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‘COOL’ CHRISTIANITY

T-shirts that say “Jesus Is My Homeboy.” Magazines that talk about body piercing on one page and “extreme prayer” on another. The Christian Tattoo Association. This is the next generation of Christianity, according to a recent story called “Christian Cool And the New Generation Gap” by John Leland (reprinted here), which ran on the front page of the New York Times Week in Review section. A “movement” Leland calls “alt-evangelicals” has “gained attention by creating alternative churches in coffee bars and warehouses and publishing new magazines and Bibles that come on as anything but church.”

Credit Leland for not taking the familiar angle and reflexively lauding “alt-evangelicalism”‘s innovation and edginess. He sounds skeptical by the fourth paragraph: “But does a T-shirt really serve the faith? And if religion is our link to the timeless, what does it mean that young Christians replace their parents’ practices?” Leland then records theologian Michael Novak’s suspicions that this is watered-down religion. The piece could have better distinguished between the two chief religious mistakes of the baby boomers which “alt-evangelicalism” presumably attempts to correct: on the one hand there is what Leland terms the “deity-free ‘church lite'” of the megachurches; on the other is the overly sedate worship of mainline denominations. “My generation is discontent with dead religion,” Cameron Strang, the 20-something founder of Relevant Media tells the Times. “Our generation wants a tangible experience of God who is there.”

Leland says the significance of the “alt” movement is “more stylistic than doctrinal,”

and so he is generally content to convey a conflict between defenders of tradition and proponents of change. But a larger question is left out: whether it is in a megachurch, a mainline church, or a coffee shop church, can religion really become more meaningful if it fails to foster faith that is both communal and cosmic? That is: will religion that is vertical—an up-and-down connection to God—be only tweaked but never truly improved until it also becomes horizontal—enriching and informing our connection to other believers and to the natural and cultural world? Some of the “alt” Web sites and magazines still reek of the attempt to enhance the believer’s “user experience,” which isn’t communal or cosmic. The Times quotes college students who told a survey they find religion “personally helpful” for “spiritual strength.” But religion should go beyond that and foster faith that changes how we see the world and carries a call to heal it. A magazine-like teen Bible profiled in a Timessidebar—which promises “Beauty Secrets” on its cover (the inner kind, we can only hope)—seems to cater to, rather than challenge, its readers’ worldview.

That teen-zine cover brings up one last point. The assumption holds throughout the Times piece that teens and young adults are so spiritually immature that the seed of faith won’t take root unless it comes in cool packaging. Teenage girls are all Hilary Duff, give or take a layer of makeup, whose attention will waver unless you wave a Christian version of Cosmo before their eyes. For two striking counterexamples to this caricature, read the weblogs of the daughters of theologian Gideon Strauss (whose own blog is an essential bookmark). One discusses C.S. Lewis, Jane Austen, and her love of poetry. The other reflects on her mandolin lessons and evaluates the ontology of Hinduism from a Christian perspective (she’s 13 years old). Both come across as young disciples who take seriously the biblical charge to “be transformed by the renewing of your minds.” Relevant Media may have a lot to learn before it is relevant to them.

Related: The Los Angeles Times on ‘Biblezines’
Earlier:Worship and wholeness: the Calvin Symposium on Worship

PLACES & CULTURE

From the New Republic:

RUHENGERI, Rwanda — The Rwandan Demobilization and Reintegration Center sprawls across a lush plateau near the northern town of Ruhengeri, just beneath the precipitous slopes of the 14,800-foot Mount Karisimbi volcano. With students playing pickup games of soccer and striding purposefully to class, it could be the tidy campus of a polytechnic academy. Yet it is here where some of the most hardened foot soldiers of the genocidal former Hutu regime … are being reeducated and reintroduced to Rwandan society after a decade in exile. “These men fought as mercenaries in the jungles of Africa for eight or nine years,” Sam Barigye, a 29-year-old Tutsi who helps run the program, told me as we strolled across the grounds. “They’ve been brainwashed. They have been isolated. We are trying to tell them what really happened in this country.” … As the tenth anniversary of the mass killing approaches, the Rwandan government is stepping up its campaign to compel its citizens to confront the truth about one of the twentieth century’s greatest crimes.

From the New York Times:

BLACKPOOL, England — Thirty years ago, 17 million people a year braved frigid seas and draconian bed-and-breakfasts to make the city the working-class resort of the north. Today, with sunny Spain a cheap plane ride away, the number has plunged to 10.6 million. … To recapture its popularity, Blackpool is banking on legislation that would bring Vegas-style gambling resorts to Britain, where casinos are small, highly restricted and free of glitz. If it passes, as it is likely to in some form, Britain would become the first country in Europe to usher in American-style casinos, with their acres of slot machines, restaurants, shops and shows, a change that would significantly change how Britons gamble. … Although Blackpool is remarkably organized and single-minded in its courtship of casinos, it is not alone. The legislation has brought a frenzy of deals and counter deals in nearly every big city in Britain, so many in fact, that the government is torn between delight and distaste.

Related: Las Vegas as a mecca of capitalism, from The Nation

WEEKLY DIGEST

• What do you mean? The better question may be, why do you mean what you mean? In the early 20th century, Ferdinand de Saussure stated “that no word is inherently meaningful,” says author Paul Greenburg in the Boston Globe‘s Idea’s section. “Rather a word is only a ‘signifier,’ i.e. the representation of something, and it must be combined in the brain with the ‘signified,’ or the thing itself, in order to form a meaning-imbued ‘sign.'” Thus semiotics was born. It flourished at Brown University, where students—such as radio host Ira Glass and others who would go on to contend for Pulitzers and Oscars—put culture under their microscope, looking for codes, messages and narratives. Greenburg looks at the legacy of those first semioticists—which includes the “constant irony” of popular culture’s self-consciousness—and the rebirth of the discipline today as media studies. (Without semiotics, would we be talking about “alt-evangelicals”?) Story

Related:
Media scholars tuning in to radio’s golden age, from the Chronicle of Higher Education
Jazz’s influence on literature, from the Chronicle
Gulf between high and popular culture is growing (and irritating), says Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post

• One master of metaphor and meaning was Shakespeare, whose 440th birthday may or may not have passed last month. In a commemorative essay in The Australian, Peter Craven remembers Shakespeare as “at least as great a comic writer as Oscar Wilde or George Bernard Shaw and as turbulent and bottomlessly sad a depicter of heartbreak and horror as August Strindberg or Eugene O’Neill.” This artistic breadth—today we would call it “versatility”—is the key to Shakespeare’s literary eminence, Craven says. Shakespeare was also prescient, “prefiguring” everything from “romantic poetry [to], as Northrop Frye says, Mozart’s operas.” In short, Shakespeare “presented through the mask of the entertainer the most comprehensive vision of life we have.” Happy birthday, Bill! Essay

Elsewhere: Speaking of prefiguring, what do Orwell and others tell us about our fears of the future? from Comment

• Barely into its adolescence, the term “political correctness” is already a gratingly “familiar piece of moral shorthand,” Roger Kimball wrote recently in The National Interest. Martin Amis said PC aspires to “accelerate evolution,” but Kimball is less impressed. He sees it as no less than a tool of “moral conformity” and what Tocqueville called “democratic despotism.” PC is so humorless that it functions as “a kind of geiger counter that registers deviations from the norm of earnestness,” Kimball writes. Essay While his political science digressions are interesting (if not convincingly relevant), and while it is fun to ridicule PC professors who condemn Frosty the Snowman for “substantiat[ing] an ideology upholding a gendered spatial/social system,” Kimball could have spent less time harping on academics and more on this question: What are the noble principles behind the grotesqueries of PC, and how can they be salvaged from PCers? Or, to use Kimball’s own terms, how can the “abstract benevolence” of PC be extracted from the “rigid moralism”?
• The world is getting ready for a once-in-a-lifetime astronomy event. Actually, twice-in-a-lifetime. On June 8, Venus will appear to slide across the face of the sun in what is called a transit of Venus. This mini-eclipse hasn’t happened since 1882 (when it helped scientists hone their calculations of Earth’s distance from the sun), and after an encore in 2012, it won’t happen again until 2117. Venus will appear as a black dot on the bottom half of the sun, causing a .01% drop in the sun’s brightness, said a cover story of the New York Times Science section. But don’t look at it directly.

Related: Pollution causes global dimming, from the Times

• Miscellaneous: Dordt College’s Pro Rege posts back issues—Newsweek‘s coverstory on the Left Behind series – Proofreading the Bible, from the Associated Press –Why oil prices are up, from the London Guardian—The good and bad news from Sudan, from The Week magazine, and what the U.S. is doing about it, from the New York Times – European voter apathy, from the Guardian—TV turns to animation for adults, from the Christian Science Monitor—The triumph of the knuckleball, from the New Yorker

• Previous/Archive/About/Feedback/Links/CT blog

Nathan Bierma is editorial assistant atBooks & Culture. He writes the weekly “On Language” column for the Chicago Tribune.

Christian music publishers hoped they were different. As song swapping grew exponentially in the late 1990s, the Christian labels stayed silent on the issue, thinking that Christian teens would behave differently from their non-Christian peers. Christian teens don’t head home from youth groups and Campus Crusade meetings to burn copies of Third Day’s newest album for each other, right? There’s that whole “thou shalt not steal” commandment to think about. The labels continued to post growing sales figures even as secular labels complained loudly about the damage being done by online trading. Christian music racked up $920 million in sales and moved almost 50 million units in 2001, but by 2003, with sales down by almost 5 percent, the labels began to wonder if song swapping had to be addressed.

