Saturday, March 14, 1998

Pastors in pain increasingly feel jilted by their own flock -- and even by God

By Jeffrey Weiss / The Dallas Morning News

DALLAS -- The request seemed silly, almost trivializing the pain that filled the room. The therapist asked the 50 men and women each to put a penny, a nickel and a dime in their hands and decide which one represented them best.

A woman picked a penny because she felt worthless. A man picked a nickel because it's between a penny and dime and he felt squeezed in the middle of his responsibilities.

The next man picked his penny because "I discriminate against pennies. I just throw them away. And I just feel God's turned his face away from me."

In this group, that was a particularly vulnerable admission. Everyone was a Southern Baptist pastor or pastor's wife, united by common theology and a desperate need for help.

The "Wounded Heroes" retreat held recently at the Cooper Aerobics Center in Dallas was not just another pastors' conference. Yes, this was a Christian counseling program but no, it didn't start and end with Bible readings.

This was, according to the participants and officials of the Southern Baptist Convention, a unique blend of the clinical and scriptural the likes of which the national convention has never made available. The Dallas retreat was the first of what will be three pilot conferences intended to bring clinical counseling to dozens of troubled pastors.

But Wounded Heroes is not sponsored by the SBC. It is largely the project of The Rev. Freddie Gage. Gage was a big-time evangelist in the 1970s who worked with, helped employ or preached for many of the current leaders in American Baptist life.

He was felled by anxiety attacks and clinical depression in 1978, when he was 44 years old. He spent time in a psychiatric hospital and has continued to take advantage of secular psychiatric help.

His fall and the challenges of his recovery have been an open secret within Baptist circles for years. Because he was one of the few Baptist leaders to acknowledge a psychological problem -- and not dismiss it as spiritual -- he got calls from many other pastors in need of help. When over the past couple of years he lost several friends in the ministry to suicide, he decided the Southern Baptist Convention needed to take action, he said.

"The majority of Southern Baptist ministers do not offer grace, compassion and restoration to their fellow ministers," Gage has said. "When a pastor stumbles, we purchase him a coffin and bury him. Is this the Baptist way?"

Gage still faces daily battles with skewed brain chemistry and emotional stress. And he wins some and loses some. But the charisma and drive behind his dynamic evangelism -- he'll tell you that Dr. W.A. Criswell dubbed him the "bouncing ball of fire" 40 years ago -- has not left him.

"Freddie is a catalyst," said Dr. James Draper, head of the Sunday School Board of the SBC. "He has only one speed and that's full speed, and he has one emotion and that's passion."

For 14 years, Gage has worked for Rapha, a national Christian psychological counseling company. Working from Dallas, he has acted as a liason between Rapha (the word is Hebrew for "healing") and Southern Baptists.

He turned to Rapha to help him set up the nonprofit Wounded Heroes ministry. And he turned to his longtime Baptist friends for moral and financial support.

Supporters who came through with time, money or both included Dr. Draper, Dr. O.S. Hawkins, former pastor at First Baptist Church of Dallas and current head of the SBC's Annuity Board; Dr. Kenneth Cooper, the inventor of aerobics who owns the Cooper Aerobics Center and fits a little Christian witness into each of his health-related books; the Rev. Dick Maples, coordinator for minister/church relations for the Baptist General Convention of Texas; and Dr. Jack Graham, pastor at Prestonwood Baptist Church in Dallas.

More than 1,400 pastors or their wives called for information before the Dallas retreat. With a maximum of 50 slots, the waiting list reached 140.

Their problems reflected the ills of modern America and the peculiar problems of a Baptist pastor: depression, family discord, obsessions with pornography or infidelity, being booted from their pulpits by unhappy deacons.

Ministers of all denominations wrestle with these demons. Leadership Journal, a trade publication for pastors, reported the results of a survey last year: More than a third of pastors felt physical stress from their workload at least once a week, and 41 percent reported emotional stress at least once a week.

Add to the general pastor's burden the specific challenges of Southern Baptist ministry. Each church is autonomous, answering to no bishop or synod. That gives the pastors power and isolation. It also contributes to turnover.

About 6,000 Southern Baptist pastors leave their ministries each year. Last year, 225 pastors were fired every month. And more than 50 calls a day come in to a little-publicized SBC help line.

Those calls for help indicate that about a third of the SBC's 62,000 churches had staff suffering from emotional problems last year, Draper said.

And the problem could be worse, underreported because of the unusual stigma that many Christians still attach to psychological problems.

Dr. Dwight Carlson, a psychiatrist and the author of "Why Do Christians Shoot Their Wounded?" wrote in a recent issue of Christianity Today magazine:

"This prejudice against those with emotional problems can be seen in churches across the nation on any Sunday morning. We pray publicly for a parishioner with cancer or a heart attack or pneumonia. But rarely will we pray for Mary with severe depression. ... Our silence subtly conveys that these are not acceptable illness for a Christian to have."

