Baylor Honors Chaplain With Humanitarian Award

The Baylor Alumni Association presented the Abner V. McCall Humanitarian Award to Gil A. Stricklin, during summer commencement Aug. 14 at Baylor University. The award recognizes alumni who have exhibited a Christian response to those situations and persons around them in ways exemplified by the life of the late Baylor President Abner V. McCall.
A 1957 Baylor graduate, Stricklin is founder, president and CEO of Marketplace Ministries Inc., a national faith-based contracted chaplain service to secular businesses, with headquarters in Dallas. He spent six years as special assistant for media relations with Dr. Billy Graham and 14 years as chaplain ministries coordinator for the Baptist General Convention of Texas. In 1994, he retired as a colonel in the U.S. Army Chaplain Corps, after spending 37 years as a commissioned officer, including active duty as a chaplain during Operation Desert Storm.
Stricklin founded Marketplace Ministries in 1984, with one client company and himself as the lone chaplain. He now leads a corporate chaplain and support team of more than 1,500 members, who care for approximately 300,000 employees and families at 250 companies from California to Maine. With national statistics showing that slightly more than half of today's workforce has no practicing religion, Marketplace Ministries - Marketplace Chaplains USA provides 21 pastoral care chaplain services, including weddings and funerals, crisis intervention and hospital visitation.
A recipient of the Baylor Alumni Association's Distinguished Alumni Award in 1997, Stricklin was given an honorary doctorate in 2003 from Dallas Baptist University. He has been married for 46 years to his Baylor sweetheart, Ann March, a 1958 Baylor graduate. They have two sons, Art Stricklin '83 and Cliff Stricklin '86, and four grandchildren.
For more information, contact Judy Prather, communications coordinator for the Baylor Alumni Association, at (254) 710-6431.