(FORTUNE Magazine) – The evangelist's ex -- ex-PR man -- is now in business for himself, renting chaplains to secular businesses. Gil Stricklin, 57, collects an average $30 per hour from 99 companies, including Pilgrim's Pride, a chicken producer in Pittsburg, Texas, with 7,000 employees. A chaplain in the Army Reserve, Stricklin has 127 chaplains -- 104 men, 23 women, and mostly part-timers -- on the payroll of his nonprofit Marketplace Ministries. All of them have theological backgrounds and must complete two weeks of on-the-job training. Stricklin says they provide an alternative employee assistance program by offering succor for the spirit as well as more traditional help on troubled marriages and the like. Such counsel comes free for employees and their families. As part of its basic coverage, the Dallas outfit also handles weddings and funerals and provides ''grief management'' for the bereaved. All in all, says Stricklin, ''we're not representing management or employees. We're an umbrella of compassion that covers everybody.'' That, says Bob Pearson, head of human resources at Pilgrim, ''makes Marketplace Ministries even more effective than a traditional employee assistance program.'' Pearson says no one has cited religious objections to the plan. Stricklin left Billy Graham's employ in 1970 to work for the Southern Baptist Convention. He launched Marketplace Ministries in 1984, operating at first out of his 1974 Datsun as he hunted for clients. He still drives some 30,000 miles a year -- but now in a donated 1983 Lincoln Continental.