The Christian Music Trade Association commissioned a study from the Barna Group to get some hard numbers, and the results were shocking. In an April 25, 2004 press release headed, “CHRISTIAN TEENS TAKE THE MORAL HIGH GROUND ON MUSIC PIRACY … NOT!”, the CMTA announced that being a born-again, actively church-attending Christian made absolutely no difference in one’s behavior in this area. None. Neither did race, gender, or socioeconomic status. 80 percent of all teens, Christian and otherwise, had shared copyrighted music in the last six months, including almost half of those who believed that it was wrong to do so.

Lawrence Lessig’s new book Free Culture takes the problems faced by the music industry as its starting point in talking about the battles over copyright that are raging across the country. Lessig, a Stanford law professor and one of the leading voices on digital technology issues, has no time for true pirates who deprive media companies and artists of deserved income, but he also has serious questions about current policies that turn 80 percent of American teens into criminals.

Free Culture argues that without a better balance between the interests of rights-holders and the interests of the public, we as a culture are losing our own ability to create new culture. Copyright owners exert control as they never have before in history over the use and distribution of their products, even being able to limit ‘fair use’ rights explicitly granted to consumers under copyright law.

In the first hundred years of America’s history, copyright was extended only one time, in 1831, from a maximum of 28 years to 42 years. In the next 50 years, it was extended once more as the maximum was raised to 56 years in 1909. But from 1962 to 2002, copyright has been extended eleven times, and all eleven times have extended the right of existing copyrights. Most recently, under heavy lobbying from Disney (as Mickey Mouse was about to come out of copyright), the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act gave all copyright holders an extra 20 years of protection.

But how does copyright affect the ways that artists create new culture? Lessig answers that longer copyright terms prevent material from entering the “public domain,” our repository of free-to-use culture from the past. Throughout the book, Lessig points out that copyright was never meant to be perpetual. The Constitution enshrines this principle of limited time, granting Congress the power “to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” In the not-so-distant past, the public domain was always “just over the hill.” The average length of copyright was around 30 years, which meant that anything more than a generation and a half old could be freely used, remade, or transformed in any way. Now, though, thanks to the extensions of copyright granted to Mickey Mouse (created in 1928), only material from before the Great Depression can be assumed to be in the public domain.

To show that this loss of the public domain has real consequences, Lessig turns to his favorite example, that of Walt Disney himself. Mickey’s first successful cartoon, Steamboat Willie, was not created in a vacuum—it was a direct parody of Buster Keaton’s recent silent film Steamboat Bill, Jr., which was itself based on the popular ballad “Steamboat Bill.” Disney was free to draw on very recent cultural products and to transform them in his own creative way in something new, and not just with Mickey Mouse. Most of the great Disney cartoons have drawn from other people’s source material (such as the Brothers Grimm), including Snow White, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Robin Hood, Peter Pan, and so on. The irony here is clear: Disney built a media empire on the back of public domain material but now fights tooth and nail to prevent any of its own content from flowing back into that same shared space.

At its heart, copyright has always been about preventing the spread of unauthorized copies of a work. Now that digital copies of any work can be instantly shared, proliferating across the network like rabbits, the power of copyright has grown enormously in scope. As only one example of the power of copyright in the digital age, Lessig points out that a teenager who downloads two copyrighted songs to his computer faces stiffer maximum penalties ($150,000 per song) than does a surgeon who accidentally amputates the wrong leg of his patient ($250,000). Free Culture‘s central claim is that the control exerted by major media companies ought to be scaled back to a more sensible level, one that leaves more room for transformative works (such as Disney’s) and creates a healthy public domain. “The internet,” writes Lessig, “should at least force us to rethink the conditions under which the law of copyright automatically applies, because it is less clear that the current reach of copyright was never contemplated, much less chosen, by the legislators who enacted copyright law.”

Loaded with fascinating examples, Free Culture is a thought-provoking read, though at times it slows under the weight of repetition. It’s a book designed to make you angry at the status quo, and on that level it works superbly well, but those hoping that Lessig will come down squarely on the side of the millions of file-swapping Christian teenagers will be disappointed. File-swapping, like the VCR, has all sorts of non-infringing uses, but if record companies don’t grant permission to share their music, Lessig is no Abbie Hoffman. He will argue, though, that labels cannot hang onto their copyrights forever; Christian teens will just have to wait for middle age before downloading that Steven Curtis Chapman disc for free.

Nathan Anderson lives and writes in Wheaton, Illinois.

Copyright © 2004 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

The Christian Music Trade Association’s press release is available online.

Download a free copy of Free Culture for a limited time.

Books & Culture Corner appears every Monday. Earlier editions of Books & Culture Corner and Book of the Week include:

Mystery and Message | Must they compete? (May 10, 2004)

Celebrating Faith in Writing | A dispatch from Calvin College’s biennial event. (April 26, 2004)

Shabbos, Sheitels, and Yarmulkes | A novel set in the world of Orthodox Judaism. (April 19, 2004)

The Naked City | The story of the 1977 blackout in New York-the occasion of widespread looting and destruction-has some surprisingly timely lessons for America in 2004. (April 19, 2004)

A Curious Contingency | Confessions of a wordsmith. (April 05, 2004)

“Trust but Verify” | Ronald Reagan’s faith. (March 29, 2004)

Baseball Preview 2004 | Plus a look back with some Negro League veterans. (March 29, 2004)

How Do You Live with a Torturer? | A novel of Haiti by the brilliant young writer, Edwidge Danticat. (March 08, 2004)

God Is in the Details | A scientist affirms his faith. (Feb. 23, 2004)

History Repeats Itself, Sort of | How the fate of Eugene McCarthy’s insurgency against LBJ sheds light on the 2004 presidential campaign. (Feb. 16, 2004)

The Worst President Ever? | Former Nixon aide John Dean attempts to rehabilitate the reputation of Warren G. Harding. (Feb. 09, 2004)

Wholly, Wholly, Wholly | Calvinists and conga drums in Grand Rapids: a report from the seventeenth annual Calvin Symposium on Worship and the Arts. (Feb. 02, 2004)

The Doom of Choice | Fate, free will, and moral responsibility in Tolkien. (Feb. 02, 2004)

A Rose Among Thorns | A new novel by the author of Father Elijah illumines the spiritual consequences of our simplest decisions. (Jan. 26, 2004)

Baptized in Fire | A new book on Martin Luther King, Jr., emphasizes his spiritual transformation. (Jan. 19, 2004)

O’Connor v. the Antichrist (Jan. 12, 2004)

Moody, the Media, and the Birth of Modern Evangelism | A cautionary tale. (Jan. 05, 2004)

A Few Coming Attractions from 2004 | Plus: What to buy with those gift cards, and some of the books in my to-read stacks. (Dec. 29, 2003)

The Top Ten Books of 2003 | Plus: The Worst Book of the Year, more good reading, digital books, and a little Christmas music. (Dec. 22, 2003)

Books at Warp Speed | We continue our annual roundup of noteworthy books. (Dec. 15, 2003)

Is “Sensual Orthodoxy” a Contradiction in Terms? | Read this unconventional collection of sermons and judge for yourself. (Dec. 8, 2003)

After several delays, Saved! finally hits theaters this Friday, May 28. The movie, depicting life at a Christian high school, stars Mandy Moore, whom Christians embraced a few years ago for her role in A Walk to Remember. But in Saved!, Moore plays Hillary Faye, an overzealous, self-righteous Christian. When her best friend Mary (Jena Malone) gets pregnant, Hillary launches into hellfire-and-brimstone mode, labeling Mary an outcast. Christianity Today Movies critic Stefan Ulstein and his wife, Jeanne, interviewed Saved! writer/director Brian Dannelly—product of a Catholic elementary school, Jewish summer camp, and a Christian High school—at the Seattle International Film Festival. Ulstein, who teaches a film class at nearby Bellevue Christian High School, was joined at the interview by Chelsea Hamilton, a Bellevue senior who, interestingly, thought Dannelly at times “nailed it” in his portrayal of Christian school culture.

Evangelical Christians are a pretty big group, but in Saved! you don’t see that self-referential humor that you often see with Jewish or Catholic films.

Brian Dannelly: It’s so funny because that’s one of the current arguments that’s going on. People are saying, “They should make a film about Jewish people in the same situation and see how they like it,” but you know, Jewish people have a sense of humor about themselves. Well, I think Christians do have a sense of humor about themselves. I mean, you can’t look at Jan on TBN … the one with the pink hair. I mean, there’s stuff that’s funny.

How do you expect Christians to react to the movie?

Dannelly: It’s really interesting how different factions see it. The Chicago Sun-Times religion writer said the movie is a love letter to faith and it reminds us of how we ought to be. And Jerry Falwell said it’s the most hateful movie about Christians that ever came out of Hollywood. Relevant magazine said it was a great movie and a great teaching tool for teens. So, it’s the same movie but very, very different perceptions.

How does that affect you when you get attacked by someone like Falwell?

Dannelly: It’s funny. A lot of people like it, but Falwell hates it! It doesn’t exactly hurt, but you feel disappointed.

Did you test market the film to a particular target audience?

Dannelly: We had religious screenings. We invited anywhere from Buddhists, to Fundamentalists to Catholics.

How was their response?

