I’ve seen terms such as celebrant, worshipper, penitent etc, but is there one generic term that fits all circumstances, regardless of faith or whether the “client” is a mourner, bride, groom, confessor, counselee, etc?
In the usage I’m familiar with, “celebrant” is the person who officiates a service, such as a priest or justice of the peace.
Laity is a group term for people served by the clergy. Lay person would be a generic term for an individual.
Hi Telemark, thanks for that (for both the celebrant correction and layperson).
But “laity” is just a blanket term for everyone who’s not in the clergy or religious orders, not necessarily a member of a particular cleric’s flock.
Agreed.
“Parishioner” is what the OP is looking for in the sense of being the “customer” of one particular clergyman, except that obviously it’s not generic.
“Participant” fits, but might be too generic(?).
The closest would probably be “congregant” - “parishioner” only fits certain faiths and implies a more permanent relationship than 'congregant" does - if I attend a Catholic Mass on the other side of the country while on vacation , I am part of the congregation at that Mass, but not a member of the parish. But that still won’t fit the person confessing/receiving counseling who may not be a parishioner and is not a part of congregation during the confession/counseling.
I think in English the word congregant comes closest to having fewer sectarian implications. Certainly it is used for many churches, synagogues, and mosques, and I’ve seen it used occasionally for Hindu and Buddhist worshippers as well.
As far as I can tell from the CofE’s guidelines for professional conduct, the only generic they come up with is “those whom we serve”.
“Congregant” is theoretically non-sectarian, but I think usage tends to be associated much more frequently with Christianity?
If the intent is to indicate the “customer” of a specific place of worship, I think the words “worshipper” or “member” are probably the best generic terms, with the precise meaning narrowed down by context. I think those are the words that a news story would tend to use, for example.
“The mayoral candidate is a member of the Market St Baptist Church.”
“The imam was unharmed, but five worshippers were slightly injured when the storm dislodged tiling at the Springfield Mosque.”
This is a bit of a conumdrum for me as I’m looking specifically for the customers of military padres, who can serve, in a multi-faith capacity, as counsellors to individuals in a warship or on the battlefield; as clergy presiding over a religious service in the same circumstances; present at a crash site of an aircraft; or anything else appropriate. I’ve actually known a naval padre who’s done all those things and I don’t know if there’s a one size fits all term.
Here I think we’re circling back to “lay”. It’s commonly used to indicate someone non-ordained, a “non-professional” if you like, fulfilling some specific role in a religious context. I’d call this a “lay counselor”.
ETA: try googling “lay counselor” and check out how it’s used, you can see if you feel it fits the bill. It means a religious/spiritual counselor, someone implicitly with some degree of skills and experience, but who is not professionally ordained as a member of the clergy. It implies nothing in itself about being non-sectarian, so you might want to say something like “multi-faith lay counselor”.
Then it won’t be “members” or “parishioners” of their particular denominations. Depending on what you’re focussing on, “clients” or “service users” is the sort of term social workers use. Or use that formulation I found above “those whom they serve” or “to whom they minister”.
I realize now that I’m a bit confused about what you are asking for. You said:
Hence my suggestion “lay counselor” - a non-ordained person, someone who’s usually in the padre’s congregation, acting as counselor.
But then you said:
Here you seem to have switched to talking about someone ordained, the padre himself, doing the counseling.
So now I realize that your first sentence was ambiguous. Are you looking for a word for the people being counseled?
I’m pretty sure you won’t find such a term that covers everyone who might somehow be assisted by a chaplain ( which is what I assume you mean by military padre, although that’s actually somewhat country/religion specific.) Chaplains may in fact not be clergy- I’ve known lay chaplains. Chaplains have neither a congregation nor a parish - generally speaking, they are attached/assigned to some sort of secular institution such as a military unit, hospital, prison, labor union, cruise ships, airport etc . My understanding is that chaplains in these situations are expected to minister to people of all faiths ( and therefore chaplains must be familiar with the beliefs of faiths other than their own) but only conduct services or rituals of their own religion.
I would parse it as “who can serve, in a multi-faith capacity, as counsellors to individuals in a warship or on the battlefield” referring to the military padres.
I think that’s going to be the case for any English word, simply because most of the English-speaking world is Christian.
Congregant is better than member. Member usually has a specific definition in the church setting. Typically one who has officially declared that they belong to an individual congregation or church. A person who merely attends a particular church need not be a member of that church. I think that if you were to ask a pastor, “Who is that person?” and they were forced to use a single word, they might go with ‘attendee.’ If the person is someone that very often goes to the church, they’d probably say ‘congregant’ and only for those who have made a formal declaration would they say ‘member.’
To some extent, yes.
But I’d still say “the congregation” tends to make me think specifically of Christianity, whereas “the worshippers” does not. I’m not sure why.
The membership process can be more or less formal at various churches, though. I’ve tried multiple times to get on the official rolls of my church, and the paperwork just keeps getting lost in the shuffle (the people we have at my church handling paperwork are not very competent). But I’ve been going there every Sunday for years (longer, in fact, than our pastor), everyone there knows me, I’m on the mailing list, and I frequently serve as a lector and eucharistic minister, and am in charge of one of the church’s minor outreach programs. There’s no documentation that I’m a “member”, but at the same time it’s absurd to say that I’m not.