The Rev. Todd Boling, university chaplain, leads the office of Religious & Spiritual Life, which offers worship services to mark special occasions, programming for the exploration of faith and pastoral care for students, faculty and staff. Boling, who has been a chaplain on campus since 2011, also works with the many campus ministries and religious organizations that help students on their faith journeys.

Were you religious growing up?

I grew up in a very religious home in a small farming community in Kentucky, and the church was kind of the center of the town’s social life. Probably my earliest formative spiritual guides and mentors were not people in ministerial roles, they were the women in my life — my mother, my grandmother, my aunt and my Sunday school teachers. These were the women who taught me what it meant to be a person of faith, who taught me what it meant to be a Christian, who guided me, who helped me struggle with questions that I had, who supported me, who cared for me, who mentored me, who developed me. Not to mean that there weren’t men along the way that were helpful, too, but it was these women who were present to every formative experience in my life and who really helped shape who I am today.

How does a person’s faith grow and change over time?

None of us come into this world with the ability to contemplate or reflect upon theological ideas. We need people that help us understand those things. Part of what I love about this work is that when you get to college, for many people it’s the first time you begin to ask questions for yourself. You begin to discern what you believe apart from what everyone has told you to believe growing up. For some people, those principles and ideas stay the same. For other people, they evolve, they change, they grow because they experience God in a different way, or they learn something here that changes the way they understand God.

How did you discover that you wanted to become a chaplain?

Growing up, like a lot of adolescents, I struggled with depression and learning to love who I was. Religion was a big part of what gave me hope on days when I felt hopeless. The older I got, the more attuned I was to hurt and pain in other people, and I wanted to help other people navigate that hurt and pain and use faith to do it. I didn’t know when I entered ministry what that was going to mean or what that was going to look like the rest of my life, but I felt called by God.

“I think a lot of times people hear the name ‘Religious & Spiritual Life’ and make some assumptions about who’s welcome and who’s not. But everyone is welcome here. That’s what it means to be a community of faith where we don’t decide who’s in and who’s out based on some part of their identity.”
Todd Boling

You earned a bachelor’s in religious education at Campbellsville University in Kentucky and then had an internship in campus ministry at Georgia Southern University. What other training did you need to become a chaplain?

I went to seminary and got my Master of Divinity degree [at Mercer University in Georgia]. And then after that, I did my Clinical Pastoral Education residency. There are theological things that you can learn in the classroom, but how those things apply to everyday life, especially for people who are in the worst moments of their life, can take some work — you can only learn those things by being thrust into those environments. During my residency, I was assigned to the trauma bay, to the ICU, to the psychiatric unit, to a variety of places. The idea is that we’re immersed into those places where people are struggling, where people are hurting. And my job as a chaplain was to be a crisis manager, helping people manage this crisis that they find themselves in with regards to their health or the health of their loved one. If you have heart problems, what’s going on in your life that’s breaking your heart? And how can I help you find some healing and some wholeness, so that we’re not only treating the physical body, but we’re treating the spiritual component to who you are as well?

What was it like helping patients in a hospital setting?

People are in a really difficult position, a vulnerable position, when they’re in a hospital not knowing what their future holds. But we as chaplains, both in the hospital setting and in the university setting, are holders of hope. When you’re in these vulnerable, painful places, it’s hard to hold hope and believe that something can be better. And so chaplains are holders of hope. We hold it for you when you can’t hold it for yourself. And when you’re ready, we give it back to you and let you hold it moving forward. For some people, healing looks like recovering from the illness and getting better and leaving the hospital and going back to your everyday life. For other patients, they’re not that lucky and healing looks like their soul being free from a body you can no longer support and care for. Chaplains are present to both events, celebrating those great successes where people get to go home and being present to the really painful and difficult moments when they go to a different home.  

After completing your residency, you took a university chaplaincy position in North Carolina and later moved to the Cleveland Clinic to supervise residents doing their Clinical Pastoral Education. What led you to TCU in 2011? 

There was a part of me that missed working with college students, that missed helping people discern who they are, who God has created them to be and what they want to do with their lives. There aren’t a lot of university chaplaincy positions out there, and this one was open at TCU — it was an associate chaplain position — and I was fortunate enough to be selected. I moved here thinking I’d be here for five years and then move on, but there’s something about TCU that kind of gets into your bones and becomes a part of who you are. Over the last 13 years, I’ve been promoted into different roles, including this one.  

If you’d asked me at 22 what the course of my life would look like, I would not have said this work in Fort Worth, Texas. But the beauty of it is that God understands and knows what’s best for us even when we don’t understand and know those things for ourselves. I think God empowers us to make choices along the way, and God joins us in those choices, both the good ones and the bad ones, and helps us make the best of those experiences and essentially leads us to where we need to be. And I am where I need to be doing work that I really love.

What does a day in your work life look like?

No two days look alike. You’re constantly being present to whoever might need you that day.

The things that really guide and shape our work are first around student support; we call it spiritual care — being present to people in both great moments of success and great moments of loss and hurt and fear. There’s the educational component as well: How do we teach people to live in community with one another when they believe something different from each other? And then a third element would be spiritual development and growth, helping you get connected to a religious community here that will support you and care for you, but also mentor you and guide you, develop you into being the person that God has created you to be.

What are some of the challenges of being a university chaplain?

Sometimes people want answers when the answers aren’t available, and sitting with people in the midst of the discomfort of that can be hard. I think another part of this work that’s hard is there are three chaplains that serve this entire university — students, faculty and staff — over 15,000 people. Trying to find ways to care for and support all of them can be challenging. We often default into kind of a triage mode, to use a more clinical term, addressing the more pressing need in the moment. And I think a part of that challenge, too, is that sometimes people don’t understand why we aren’t as present to something that’s going on and they think it’s maybe because we don’t care. That’s not the case at all. Sometimes we are faced with the fact that we cannot be all things to all people all the time.

Rev. Todd Boling’s office hosts vigils and supports grieving students as they process loss.

You led a vigil following the death of junior finance major Wes Smith in fall 2023. How do you help grieving students find hope?

We still feel the weight of that loss. We host a vigil every time we lose a student at TCU as a part of what we do as an office to care for and support this community. Whenever a student passes away, I work with the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Kathy Cavins-Tull to help support the family and connect with them to help them as they grieve and process this new unexpected and tragic event in our lives. We also work closely with our colleagues in student affairs to connect with the students on campus that are most connected to the student that passed away. And we work collectively to help care for them, support them, get them the resources that they need as they grieve this loss. 

We bring people together in vigils, where we sit with the weight of that loss. We sit in silence and pay respect to that person and to their memory while we begin to process the fact that they are not a part of our life anymore in the same way they used to be. And we invite people to come forward and light candles and place them around the fountain next to the picture of the person who passed away. And we conclude that time by bringing everyone together around the fountain and inviting them to share memories of the person they lost. We laugh together, we cry together, we hold each other and we pray together. That’s what it means to be a community in grief — to be present to the pain, to care for each other through it, knowing that it may take time but we’re not in it alone.

What kind of support can Horned Frogs find at the Office of Religious & Spiritual Life?

It doesn’t matter what your religion or faith identity or faith perspective might be. When they come here, they’re going to be met with care, with love, with acceptance, with affirmation — and leave feeling empowered to go out into this world and make it a better place for others. I think a lot of times people hear the name ‘Religious & Spiritual Life’ and make some assumptions about who’s welcome and who’s not. But everyone is welcome here. That’s what it means to be a community of faith where we don’t decide who’s in and who’s out based on some part of their identity. We celebrate all of them because they are all God’s creation, and they deserve to be loved.