Dannelly: The Fundamentalists are always the tricky ones. To me, a lot of the movie is about missing the message. Some are saying that Jesus tells Mary [Jena Malone] to have sex with her gay boyfriend, but it doesn’t say that in the film. Jesus says, “Dean needs you now. You must do everything you can to help him.” They’re two very different takes on the film.

I get some flack about Hillary Faye [Mandy Moore] crashing the van into the statue of Jesus, but it’s in there for a reason. The kids start the film with this idea of what Jesus is, and at the end of the film they have to kind of tear that down and start over with the new information that they have gotten. When the head of the statue falls off, I wanted to have that moment of Hillary Fay just looking at it. You can think of it as this thing that she has created, or as it [the statue] looking at her saying, “Come on, Girl. Get it together.”

[Laughs] I don’t know what I was thinking when I made a film about teenagers and religion. But when I was researching it, I went undercover into some Christian teenage chat rooms, and I think I got a more honest sense of what these kids are going through. They go through the same thing everybody else goes through.

(Question from Chelsea Hamilton): As I watched the film, I thought you must have put a lot of your own experience into the film: “How did he do that? He just nailed it!” A lot of it was just how I felt a couple of years ago, before I was reborn in my faith.

Dannelly: Well, thank you. I tried really hard. Everything in the movie, I can tell you why it’s there and where it came from. I went to a Christian high school and there was one Jewish girl. And there was one girl who got pregnant, and there was a pastor that was having an affair. But in the movie he doesn’t have an affair, they just kiss.

When you observed those things in your Christian school, how did that affect your faith?

Dannelly: That’s funny; nobody’s asked me that question. When stuff like that happens, it feels like you’ve been lied to or cheated. Sort of like Tammy Faye Bakker. That’s the obvious example, but you hold people up to such high ideals that the fall is really great, and then it makes you suspect everything else. So it felt really scandalous because the girl in my school was more like the Hillary Faye character: she was perfect, and then she got pregnant. I once heard about a Christian youth group that had the highest rate of either syphilis or gonorrhea ever, because they were all sleeping with each other.

So, what’s your take on all that—the pastor having an affair, the perfect girl gets pregnant, the youth group sleeping with each other?

Dannelly: My take is, honestly, Jesus loves you. You make mistakes. I think the point is to get through those mistakes. There’s something shocking or scandalous about every character in the movie, and the thing is for you as an audience to ask, where do they go from here?

I don’t know what will happen to Hillary Faye, or if Pastor Skip will ever go into that hotel room or what happens to Mary and Dean and the baby. They are all trying to reach an understanding of God. It’s part of their journey, but they had to go through all of this other stuff.

Why did you leave the Christian school you attended?

Dannelly: For demerits. It was one of the strictest schools in the nation. You got a demerit if you didn’t bring your red pen to school. So I got lots of demerits.

Faith is a journey. I’m always in conscious contact, even during a period when I didn’t believe anything. You know what? I said I’m just not going to believe in anything. I’m going to start with personal responsibility and kindness. There’s not going to be any reward system or punishment system. That’s going to be my system. Not God. But when you’re not believing in God, you’re talking to him all the time! So it’s a great journey.

Do you sense that you need to “define” your faith for the discussion about the movie, or do you just feel that the movie is the statement?

Dannelly: I have responded. I just did an hour and a half interview that was very, very personal. But I came out thinking: I’m a director. Is anyone asking John Hughes what his personal religious beliefs are? I understand there’s a difference because I made a movie about faith, but it’s very tricky.

Since this interview is for Christianity Today Movies, are you being more elusive about your faith journey?

Dannelly: I don’t mind talking about the journey. I just don’t want to be listed as this or that kind of a believer. That’s our right as Americans. If this film does anything, I hope it will encourage dialogue about the journey.

I could see that someday, Christian schools will use this film in their curriculum to help explore the journey.

Dannelly: You know what? They won’t. I’m talking about Fundamentalists. The stuff I read from them, I was really down. It was hard. The point of humor is that it opens you up and makes you look at yourself.

Do you think Fundamentalists may feel they are being ridiculed, so they can’t watch the film without feeling that they are the joke?

Dannelly: At a screening, a Christian woman said she had a very hard time with the movie until the assembly scene, and then she thought, Oh, it’s going to be okay.

The part where Cassandra, the Jewish girl, begins speaking in tongues?

Dannelly: Yeah. If you can make it past that scene, you’re going to be okay.

The humor is broader in the beginning, but it was very important that those characters became real. I love those characters. I loved the way that Mandy Moore handles that scene where she has to swear to God. She’s being dishonest and she says, “There, are you happy?” But then later she says, “Do you think Jesus still loves me?” Roland [Macaulay Culkin] makes a joke but then he says, “Yeah, he does.” I love that scene.

(Question from Chelsea Hamilton): When I was really angry and cynical a few years ago, I’d be in chapel and I could see through some of my friends. I was like, “What are you doing?”

Dannelly: Sure. I got “saved” a couple of times in my Christian high school just to be popular. It’s a very slippery slope, especially when you have all these other things to contend with in high school, and this is your soul.

Was it your choice to go to the Christian school?

Dannelly: No. My parents were friends with the principal. I was more excited that it was a private school. But it was really fascinating. I was constantly getting spanked—in 10th grade! There was no dancing. For our prom, the entertainment was a puppet show. But in this movie, there’s no difference really between the Christian world and the secular world. I would think it would be confusing as a young Christian to go to a Christian concert and you’re not supposed to idolize, but you’re screaming for the band. I just found that stuff confusing. But that’s human nature I guess.

What do you wish people would ask you in these interviews that they don’t ask?

Dannelly: These kinds of questions. I hate some of the questions I get like, “What was it like to work with Mandy Moore?” “This is your first film. Was it hard?” I want to say, “Hey, did you watch the film?” There’s so many questions you could ask. I’ve never seen a film like this …

Neither have we. We have all these Left Behind kind of movies …

Dannelly: The Christian movies are so dorky. They’re just so bad. I talked to one religious writer who said he hoped that Saved! would open the door to more of this kind of religious movie.

Did you expect this level of dialogue about the movie?

Dannelly: Not at all. I just saw a segment on CNN: Shrek 2 and Saved! That’s just weird.

Do you wonder if all the buzz might boost ticket sales, like it did for Mel Gibson’s The Passion?

Dannelly: Well, you wonder, but then again maybe they’ll all protest it and nobody will go. Thinking about it will make you crazy. I’m just glad I made the movie and I’m glad that people are all talking about it.

Copyright © 2004 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Any action to expose lying seems a foray into enemy-occupied territory.
—Kevin Miller

The phone call couldn’t have come at a better time.

Just that morning Ken McMahon had mustered the courage to fire his choir director. He needed to do it—he’d been putting it off for too long—but he hated to do it all the same. During his thirteen years at Levittown Community Church, people had often told Ken he was an encourager, a rescuer, the kind of person who could bring out the best in others. Maybe that’s why it hurt so much to let Sharon go.

But the call took away the morning’s bitter aftertaste. An old seminary friend who was now teaching at a college called out of the blue to say, “If you’re ever looking for a music director, there’s a sharp young guy who is coming to Philly for graduate work in music. He’s one in a million.”

Ken got the name and number and set up a breakfast appointment for the following Tuesday.

On Monday Ken called the guy’s home pastor. The pastor was high on him. “Steve Borchard? Every time he was home from college, he jumped in with the choir. One summer he helped organize and lead a week-long ensemble tour. Another time he got our high school kids—can you believe it—to put together a cantata.” Steve certainly sounded motivated.

The Tuesday interview confirmed everything Ken had heard. The first thing that struck Ken was Steve’s rugged good looks—tall, about six-two, raven black hair with a slight wave to it. Good looks never hurt Kennedy’s popularity, Ken mused while they waited for their pancakes. We won’t have trouble recruiting sopranos. Steve talked fast, and his hands were always moving, as if he were trying to direct Ken through a difficult aria. But Steve struck Ken as a mover and a shaker.

“I’m excited,” Ken told his wife, Jean, that evening. “You know how Sharon used to ask, three days before a cantata, what I thought should be on the program cover? Steve already has plans for two cantatas, including adult and youth choirs, complete with ideas for the program covers!”

On Thursday evening, Ken described Steve to the board. He admitted Steve was young, sort of a raw recruit. But the board was impressed by the work Steve had done at his home church, and most of them were happy just to find a choir director so soon, especially one who would work hard. They authorized sixteen to twenty hours a week for the position, and they were open to increasing hours if Steve proved himself.

Steve’s first real assignment came in August, at the church’s annual picnic in Washington Crossing State Park. Ken asked Steve to lead a short time of singing in the pavilion after dinner. That was always a tough situation, Ken knew, because everyone would rather be out playing volleyball or throwing Frisbees. But the visibility would be good for Steve, and Ken wanted to see how he’d handle himself.

When Ken introduced him, Steve walked to the front and strapped on his twelve-string Ovation guitar. “I’m really better on the piano,” he smiled, “so you’ll just have to imagine I have an eighty-eight-string guitar.” People laughed, and from then on Steve had them right with him. He started with a couple of folk choruses to loosen everybody up. Steve moved around a lot, and his excitement was contagious. Ken looked around during one song and saw that even some of the high school kids were singing. Steve flowed smoothly from one song to the next—not talking too much, just enough to make you want to sing. He closed with “Fairest Lord Jesus,” which Ken knew the older folks would appreciate. I can’t believe this guy is only twenty-four, Ken thought. I wish I’d had that kind of poise when I was starting out.