That sentiment was echoed by one of the participants in the Wounded Heroes retreat:

"It's not sympathy I want. It's just a little bit of understanding from those perfect people," a pastor said with bitter sarcasm.

Gage promised the participants at the retreat that his goal was the same as theirs.

"I'm launching a crusade," he said. "I'm asking God and the Southern Baptist Convention to replace the word Ôstigma' with Ômercy.' "

Many state conventions offer a variety of spiritual and clinical counseling programs. But the SBC has never supported the kind of intense clinical and spiritual retreat proposed by Gage and Rapha.

Rapha counselors employ some psychological techniques used by many secular professionals. Some techniques, like the coin game, are designed to give people a way to express their pain by focusing on their problems in a new way. Other techniques are designed to help define problems in a way that lets people separate themselves mentally from the sources of their pain.

But Christian couseling takes another step. These pastors and their wives were also asked to take particularly Christian steps: Acts of complete forgiveness and love toward those who offended them. And acceptance that the strength to overcome their problems comes uniquely from Jesus.

"I think we're just getting back to what's been in the Bible all along," said Rapha president Ron Braund.

He quotes James 5:16. "Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another that you may be healed."

Not that the counselors say that retreats like this one offer a complete cure.

"We're not claiming that a few days is going to make all these people's problems go away," said Michael Schumacher, Rapha's vice president for ministry development.

Those on the list of applicants whose problems seemed the absolutely most pressing were brought to Dallas. Donations from a variety of Baptist sources covered the cost for most of them.

Most came in secret, fearing that exposure could cost them their jobs or even make it impossible to find new jobs. For that reason, neither names nor enough details to identify individuals will appear in this article.

Here was the pastor who spent 10 years at a church and lost his job when he was caught with a woman not his wife. He and his wife got counseling and she forgave him. The church deacons did not. After more than a year without a pulpit, the couple's shame and anger and hopelessness fairly burned.

Sitting awkwardly side by side were the older evangelist and his younger wife. She had fallen in love with another man. In addition to the threat to their marriage, he believed her leaving would destroy his ministry. No church would host this preacher's revival if he couldn't keep his own marriage intact.

"I know there's a hell because I spent 1997 in it," he said. "I've prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed and I'm getting nothing."

In the corner was the pastor of a large church in the Midwest. Several years ago, he took an associate pastor on an overseas mission. On the way to an airport in that faraway land, they had a car wreck. The associate pastor was killed. This man was wracked with survivor's guilt, so depressed that it was interfering with his work. His congregation, he said, has no idea.

Another pastor confessed that every week, when he issues the invitation for people to come to Christ, he wants to come forward himself, get on his knees and pray.

"I'm thinking the whole time, ÔWhat would people think? We're supposed to have it all together,' " he said.

Schumacher and Stuart Rothberg were the clinical leaders for the retreat. Both are ordained Baptist ministers as well as licensed counselors. They explained that they used clinical tools in the cause of biblical truth.

"God's word is the absolute authority for everything we do here," said Schumacher.

The steps in a forgiveness exercise demonstrated the combination of faith and therapy. The first three steps might be the same in any group therapy. The final three consciously incorporate Christian teachings, the counselors said:

Feel the pain.

Separate the person and the behavior.

Rage at the behavior.

Express love (grace) to the offender.

Release the offender and the hurt.

Act with bold love.

Another exercise borrowed from secular psychology is called "Changing Positions." The goal is simply to cross the room -- without repeating how anybody else did it. With modern, secular music providing a backbeat, the pastors and their wives hopped, duck-walked, skipped and rolled around the room.

"It's not dancing. It's choreography," Rothberg said.

The intent of the exercise was to get these people to move in ways they would not normally move, because that can to help jar their minds into new ways of thinking, the counselors said. Plus, it can be fun for people who haven't had much fun in a while.

Otherwise quiet men and women clapped, whooped and hollered as their peers gyrated through the room. A faint smile even lit the face of one man who had said he hadn't felt joy in years.

"Our goal and design was to get these people moving," Schumacher said. "Some of these people were stuck, spiritually and emotionally."

By the end of the week, counselors and participants declared the event a success. Even though real psychological healing takes much longer, many of those involved agreed they had witnessed significant progress.

"I saw more work accomplished in one week that you'd see in six to eight weeks of individual or couples therapy," Schumacher said.

Couples who had entered on the verge of divorce said their marriages were strengthened. Pastors consumed with frustrations said they were more at peace.

The participants traded addresses and phone numbers. And every participant will be paired with one of the members of the Wounded Heroes board of directors for follow-up, Dr. Gage said.

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(c) 1998, The Dallas Morning News.

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