual-care experience spans schools, young people, community and correctional settings, and the care of other chaplains. What follows is experience she has carried into this work.
Public schools — primary and high school
Experience in public primary and high schools, including work as a Special Religious Education (SRE) teacher and as a chaplain in public-school settings.
Children and young people
Experience offering chaplaincy and spiritual care with children and young people, in and around the ordinary rhythms of school life.
Correctional centre chaplaincy
Experience providing chaplaincy within a correctional centre environment, working inside institutional protocols and boundaries.
Chaplaincy Australia — 1800 Chaplain
Worked with Chaplaincy Australia's 1800 Chaplain service as a team leader, supporting and debriefing call-team chaplains after calls and shifts.
Chaplain wellbeing and reflective debriefing
Practical knowledge of what a helper is carrying after a difficult encounter — boundaries, release, referral, escalation and sustainable care.
Schools
Chaplaincy in schools & with young people.
Good school chaplaincy works inside the school's wellbeing and safeguarding structures — not alongside them, and never as a separate spiritual silo. It is relational care within a team, offered to every student regardless of belief.
A steady, familiar presence
Safe, consistent and approachable — the adult who is simply there often enough to be trusted, before anything difficult ever needs to be said.
Listening and relational support
Unhurried attention, without rushing to fix, advise or interpret. Most of the work is ordinary, everyday accompaniment.
Belonging, connection and inclusion
Noticing who is on the edges, and quietly widening the circle. Belonging is protective long before anything goes wrong.
Walking through hard seasons
Grief, family change, friendship difficulties, transitions, and questions of identity and meaning — held with care and without drama.
Age-appropriate wellbeing activities
Practical, participatory ways for students to connect with each other, with staff and with the wider school community.
Knowing where the role ends
Clear about when to refer to school counsellors, psychologists, child-protection pathways, health professionals or emergency support — and doing it promptly.
Working inside the team
Collaborating with teachers, wellbeing staff, leadership, families and external services, rather than running a separate spiritual silo.
Child-safe practice
Confidentiality limits explained honestly, appropriate documentation and information-sharing boundaries, and clear escalation pathways.
Culturally safe and inclusive care
Respecting differing beliefs, values and worldviews. Chaplaincy in a public school is care and presence — not religious instruction, persuasion or proselytising.
Young people
Young people talk sideways.
Rarely across a desk. More often while walking, making something, sitting at lunch, during an activity, or in the thirty seconds before the bell. The conversation that matters is usually not the one that was scheduled.
Presence and patience
Turning up consistently so the sideways conversation has somewhere to land.
Curiosity over conclusions
Asking, wondering, staying interested — instead of deciding early what this is about.
Dignity and non-judgement
Whatever gets said, the young person leaves with their standing intact.
Emotional literacy
Helping young people find language for what they are feeling, at their own pace.
Safe connection
Warmth with clear, visible boundaries — trust that does not become dependency.
Recognising the moment it changes
Knowing when a casual conversation has become a safeguarding matter, and acting on it through the proper pathway.
Correctional & justice settings
Presence inside hard walls.
Correctional chaplaincy is dignified, non-coercive spiritual and pastoral presence for people living with isolation, loss, shame, grief, family separation, and long questions about meaning, faith and hope.
It works entirely within institutional protocols and security requirements, and within clear boundaries about what a chaplain can and cannot offer. Nothing about it is legal advice or clinical treatment. Its whole discipline is respect: meeting a person as a person, without conditions and without agenda.
Formation
Spiritual formation & pastoral care.
For anyone who sits with others — chaplains, pastoral carers, ministry leaders, lay carers and the quietly relied-upon. These are the themes that run underneath the work: clarity, discernment, dignity, agency, boundaries and release.
Presence before answers
Being with someone is usually the intervention. The words matter less than the steadiness.
Listening without taking over
Staying curious rather than steering the story toward your own conclusions.
What is mine, what is theirs
Discerning what belongs to you and what belongs to the person you are supporting.
Spiritual care without coercion
Faith, prayer and meaning offered — never imposed, assumed or used as leverage.
Agency, not dependency
Care that leaves people more able to carry their own life, not more reliant on you.
Boundaries as care
Boundaries are not the opposite of compassion. They are what make compassion sustainable.
Grief, transition and meaning
Sitting with loss and spiritual questioning without needing to resolve it too quickly.
Stillness and sustainable rhythms
Reflection, stillness and prayer where appropriate to the person and the context.
Safeguarding within spiritual relationships
Power, trust and access are real in spiritual settings. Good practice names that out loud.
Referral and the limits of role
Knowing the edge of your competence, and treating referral as good care rather than failure.
Chaplain & carer wellbeing
Who holds the person who holds everyone else?
Chaplains and pastoral carers absorb stories, distress, urgency and emotional residue. Most of it never gets spoken about again. Sustainable care needs somewhere for that material to be processed — a debrief, a reflective practice, a supervisor, a page to write it on — rather than a long drive home still carrying it.
These reflective resources are in development and will be published here.
Resource coming soon
Post-Call / Post-Shift Debrief
A short structured way to land after a shift instead of driving home still holding it.
Resource coming soon
Reflective Debrief Questions
Prompts for making sense of a difficult encounter without re-living it.
Resource coming soon
What Am I Carrying That Isn't Mine?
Sorting your own material from the material you absorbed on someone else's behalf.
Resource coming soon
End-of-Shift Release Practice
A simple, repeatable practice for closing the day well.
Resource coming soon
Boundaries After a Difficult Conversation
Re-establishing the edge of the role once a conversation has stretched it.
Resource coming soon
When a Student's Story Stays With You
For the encounters that follow you home, and what to do with them.
Resource coming soon
Referral & Escalation Reflection
Reviewing a referral decision honestly, after the urgency has passed.
Resource coming soon
Compassion Fatigue / Helper Overload Check-In
A non-diagnostic self-check for the slow erosion that comes with sustained caring.
Resource coming soon
Spiritual Care Practitioner Wellbeing Check-In
A wider look at rhythm, support, workload and spiritual sustenance.
Resource coming soon
Team Debrief Guide
For leaders running a group debrief after a hard week or a critical event.
Resource coming soon
Supervision & Reflective-Practice Prompts
Preparation prompts to take into supervision so the hour is actually useful.
For students & young people
Age-appropriate resources, in the making.
Short, plain-language reflections for young people — and for the adults sitting alongside them. Coming soon.
Resource coming soon
When Everything Feels Too Much
For the days that arrive already full.
Resource coming soon
Friendship, Belonging & Feeling Left Out
Naming what happens on the edge of a group.
Resource coming soon
Grief & Big Changes
For loss, and for the changes that feel like loss.
Resource coming soon
Calming After a Hard Day
Simple ways to come back down.
Resource coming soon
Who Can I Talk To?
Mapping the safe adults and services around you.
Resource coming soon
Boundaries & Safe Relationships
What is okay, what isn't, and how to say so.
Resource coming soon
Finding Your Voice
For young people learning to speak for themselves.
Resource coming soon
Meaning, Hope & Spiritual Questions
Room for the big questions, without a required answer.
Resource coming soon
Moving Schools / Life Transitions
Starting again when you didn't choose to.
Professional boundaries
These resources support reflective, pastoral and spiritual care. They do not replace clinical mental-health care, medical care, mandatory reporting or child-protection processes, emergency response, professional supervision, or an organisation's own policies and procedures. Practitioners should always work within their qualifications, role, employer requirements and applicable safeguarding obligations. If someone is at immediate risk, contact emergency services.