Then Steve took off his guitar. “I appreciate the welcome you folks have given me so much that I decided to prepare a solo for today.” He sang a beautiful arrangement of “At the Cross,” and his rich, unaccompanied baritone voice fit in perfectly. Ken was moved.

Squeaky wheels

The fall breezed by quickly. Ken enjoyed having someone else to talk with in the office. And Steve was there a lot. Sometimes after finance committee meetings, Ken would leave the office after ten, and Steve would still be there, scribbling away on an arrangement for an upcoming anthem. Other mornings, Ken would come in at 7:30 to get a jump on the day, and Steve would already be at work. Ken felt vaguely guilty about it because he knew Steve had to be putting in more than twenty hours, but he figured Steve just ran on high-octane fuel.

“If I told him to cut back, he’d be hurt,” he told Jean one time. “I think he not only wants to work hard, he needs to.” Besides, Ken was enough of a mercenary not to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Steve’s hard work paid off. During September, a couple of tenors—always the hardest section to recruit—joined the choir. And choir members actually smiled during the anthem. It wasn’t long before people began saying to Ken, “Wonderful sermon today, Pastor, and wasn’t the choir marvelous?”

So Ken was only a little surprised that winter when Clarence and Ruth Gillis called to make an appointment with him. “We want to talk to you about Steve Borchard” was all they would say. I should have known, Ken thought. As soon as they can’t call the shots, they yell. Both in their sixties, Clarence and Ruth had been the choir’s squeaky wheels for as long as anyone could remember. In fact, they had complained the loudest about Sharon. It was sort of understood that one had to let Clarence and Ruth speak their minds, and usually the choir followed along. Ken figured their noses were bent out of joint because Steve had taken charge and become so well-liked—without regularly consulting them.

Ken didn’t know what they could possibly complain about. Steve’s ministry ran like a well-oiled engine. The only vibration Ken had picked up was a couple of months ago when Steve had asked Ken if he could date somebody in the choir. Ken asked who and found out it was Gloria, a pretty nineteen-year-old alto.

“You have good taste,” Ken said, “but I don’t think it would be wise to date someone barely out of high school. It would be best for your ministry here to wait at least a year before dating anyone in the church.” Plus, Ken was afraid Gloria might still be emotionally tender from her dad’s death a few months ago. But Steve seemed to have accepted the counsel and hadn’t raised the issue again.

Sure enough, when Clarence and Ruth came they fired a volley of petty complaints. “Steve never mails the line-ups for special music on time. He says they’re in the mail, but they’re sitting on his desk.”

“How do you know?” Ken asked.

“We, uh, happened to be in the office one day, and noticed they were there.”

“Wait a minute. It’s one thing to tell someone, ‘I don’t believe you and I’m going to check on you.’ But to snoop in his office!” Ken’s voice rose a bit.

“We weren’t sneaking,” Ruth protested. “Just checking things …”

“But that’s not all,” Clarence added. “Steve never gives us a break during rehearsal.”

Oh, give me a break, Ken thought.

On it went. Steve was unsafe when he drove the church van. Steve joked too much during rehearsal. Ken was about to politely end the meeting when Clarence said, “Steve borrowed $250 from me and never paid it back.” That was worth checking.

“When?”

“A couple of months ago. He had a little fender-bender with the church van, and he said he didn’t want it to go on his insurance. He was going to fix it himself. He borrowed from us for the repairs.”

“When was he supposed to pay you back?”

“In just a couple weeks. But he hasn’t paid us a penny yet.”

So that’s what’s driving all these complaints, Ken thought. He promised Clarence and Ruth he’d check into the matter and thanked them for coming.

I can’t believe Steve didn’t tell me about the van, Ken thought, driving home after the meeting. And if he doesn’t pay that money back soon, Clarence and Ruth won’t give him a moment’s peace.

The next day, before he saw Steve, one of the deacons, Bill Seifert, called. “Ken, I hate to bother you with this, but something’s come up with Steve.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, Steve’s been sharing an apartment with Guy Alben. A while back, Steve was short of cash, so Guy fronted the rent money for him. Steve hasn’t paid him back yet. Guy doesn’t mean to complain—you know what a good heart he has—but he really needs the money. He came to me because he didn’t know what else to do.”

Ken’s stomach knotted. He didn’t know what to do. Was Steve just immature, not too swift with finances? And why hadn’t he told him about the accident?

Steve dropped by Ken’s office that afternoon.

“Can I make a request?”

“What’s up?” asked Ken.

Steve asked what the possibilities would be for him to work fulltime at the church during the summer. “We’ll both benefit,” he said. “I need the money for fall classes, and things are starting to take off in the choir. If I could give it my full attention, we could have an outstanding summer program—maybe take a week-long tour. The possibilities are endless.”

“That’s worth considering,” Ken hedged. He’d already thought of it, but then these money problems had popped up. “Let me check it out with the board.” After Steve left, Ken called Irv Hadley, chairman of the board.

“Irv, Steve Borchard was just in here proposing that we take him on full-time this summer. But I think we need to work through something first.”

“You mean the thing with the van?” Irv asked.

“Yeah, how’d you know?”

“Just talked with Clarence yesterday. He seems pretty upset.”

So I wasn’t moving fast enough for you, huh, Clarence? Ken was more than a little bugged. “Well, that, and another money thing. Maybe it would be best at this point to keep Steve part time through the summer, sort of a probationary period during which he can straighten things out. We can consider extending his hours a little in the fall.”

“Do what you need to do,” Irv said. “We don’t have to have him full time yet.”

Ken told some of the board members what he planned to do, and they also backed him. The next morning, he asked Steve to stop by his office.

“I’ve been thinking about your request to go full time this summer,” Ken began. “The prospect certainly interests me, but first I wanted to talk with you about some signals I’ve been picking up.”

“What do you mean?”

“I understand you borrowed $250 from the Gillises and haven’t paid them back, and you borrowed several hundred from Guy Alben and haven’t paid him back, either.”

“I’m working on that,” Steve said. “I promised them I’d pay them back, and I will.”

“There’s also an issue of integrity here,” Ken replied. “I understand you had an accident with the church van and didn’t tell me or anyone else about it. Is that right?”

Steve looked down. Ken continued, “There’s no sense losing your honor and credibility over trivial matters like these.”

“You’re right.” Steve put his forehead in both palms, and his voice quivered. “I … I’ve been struggling financially.…” Ken looked at him hunched over in the chair, and it occurred to him that Steve was only a few years older than his kids. But still, staff members needed to be above reproach. Ken outlined his proposal as gently as he could. Steve would continue through the summer on a part-time basis and get another job outside the church to supplement his income. This would allow him to get things in order. If everything went well during the summer, the church would consider extending his hours in the fall.

Steve was disappointed, but his acceptance of the decision was admirable. Within a day or two, Steve scaled back the summer schedule he’d planned for the choir and found a part-time job at a 7-Eleven. He even met with Clarence and Ruth—something of a stand-off, Ken heard, with the Gillises not being too forgiving. But Ken figured that was the best that could be expected.

Afterward, Steve wrote Ken a letter saying how sorry he was about the whole mess. Part of it read, After our conversation, I spent a long time in prayer trying to figure out where I had failed both the choir and the church, and more important, how my relationship with Christ has slipped. How selfish and damaging my attitudes and actions have been! I want to restore what has been done. Thank you, Ken, for your strong yet compassionate handling of this problem.

Ken felt relieved. He told Jean that night, “You know, it’s not easy being a pastor, but it would be a lot easier if everyone responded like Steve.”

Inquisition chair

Summer started smoothly. Steve directed a “Celebration of Joy” evening concert, one of the best-attended events the church had ever held. Ken met with Steve several times to discuss the summer choir trip. Two years before, the choir had taken a four-day trip through the Poconos and southern New York, performing four or five concerts at different churches and park band shells. Last summer’s trip was washed out because of all the problems with Sharon. Now folks in the choir were begging for another trip.

Ken assured Steve he would go along, to greet the pastors—most of them were his contacts—and bring a short message at the Sunday concerts. “But I don’t have time to make any of the arrangements,” Ken told him. “It’s your baby.” Steve said OK. “You’ll have to get those days off from your job, too,” Ken reminded him.

“No problem,” Steve said.

The Sunday before the trip, however, Steve came up after the morning service. “Bad news, Ken. They’re not going to let me go.”

“What do you mean they’re not going to let you go? We can’t take the trip without a director.”

“The manager scheduled me to work.”

“Didn’t you tell him at the beginning of the summer that you’d be gone those days?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, ask again,” Ken said. “They gave you the days, and we need you.”

Steve called Ken at home the next day, and he sounded glum. “They won’t let me go, Ken. I begged them, but they insist they need me.”

Ken didn’t get mad very often, but he was hot. “We’ll see about that,” he said. He called the 7-Eleven manager.

“This is Pastor McMahon from Community Church,” Ken said. “Steve Borchard, our choir director, is working for you this summer.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I really need Steve to lead the choir tour we’re taking this week. Isn’t there any way you can let him have Friday and Monday off?”

“Well, sure.” She sounded puzzled. “Steve never told me about those days, but if he really needs them, we can work something out.”

Ken was taken aback—and really angry now. What’s going on? he wondered. He grabbed the phone again and punched in Steve’s number.

