Stephen Montoya
Today, Greg McBrayer leads the DFW Airport Chaplaincy.
There’s a place at DFW Airport where time seems to pause. It’s not a bar or a lounge, or even the airline club with those tiny cubes of cheese. It’s a chapel. Quiet. Open. Waiting.
It sits near the end of Terminal D, unassuming and undramatic, except in the way a heartbeat is. You don’t really notice it until you need it.
Inside, the air is still. The light is kind. Two ablution stations gleam for Muslim travelers before you enter. A row of chairs — 20 or so — sit in the glow of a faux stained-glass window. There’s even a pulpit.
For 50 years, the DFW Airport Interfaith Chaplaincy has offered this kind of sanctuary. It isn’t a secret, exactly. But in an airport with more gates than some small countries have diplomats, it’s not the first thing you expect to find.
But when the urge to pray hits — or when something in you just needs to be still — this is where you want to land.
Hidden in plain sight, the chapel and the chaplaincy behind it might be DFW’s best-kept secret, says Father Greg McBrayer, a priest of the Anglican Church of North America and executive director and senior chaplain of the DFW Airport Interfaith Chaplaincy.
“I’ve been in this all my life,” he says, the cadence of a man whose story could fill a movie reel.
And it almost has.
Back in 2001, McBrayer wasn’t wearing a collar. Instead, he was in the control tower at US Airways in Pittsburgh, the morning of September 11.
“It was a beautiful day. I’d launched the fleet. Everything was moving.
“And then it all changed.”
He remembers the radar screens going dark. He remembers the call from Cleveland Center — one of the hijacked planes was flying low, in line with their tower.
“The Pittsburgh Tower evacuated. The United plane flew right over our heads.”
The hijacked plane didn’t hit Pittsburgh. It went down in Shanksville, the result of heroic passengers who raised a rebellion onboard. And when McBrayer went home that night and turned on the television, he saw what the rest of the world saw. Only for him, it wasn’t just a tragedy — it was a calling.
“I remember thinking, ‘Dear, God, we need you in this place.’ And in the silence, I heard, ‘That’s why I placed you there.’”
Stephen Montoya
That moment changed the course of his life.
McBrayer went off to seminary, receiving his Anglican theological education at Trinity School for Ministry in Pittsburgh and Nashotah House Theological Seminary in Wisconsin. Today, in addition to his duties at DFW as well as an assisting priest at St. Barnabas in north Fort Worth, he remains in flight control as chief flight controller for American Airlines.
Eleven years into his tenure at DFW, McBrayer leads a team of 25 chaplains representing multiple faiths and denominations. There’s a rabbi. A Muslim cleric. Evangelicals. Mainliner Protestants. A whole mosaic of belief systems — focused on one thing: presence.
As we talked, two gentlemen entered the main chapel in Terminal D. They washed their feet, moved their carpet out, knelt down, stood up, and knelt down again. They faced east in prayer, in the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca.
“This isn’t a mission field,” he says. “It’s a care field.”
Because at DFW, one of the busiest airports on the planet, people aren’t just flying. They’re living. Some are rushing to bury loved ones. Others are chasing new lives, new jobs, old ghosts. They’re grieving. Hoping. Holding on. And sometimes, just barely.
“When you walk into this airport, it doesn’t matter if you came from the penthouse or the poorhouse — you’ve surrendered control.”
And that surrender, McBrayer believes, creates room for something sacred. He calls it “the ministry of presence.”
No sermons. No pressure. Just people who stay.
“We’re like WD-40 and duct tape,” he laughs. “We hold people together when they’re falling apart. We reduce friction before it becomes combustion.”
The chaplains walk the terminals seven days a week, five hours at a time, each shift another page in the airport’s untold story.
Thanks to a partnership with Chaplain Care, the DFW chaplaincy has its own app, passengers and employees can now scan a QR code to locate the nearest chaplain, chat in real time, or request an in-person visit. DFW is the first airport in the country to implement it.
“It won’t get you through security faster, but it might just help you arrive in one piece — soul and all,” McBrayer says with a grin.
There are chapels in every terminal now. Terminal F, slated to open in 2027, will have one too — designed by McBrayer and his team.
The DFW Airport Chaplaincy wasn’t born from some big glossy ad campaign — but from a pilot’s quiet conviction.
Back in the 1970s, as Dallas and Fort Worth leaders tried to hash out the future of air travel in the middle of the prairie, a Braniff captain named Fred Griswold had an idea. He’d served in the military. He understood the power of chaplains in moments of uncertainty.
The first interfaith chapel at D/FW opened more than 20 years ago by DFW Airport Interfaith Chaplaincy, a nonprofit group that operates independently of the airport.
The chaplaincy was formed through the DFW Airport Interfaith Chaplaincy, a nonprofit that operates independently of the airport. Originally, the chaplaincy was a way to bring a little spiritual glue to board meetings that probably needed it. But over time, it grew. It changed. It listened.
Today, the DFW Airport Chaplaincy is the largest in the world — recognized globally among civil aviation chaplaincies and often looked to as the benchmark. Chaplains are now on duty at most major airports globally. It serves as many or more of the tens of thousands airport employees as passengers.
The chaplaincy isn’t slowing down.
A new chapel will open in Terminal F when it launches in 2027 — designed by McBrayer and his team.
McBrayer’s favorite line — he says it at the start of every Mass: “Who knew they were going to a Mass today?”
The answer, always, is no one. But they’re there. In the chapel. Holding whatever brought them in.
“You may not remember my message,” McBrayer tells them. “But you’ll remember this: There’s no greater illustration in your life than what brought you to this room.”
And that’s the magic of it all.
Buried inside the machine of one of the world’s busiest airports is this tiny, beating heart. A reminder that travel is more than logistics.
It’s life.
And at DFW, tucked just off the main drag of Terminal D, someone is always there to bear witness.
“To be a part of that and be here at our main chapel, being on the international terminal, is a great joy,” McBrayer says. “We're right in the heart of it all, and it is a great ministry.”