“Steve, what’s the deal?” Ken pressed. “I just called Fran, and she says you’re welcome to go.”

“Oh, well, I talked to her husband. She and Ralph run the store together. They don’t communicate too well. Ralph says he really needs me. And since I’ve already committed myself to stay, I need to do that.”

Steve’s answer was so quick that Ken’s anger vanished. He can’t be lying, Ken thought. That’s too easy to check. “Well, OK then,” was all he could say. Ken thought about calling Ralph to verify Steve’s story, but he felt like a louse even considering it. He couldn’t see himself calling and saying, “This is the pastor of Community Church, and I’m calling to find out if my staff member is lying to me.” Steve knows he’s on probation and that he’s gotta keep his slate clean, Ken reasoned. Only a total nitwit would try to pull something like that. He finally figured Ralph and Fran must not talk to each other.

Ken was the only one who’d had any experience directing, so he got the honors when the choir left on Thursday. The choir knew the music well enough, but Ken felt like an idiot. Once he forgot a piece was in three-quarter time and confused everyone by marking a four-four beat.

By the time the September board meeting rolled around, though, Ken had put the tour mix-up behind him. Steve said he’d paid his debts, and Ken supported the motion to increase Steve’s hours to twenty-five per week. That was all Steve could handle anyway with his two graduate courses.

The next day he stopped by Steve’s office and told him the good news. “By the way,” Ken joshed, “how are things with Gloria?” Lately Ken had noticed them talking together after rehearsals. Since Steve had been there a year, he didn’t feel too uptight about it.

“How did you know?” Steve’s head jerked up like he’d heard a rifle shot.

“C’mon,” Ken laughed. “I may have gray hair, but my eyes still work.”

“Well, we just didn’t want anyone to know until we announced it Sunday.”

“Huh?” Now Ken was confused.

“Gloria and I are engaged. We’re going to get married in February.”

Ken stared for a second or two. Finally he collected his wits enough to say, “What a surprise!” He shook Steve’s hand and left. Ken couldn’t believe how fast they’d hit it off. They must have been seeing each other all year, he thought, but he didn’t have any proof, so he let the idea go.

That fall Steve and Gloria began their premarital counseling with Jim, a church member with a master’s degree in counseling who helped part time with the counseling load. One day Jim told Ken, “I’m concerned about Steve and Gloria.”

“Because of their age difference?”

“Well, not so much that. Five or six years can pose some problems, of course, but lots of marriages make it with bigger gaps. It’s their maturity level. I’m just not sure they’re ready for the demands of marriage. There’s also some friction with Gloria’s mom. She’d always wanted her to go to college.”

Ken’s eyebrows raised. Gloria’s mom was one of the most influential women in the congregation. This had better be handled right.

“If you’re really concerned, you need to tell them. That’s part of the role of the counselor. I’ll be willing to sit in with you if you need me there,” Ken suggested.

“I’ll discuss it with them and see what happens,” Jim promised.

After considerable discussion the next few weeks, Jim and Ken finally decided they could not play God. Steve and Gloria were determined to get married, and Ken couldn’t see any good way to prevent it. If he refused to do the ceremony, Gloria’s mom—the whole church—would be on his case.

In late January, Ruth Gillis made an appointment. Ken figured it was another semiannual barrage about choir matters.

“Reverend McMahon,” Ruth said, once she and Clarence got settled, “we don’t think Steve Borchard is really repentant.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because he hasn’t paid us back a darn nickel,” Clarence said, his face flushed.

“You mean he hasn’t paid you anything? I thought he settled that last summer.”

“He came and talked to us,” Clarence said, “but he hasn’t paid us back. Instead he goes out and spends his money on some tape player. And it’s not just that. He’s not in school like he claims.”

The last comment hit Ken as outlandish. Steve had told him several times how hard his music theory class was. “What makes you think he’s not in school?”

“We asked another student to check whether he’s got a mailbox at the school, and he doesn’t,” Ruth said slowly, as if laying down a trump card.

“Not all students have mailboxes on campus.”

“We also checked with the registrar, and Steve isn’t enrolled.”

“Are you sure?”

Clarence and Ruth nodded together.

“OK,” Ken sighed, “I’ll look into it.”

The next morning, Ken asked Steve, “How’s school going?”

“It’s tough,” said Steve. “But I’m learning a lot.”

“You’ve got two classes this quarter?”

“Music theory and choral conducting. Why do you ask?”

“Just curious. Haven’t had much chance to talk to you lately.”

Ken went back to his office feeling dirty. This can’t keep going, he told himself. Clarence and Ruth are going to make me a bigger snoop than they are. He called Ruth and told her that Steve was indeed in graduate school.

But a week later, Clarence and Ruth stopped by his office in the afternoon. “We’ve double-checked with the registrar, we’ve checked with the finance office, and Steve is not in school.”

Ken had had enough. “Why are you two sneaking around checking on Steve?”

Ruth looked so hurt that Ken backpedaled a bit. “All right,” he said. “We’ll get this thing straight once and for all. I’ll bring Steve in here, and you can talk to him yourself. Are you willing to do that?”

“Bring him in,” Clarence said.

Now I’m chairing an inquisition! Ken thought. But it was too late. He’d promised.

Steve looked puzzled when he entered Ken’s office and saw Clarence and Ruth sitting there. Ken tried to put him at rest. “Steve, there’s a little confusion I’d like you to clear up for us. Clarence and Ruth feel they have good reason to believe you are not actually in graduate school. I’ve assured them you are.”

“Of course I’m in school,” Steve said, staring at Clarence and Ruth.

“Then maybe you should tell us why the registrar and finance officer don’t have any record of you,” Ruth shot back.

Ken didn’t realize their relationship had deteriorated that far. “Uh, maybe it would be helpful if you clarified your association with the school, Steve.”

“That’s easy. I’m auditing two courses: music theory and choral conducting.”

“Oh, you’re auditing,” Ken said quickly, before Ruth could say anything.

“Even so, wouldn’t the registrar have some record of that?” asked Clarence.

“Yes, but you see, I made special arrangements with the professors since all I’m doing is sitting in. But I am in school.” Then Steve got up and walked out. The meeting was obviously over.

But the assaults weren’t. Four or five times over the next few weeks Clarence and Ruth called with new charges that Steve was guilty of some misdeed.

“That choir isn’t big enough for the three of them,” Ken told Jean one evening. “Clarence and Ruth would lynch Steve if I’d let them.” Ken kept Jean up till 1:00 a.m. talking about the situation. He finally decided that, as painful as it was, for everyone’s peace of mind he was going to have to ask Clarence and Ruth to leave the choir. “I hate to do it,” he said, “but I can’t have one of my staff members under constant attack.”

With Steve and Gloria’s wedding the next weekend, Ken didn’t talk to Clarence and Ruth until the final week of February. He decided to drive to their home. “I came to talk about the problem with Steve,” he said when Ruth opened the door.

“I’m glad,” she said. “Clarence and I just can’t quit stewing about it.”

Ken sat in the recliner. “I’ve been very concerned about your relationship with Steve,” he began, searching their faces. “The constant friction worries me. It’s affecting the whole choir, and I’m worried about what it’s doing to you two, to your peace of mind.”

“We’d feel a whole lot better if Steve paid back our money,” Clarence admitted.

“I know, and Steve assures me he’s going to pay. But something has to be done. I’ve prayed and thought long and hard about this, and for the sake of the choir and peace of the church, I’d like you two to step down from the choir. At least for now.”

Ruth gasped. “But Reverend, you can’t mean it. Why, that choir is our whole life.”

“I know, and it’s painful for me to suggest it,” Ken said. “This isn’t an act of discipline, just something I’m asking you to do for the good of the church.”

“What about our good?” Ruth asked. “Don’t we count?” Ruth looked him in the eye. “You don’t believe us. You think we’re lying about Steve.”

“Of course not,” Ken said quickly. But then he didn’t know what to say. For what seemed like a long time they sat in silence. Finally Clarence spoke.

“Pastor, the reason I’m constantly harping on this lying thing is because I’ve been there. From the time I was thirteen until I was nineteen, I lived in my own world. I was a pathological liar, and my parents didn’t trust me if I told them what time it was. I wouldn’t have changed, but God brought a major disaster in my life and broke me. So I know lying when I see it. Steve is doing that to you. You’re going to be very sorry if you don’t check for yourself whether Steve’s in school. We’ve checked it to our satisfaction. You need to do it.”

Ken had never heard Clarence admit any mistake before, let alone something like this. You don’t just make up stories about being a pathological liar, he thought. But to check on Steve? All I need is people around town saying, “McMahon can’t trust his own staff.” But there in front of him was Clarence, shaking as he spoke.

“OK,” he said. “I’ll check.”

Passive-aggressive game

Ken waited until Steve got back from his honeymoon in the Poconos, just in case he needed to have him clarify something. Then on Tuesday Ken drove to downtown Philadelphia to the graduate school campus. His heart was pounding as he found Dr. Austin’s office on the second floor of Old Main. “Dr. Austin,” he said, once inside, “Steve Borchard is our choir director and a student here at the graduate school. Have you ever given him permission to sit in on your music theory class—not audit, just sit in?”

“I can’t give that permission and I wouldn’t,” he said.

Ken pulled out a picture of Steve and held it across the desk. “Is this man in your classes?”

Dr. Austin shook his head. “Never seen him.”

“Thank you,” Ken said. “That’s all I needed to know.” Neither had the conducting prof seen Steve.

Once back at the church, Ken walked into Steve’s office and remained standing.

“Hi, Ken,” Steve smiled, “what’s up?”

“About school,” Ken said tensely. “Your profs don’t know anything about your auditing arrangement. They don’t even know who you are.”

Steve blinked a few times but answered quickly. “Well, the classes are so large, and actually, I arranged the audit through the registrar’s secretary. I never did talk to the profs themselves. But when I talked to the secretary, she said it would be OK.”

“Thanks for clearing that up,” Ken said, not convinced. Back in his study Ken called the registrar’s office and talked with the secretary.

“I remember him asking last fall if he could sit in on classes,” she said. “I told him I’d check, but he never came back. But we wouldn’t grant that permission to anybody.”

Ken hung up and called Irv Hadley. He explained the entire story: Clarence and Ruth’s accusations, what the school had said.

“He talked to me for fifteen minutes one Sunday about his classes. And you mean to tell me he’s not even in school?” Irv said.

“I can hardly believe it myself, but the registrar, the professors—nobody knows him.”

“We can’t have a staff member of this church lying like that,” Irv said. “I don’t care who he is. If he were one of my employees, I’d fire him in a minute. The rest of the board needs to know about this.”

That Sunday night Ken recounted the story for the board. They decided that Irv and Ken should ask Steve to resign quietly.

On Tuesday morning the three of them met in Ken’s office. Steve looked a little shaken with Irv in the same room.

“Steve,” Ken began, “we called you in here today because it’s come to our attention that you’ve been lying to us. Everything you’ve told us about your involvement in graduate school has been untrue. You’re not going to classes, you’re not auditing, you didn’t get permission from the professors, and you lied about the secretary situation.”

Ken thought Steve might deny it, but he didn’t. He just looked down at his feet.

Irv jumped in. “I don’t know why you’ve lied about all this, but you’ve made Ken almost destroy his relationship with Clarence and Ruth. You have compromised the integrity of this entire church. You have broken trust, and that’s a precious commodity.”

Steve started to cry.

“Steve, we love you and we want to help you,” Ken added, really meaning it. “But for your sake and for the sake of the church, we’re asking you to resign from leadership. You’re our brother in Christ and we want you to stay in the church. But this pattern of lying is serious. You need to step down and work on it. We hope you’ll cooperate in the process so you can be forgiven and restored.”

No one spoke for almost five minutes. The only sound was Steve’s sobs. Finally Ken said, “Steve, we know you’ll need some time. Stay here as long as you need to, and when you’re ready we’d like to meet with you again.” Ken prayed briefly and then he and Irv left.

Steve stopped by Ken’s office later that day. “I need to see you tonight, Ken. I can’t go on like this.”

Ken knew Irv would be busy that evening. He didn’t really want to meet with Steve alone, but when he saw how upset Steve was, he felt he couldn’t make him wait. “OK. I want you to tell Gloria what’s happening and bring her with you tonight. It’s very important that she know what’s going on.” Ken knew the fallout from Steve’s resignation could wreck their young marriage unless they handled it together.

That night Ken was back in his office by 6:30. Just before 7:00 Steve walked in—alone.

“Where’s Gloria?” Ken asked.

“I, uh, didn’t tell her yet. Ken, I’m scared!”

“I would be, too,” Ken said. “Let’s talk.”

They met until quarter of twelve. Steve cried much of the time. Ken read from 2 Corinthians 7 and encouraged Steve that godly sorrow would lead him to true repentance and restoration. He assured Steve that God would forgive him and the church would forgive him. Steve would have to bear some unavoidable consequences, but he could endure those knowing he was forgiven. Then they prayed together, and when they were done they stood and embraced. Ken was crying, too. Before they left, Ken urged Steve to come in with Gloria to talk things through. Steve said he would.

Ken was glad to see the bedroom light still on when he pulled into the driveway. He told Jean how good the meeting had been.

“Ken, he’s got your number,” Jean finally said.

“What do you mean?” Ken crossed his arms.

“All Steve has to do is hint that he needs your help and cry a little bit, and he’s got you, because you’re a rescuer.”

“What’s wrong with that? He does need help.”

“It sure seems to me that Steve is playing the passive-aggressive game. He aggressively does his dirty work. Then when you confront him, he becomes passive and weak as a baby. You rush in to help, and suddenly he’s in control because you can’t confront him anymore.”

Backlash

Ken couldn’t sleep that night. He kept replaying what Jean had said. Am I really that gullible? I don’t know any other way to build a staff except to trust people.

He wanted to be firm, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that he wasn’t worthy to issue ultimatums. Everything I do is tainted, too. Am I really any better than he is? Maybe my sins are in different areas, but deep down we’re the same. There, but for the grace of God, go I.

On Friday Ken found a letter from Steve on his desk: I thought I should straighten things out between you and me. Concerning my course work, I must confess I have not represented myself well. That error in judgment is mine. I apologize for the hardship this has placed on you. In a sense I have told only half the truth, but the real issue is that I have, by my omission of certain facts, been half honest.

Nowhere did Steve admit he’d done anything wrong. He kept hiding behind “errors in judgment” and “omissions of facts.”

Later in the day, Steve told Ken that he and Gloria needed to meet with him that night. Ken called Irv and found out he was sick and wouldn’t be able to come. He didn’t like the idea of meeting with them alone, because he was beginning to doubt his discernment. But he decided the issue couldn’t wait.

Steve and Gloria arrived about 7:00. Ken had to give Gloria credit. For being such a young bride, she didn’t look shaken at all.

“What can I do to get my job back?” Steve said. “I’m really sorry. I want to repent.”

Befirm, McMahon, Ken thought. “It’s too late for that, Steve. Your job is not the issue at this point. The issue is your integrity. We love you, but we don’t feel it will be helpful to you or the church for you to remain in leadership.”

Steve looked dumbfounded. I don’t think he realizes what his problem is, Ken thought. Ken began to retell the grad school story so he would be able to understand how much damage he’d caused. But just as he was starting, Steve interrupted.

“Look, Ken, I don’t want to argue with you. I just want you to know that we agree with the decision, and we want to be the ones to tell the choir.”

“That’s a good idea,” Ken said, relieved that Steve was coming around. They decided Steve would tell the choir at next Thursday’s rehearsal. Ken would also be there. “You don’t need to tell all the details,” Ken said. “But you need to confess that you’ve not been honest—and that it’s been over a long period of time and with many people, not just a couple.” Ken added this last part because by now the choir had split wide open, with Steve and Gloria and their supporters on one side and Clarence and Ruth and a smaller group of backers on the other. If Steve said he was resigning because of “a couple of people,” everyone in the choir would immediately think “Clarence and Ruth.”

“OK,” Steve said. “Thursday.” Then he and Gloria left.

Gloria hadn’t said a word, but she had stayed calm. As Ken drove home, it suddenly hit him. Gloria doesn’t know what’s going on. That’s why Steve cut me off when I started retelling the details. He didn’t want her to know. Ken felt a twinge in his right side. She must think we’re just picking on Steve. Thursday night is going to be tough on her.

All day Thursday Ken’s mind kept racing ahead to the rehearsal. He struggled to concentrate on his 10:00 counseling appointment. Around one he gave up on a sermon outline and went out for a sandwich. He ran into Lucy Stanton, a long-time choir member, at the coffee shop. She said hi, but Ken could have sworn she gave him a dirty look. I’m getting paranoid, he thought.

Ken got to his office by 6:30 that evening to try to pray and clear his mind before the rehearsal started at 7:00. At 6:55, Doris, Gloria’s mom, stormed into his office.

“You have no right to fire Steve!” Doris began.

“Wait a minute. Who told you we’re firing Steve?”

“Steve did, this morning, after he told the choir.”

“What? You mean he already told the choir?”

“Some of them. He called a few to explain things. They’re just as upset as I am.”

Ken was angry and scared all at once. “He was supposed to announce that tonight when we could discuss it. But tell me the story as you understand it.” Whenever he got scared, Ken dropped into the pastor-as-listener mode.

“Naturally, Steve didn’t feel free to share all the details, but you don’t have to think too hard to realize it’s because he doesn’t get along with Clarence and Ruth.”

That’s not it! Ken was screaming inside, but he’d been a pastor long enough to contain himself. “What else have you heard?”

“Well, Lucy Stanton said Steve’s being fired because he’s not organized enough. Ken, he’s still young. You can’t fire him just because he’s got some things to learn.”

“Listen, Doris, neither of those things has anything to do with why we’ve asked Steve to resign. We’re asking Steve to step down because he has lied to many members of this church about a variety of things for a long period of time.”

“What do you mean?” Doris asked.

Ken proceeded to describe the whole web of lies about grad school.

“You have no proof,” Doris said when Ken had finished.

“Doris, I can get the proof.” Ken couldn’t believe she wasn’t convinced. “The point is that the lying hasn’t been an isolated incident with Steve. It’s been an ongoing pattern.”

“I think he’s being falsely accused,” Doris said. They talked for another ten minutes, but nothing Ken said would shake Doris’s belief that her son-in-law was an innocent victim. Doris finally left madder than when she’d come.

Ken looked at his watch: 7:50. The rehearsal! He jumped up from his chair and sprinted to the sanctuary. He rounded the corner, slowed, then stopped. The sanctuary was dark. Steve must have made the announcement and then let the choir go. The most important meeting of my life and I miss it because Doris pins me in my office, Ken thought. If they’ve heard Steve’s side of the story, they’re never going to believe me. We’ve lost the war.

When Ken walked in the door at home, he could hear Jean on the phone. “Yes, he should be home soon. I’ll have him return your call.” Jean hung up and turned to him. “Ken, that’s the fourth call in the last ten minutes. They’re all about Steve.”

“I’ll return them in the den.”

“Ken, they sounded angry. What happened?”

“I don’t know, dear. I don’t know.”

Ken emerged from the den around eleven, feeling like a weary infantryman crawling from a foxhole. Every time he’d hung up, another call had come in. He still had one call to make, but by now it was too late to call anyone. Each call had been sickeningly like his meeting with Doris, beginning with some sort of attack, like, “I can’t believe you would fire Steve.” Ken would ask, “What is the problem as it’s been related to you?” and inevitably the person would say, “Steve’s being fired because he’s disorganized, but mostly because of Clarence and Ruth.”

Ken would try to explain, but the caller either didn’t really believe him or wanted to know what proof Ken had. After the second call, Ken began promising people he and Irv would come to the next choir rehearsal to clear up the matter.

What proof?

Sunday tested Ken’s will. He had hardly slept since Thursday. He’d answered, at last count, thirty-five calls. The choir had been scheduled to sing, but obviously couldn’t without a director, so they sat in the pews. Many of them glared at Ken throughout the service. And there was Steve, sitting near the back, surrounded by members of the choir, and smiling.

Monday morning Steve dropped by the church to finish clearing out his office. Ken asked him to come into his office and sit down.

“What happened last Thursday?” Ken asked, his voice edged with anger.

“I presented the whole situation to the choir as a positive and biblical decision,” Steve said. “They took it about as well as could be expected.”

“Then why do forty people have the wrong story?”

“Well, you see, an issue came up that I feel you should consider,” Steve said. “The choir said to me, ‘We forgive you, and God forgives you. Why can’t we, as the people under your ministry, restore you?’ So what could I say? There are a lot of people, Ken, who want me to stay. And not just in the choir, either.”

So now the fighting gets dirty, huh? Ken thought. “Listen,” he said, “ten words from you could save me a year of trouble, and I want those ten words. Thursday night you are going to come to choir rehearsal and tell those people the truth. Is that understood?”

Steve nodded. Too quickly, Ken thought.

When Ken and Irv walked into the sanctuary Thursday evening, the first thing they heard was crying. Most of the choir was standing in a big huddle, and the crying seemed to be coming from there. When Ken and Irv got closer, they saw it was Gloria. Steve had his arm around her, saying things like, “It’s all right, honey. It’s going to be all right.” Everyone turned and stared at Ken and Irv.

They look like we’ve been beating her, and that’s why she’s crying, Ken thought.

Once everyone had been seated, Ken said simply, “I know the last week has been very difficult for you. We’d like to straighten things out tonight. Steve has something he’d like to say.”

Gloria was still crying, softly now.

Steve began rambling about misunderstandings and how things “hadn’t worked out.” He finished by saying, “I have not been as honest as I should have been with a couple of people.”

Ken kept waiting for him to say something more, but he sat back down. So Ken stood up and said, “Steve, that’s not the issue. You have repeatedly misrepresented yourself over a long period of time and with numbers of people. And you have used the reputation of the staff and the church to cover your tracks.” Ken went on to briefly outline the situations with the grad school and church van. He wanted to mention the special music lists, the tour mix-up, and a host of other things, but he didn’t have firm proof of those.

One of the tenors Steve had recruited raised his hand. “You’re saying that Steve has lied.”

“That’s right. Repeatedly.”

“But how can you prove that?”

“Let me give you an example,” Irv said, and explained how Steve had told him about his classes while the professors said they had never seen him.

“But how do we know that what you’re saying now is true?”

I can’t believe this, Ken thought. If this were about adultery, would anyone ask for videotapes and motel receipts?

“Irv and I are not going to go into all the details,” Ken said, “because it’s not fair to Steve. We want Steve to stay in the church and work on this area, and he can’t do that if his every action is for public consumption. This is a leadership issue. The board and I stand behind our assertion that Steve has repeatedly not told the truth.”

The meeting ended soon after, which was just as well, Ken thought. No one was listening anyway because they were caught up by Gloria’s crying.

Reconciliation rejection

“We lost that battle,” Irv said in Ken’s office afterward. “Steve’s got that whole choir, except for Clarence and Ruth and a few others, on his side. And from what I can tell, he’s got a good chunk of the rest of the congregation on his side, too.” Irv leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling.

“They think we’re lying,” Ken added. “You can’t minister to people if they think you’re lying to them. And that hurts more than anything. If there’s one thing I try to do, it’s shoot straight.”

“I know. But what are we going to do now?”

“I won’t retreat, Irv. I can’t.”

The next morning Steve’s mother-in-law called Ken at home before seven. “Steve told me about the meeting last night,” she said. “What disturbs me is that it shows you don’t have any proof of what you’re saying. I can’t believe this church has turned into a kangaroo court.”

“We have proof, Doris,” Ken said. “But it looks like the only way we’re going to settle this thing is to get all the responsible parties together. You bring Steve and sit down with me and the board. We’ll go over all the information together. But it’s completely unfair to Steve for me to talk about him when he’s not here to defend himself.” Ken hoped Doris would accept the offer. It was the only way Ken could think of to keep the battle from raging underground, where Ken knew he couldn’t win.

But the offer didn’t slow Doris or her friends. Nearly every day for three weeks, one of them would call to accuse Ken of ousting Steve for personal, unjustifiable reasons. Ken stood firm: “You bring Steve, and we’ll sit down with the board and go over the evidence.”

Ken called Steve several times and told him what he’d told Doris. “They say you’ve never had a chance to defend yourself. Here’s your chance. Come meet with us.” Steve finally sent a letter saying, “I have strong feelings about the way this situation has been handled, the fairness of it” and saying he needed more time for his “emotions to lessen and healing to take place.”

When Ken wasn’t on the phone with Steve or Doris, he was talking with one of the choir members, what few were left. Over half the choir quit after Irv and Ken had met with them, and Ken was trying to keep up morale in the remaining members. “I’m not saying it’s wrong to ask Steve to step down,” one alto told him, “but do we have to kill the entire choir over it?” When he heard that, Ken wanted to cry.

One day Clarence and Ruth called. “Did you hear what Steve’s doing?” they asked.

I’m afraid to ask, Ken thought. “No, what?”

“Ten or twelve people from the choir are meeting at his house every Thursday. We know because we saw their cars parked in front. One can only guess what they’re doing.”

Ken called Steve.

“Why, Ken, what a surprise,” Steve crooned.

“Steve, I understand a group from the choir is meeting at your house every Thursday.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Steve, you are not Community Church’s choir director anymore. You should not have half the choir meeting with you every week.”

“They wanted to. It’s an informal thing. We get together to just, er, pray about things at church.”

“I don’t care what the reason is, those meetings have to stop. This is supposed to be a time of repentance for you.” Ken paused, but Steve didn’t say anything. “Steve, however incongruous it might seem, my heart is open to you. But this waiting game must end. I have made it clear we want you to come talk with the board. The ball’s in your court. If you don’t come talk with us in a month, by May 20, we will have to let everyone know that was your choice.”

For Ken, the month felt like thirty days on the rack. Every day people would call: “What’s happening to our choir?” “Ken, you don’t have proof.” “I have questions about the fairness of this whole thing.” Ken stopped scheduling lunch appointments because he couldn’t endure the hour-long assaults. He’d lie awake at night and think, I’m helpless. Jean loves me, Irv supports me, but they can’t protect me.

Ken didn’t do much that month but answer the phone and try to get his sermons together. Every Sunday, he’d look out and see Steve sitting there. “I know I want Steve to stay in the church and be restored,” he told Jean after one Sunday, “but it feels like a divorcée attending the wedding of a former mate.”

Ken did meet with Irv often. They’d pray, often on their knees, for strength and wisdom. They began to document their claims. Irv pored over all the church financial records dealing with Steve. He found several fishy items. The previous summer the board had authorized Steve to do miscellaneous maintenance projects around the church to supplement his income. The very days when the choir went on tour, when Steve had to work at the 7-Eleven, he had submitted a bill for thirty hours of caulking windows.

Ken called Steve’s home pastor in Doylestown. He felt like a rat doing it, but recently he’d gotten a hunch regarding why Steve had lied about graduate school.

“This is Ken McMahon from Levittown Community Church,” he began. “I want you to listen to me and gain my tone. You may not trust me, but please, listen to what I have to say.”

“Go ahead,” said the pastor.

“Did Steve ever tell you about the graduate music courses he was taking? Were you aware that he had not been taking any classes? Have you been giving him any financial aid?”

“Yes, we give $600 a semester to people studying for churchrelated careers. You’re saying he hasn’t been going to school?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“I want to check on that.”

A few days later the pastor called Ken to say he’d checked with the school, and the church was canceling the financial aid.

Steve arranged to meet with the board on Saturday morning, May 19, one day short of the deadline. He walked into the church lounge at five minutes after nine—alone. Ken was surprised that Doris and Gloria hadn’t come with him. Ken and Irv and Bill Seifert stood up and shook his hand.

“Well, Steve, do you have something to say to us?” Ken asked when they were seated again. Ken felt like a racehorse in the chute—churning inside with adrenaline, anger, and fear, but still under control.

“Yeah, I’d like to apologize for our misunderstandings and for the hardship I’ve caused you.”

“Does that mean you’re admitting that what we’ve done is correct, and that the reason we disciplined you was properly stated?”

“No, I’m not saying that. I’m saying that I’m sorry we misunderstood each other and that I didn’t help in that circ*mstance.”

“That’s not exactly what we had in mind, Steve,” Ken said.

Irv was sitting next to Steve, and he leaned over, put his arm around him, and began talking in a quiet, steady voice. “Steve, we want you to understand that we love you and want to be reconciled. But the Bible makes it clear that first there needs to be confession of your sin and repentance, a change of mind about that sin. You see, we’re not the ones you have offended. We’re included, but you have offended the church. What we need to know today is whether you are confessing—not just admitting under duress—that you have sinned so that we can be reconciled to you. We’re ready to do that, and we’d like to.”

Steve shifted in his seat and looked out the window. Irv continued, “Let me tell you why that’s necessary. One Sunday last September, you and I talked in the foyer for fifteen minutes about your graduate school experience. You went into great detail about how difficult your choral conducting class was, and how hard your music theory professor was, and about the papers you were writing. The bottom line is, every single one of those things was false, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, it was.” Steve’s eyes became moist.

Ken outlined the other lies about having to work the weekend of the choir tour, and not dating Gloria, about reporting hours that he hadn’t really worked. Steve admitted to the situations where he could tell they had firm evidence, but he denied all the others. Finally Steve said, “What do you want me to do now?”

“We simply want you to confess your sin to us and the Lord so we can restore you. We would like you to write it out—not to be published, just to help you—and come meet with us again and read it. It would help you and the church if Gloria and her mother came also.”

“All right,” Steve said. “I’ll set up a time, and I’ll call you in two days.”

Then he walked out of the lounge, and Ken never saw him again.

Epilogue

Steve’s mother-in-law left the church shortly thereafter. The church hired a choir director on a temporary basis, then after a year hired a full-time replacement. The church has continued to grow, though the choir remained stagnant for years and only recently has begun turning around. Another church hired Steve, against Ken’s recommendation, and dismissed him one year later. Steve is now serving another church.

Subterfuge safeguard

Deception assumes many guises. A church treasurer may skim funds. A board member may falsely recount what you said in a meeting. Regardless of its outward appearance, lying is a deadly weapon. It poisons relationships and trust.

How can we protect ourselves? What strategies can shield us from fleecers, flimflams, and frauds? Based on his own painful experience, Ken McMahon suggests the following:

Watch for repeated patterns of behavior. “Looking back, I can’t believe we didn’t pick up on Steve sooner,” Ken says. “He seemed to leave a trail of debts and unresolved conflict.” When a member of the church repeatedly mishandles money or kicks up dust, there’s usually a character problem inside.

Of course, mistakes are often a sign not of malice but immaturity. How can you distinguish the two? As a general rule, the sincere admit their mistakes and learn from them. The swindler covers his “mistakes” and repeats them. Ken points out: “All Steve had to do was say, ‘I’m sorry, I’m having trouble paying my bills and didn’t tell the truth.’ But he couldn’t, because he feared looking bad. So when I hire somebody now, I look for a person who is not overprotective of his or her image, someone who can openly face detractors.”

Do your homework. If you suspect a parishioner is conning you, gather proof. This step pains most pastors. “I hated checking up on Steve,” Ken says. “First, snooping looks terrible to people outside the church. It gives the church a bad name. Second, playing detective goes against my grain. Maybe it’s our weak spot, but we pastors believe the best of people. To doubt someone in my church, to double-check everything he says, tears me up.”

But only such documentation will stand up “in court,” whether that be a one-on-one confrontation or an all-church meeting. Deception, by its very nature, is the best camouflaged of all sins, the hardest to expose. And when someone is accused of it, everyone else in the church will demand to see the instant replay. Some inner urge makes people insist on seeing the evidence and deciding for themselves.

Never make a move alone. “Perhaps the biggest tactical error I made,” Ken says, “is that I met with Steve alone several times. I shouldn’t have allowed that. I needed someone like Jean or Irv, someone more discerning who could have firmly called Steve’s bluff.” Plus, when acting alone, no one can corroborate your story and prevent your-word-against-his situations.

Ken did, however, involve the board early on, and this proved wise. By acting in concert, each action taken against Steve became a board and church matter, rather than Ken’s personal vendetta. And when the powder keg exploded, the board helped shield Ken from the flying fragments.

Another reason support is needed can be found in Jesus’ description of Satan as “the father of lies.” Any action to expose lying seems a foray into enemy-occupied territory. A pastor can expect to meet unusual spiritual resistance. “I found it almost impossible to pray during this,” Ken says. “I relied on Irv and a woman in our congregation who prayed for me several times a day. When I felt confused, oppressed, and unsure of my ability as a pastor, I needed people who were ‘true worshipers,’ people who have been through deep waters and as a result know how to pray.”

Hide inside the Mighty Fortress. As Ken discovered, even your best efforts may not prevent a considerable amount of damage.

“With a practiced deceiver, it’s a no-win situation,” he says. “You never come out unscathed. Only recently have I gotten to the point where I don’t think about Steve every day. The choir is just now coming out of a prolonged drought. People are finally beginning to trust me again.”

But Ken knew where to run for cover. “It’s a truism, but the only thing that mattered in the middle of this was my relationship with the Lord. I finally realized no amount of self-effort could protect me. Yet I was not alone. God protected me.”

Copyright © 1997

Ironically, I am most grateful for two things I normally try to avoid: guilt and fear … yet guilt and fear are such powerful forces that they may also deceive. In my case, they deceived me into seeing God as my enemy.

Virtue, unlike innocence, has successfully passed a point of temptation.

Name Withheld

I was sitting in an aisle seat on a cross-country flight when the passenger across the aisle, one row ahead, pulled out a magazine from his briefcase. I recognized something familiar in the furtive way he looked around, nervously adjusted his posture, and opened the magazine. He held the pages open just far enough to see inside, but from my angle I had a clear view of various women spreading their legs for the camera.

It seemed incongruous, even bizarre, for a man dressed in a business suit to be studying some anonymous woman’s private parts in the artificial setting of jammed-together airplane seats and plastic folding trays. But after the sense of the bizarre had passed, I felt another twinge, this one a mixture of pain and sadness. Five years ago, I was that man in the business suit, addicted to lust. I wrote about my struggle in the Fall 1982 edition of Leadership, in an article called “The War Within,” which also is Chapter 1 in this book. After the sadness had passed, I felt an enormous sense of relief, for I realized that my initial sense of bizarreness was a sign of the healing God has accomplished so far.

Not long after the airplane trip, an editor from Leadership asked if I would do another article, recounting what I had learned about lust in the five intervening years. At first, I didn’t like the idea. It seemed an unnecessary probing of old wounds. The article had been for me a means of catharsis, a deliverance. Why dredge up the past? Finally, however, I agreed to consider the request.

I reread the original article for the first time in five years. Its passionate tone startled me. I had forgotten how completely sex had dominated my life. I found myself feeling compassion for the author of the article, momentarily forgetting his identity! Again, I breathed a prayer of thanks for God’s healing. In the same file folder as the article, I also found an envelope from Leadership containing several dozen letters from readers, and I proceeded to read each one.

Some readers felt a sense of shock and betrayal. They criticized the article for being prurient and disgusting. The author had been far too explicit, they said; he dwelt on lurid details as if he still enjoyed his memories of lust.

“The author cannot possibly be considered a Christian,” concluded one reader (I hope this person never encounters Augustine’s Confessions). Others claimed the article had caused them to distrust their pastor and all Christian leaders: “Who knows what might be going on in their minds?”

I pray and hope that my article did not lead anyone astray. I must admit that, at a distance of five years, the article seemed somewhat overwrought. Does the issue of lust merit such a long, involved treatment? But I also know that the article was true, every word of it. I lived it. War raged within me for a decade.

At the time, some people were scandalized that a Christian magazine would print such a blunt, realistic confession by a Christian leader. But in more recent days we have read far more explicit accounts of Christian leaders’ immorality in Time and Newsweek.

Not all the letters were negative, however. More than half expressed deep gratitude. I have a whole stack of letters that begin like this: “I thought I was the only one with this problem. Thank you so much for having the courage to bring it out into the open.” Some go on to describe agonizing personal battles with lust and immorality. At least one reader said the article permanently cured his lust problem by frightening him away from the temptations of bare flesh.

The most moving letters, however, came from people who have not been cured. “Please, tell me how to solve my problem!” they wrote. “You said that God ‘came through’ for you, but he has not come through for me. What can I do?” It was this group of letters that ultimately convinced me to write about what has happened in the past five years.

The Road to Freedom

I begin with humility and gratitude to God for breaking my addiction. I came to see the problem of lust as a true addiction, much like addiction to alcohol or drugs or gambling. And I can truly say that I have been set free of, in Augustine’s words, “scratching lust’s itchy sore.” For those still caught in the web of that addiction, I bring a message of hope.

Ironically, I am most grateful for two things I normally try to avoid: guilt and fear. Augustine records rather candidly that, except for the fear of God’s judgment in the afterlife, Epicurus would surely have lured him even deeper into carnal pleasures. A similar kind of fear and guilt kept me on edge during my long struggle with lust.

Psychologists use the term “cognitive dissonance” to describe the battle inside a person who believes one way and acts another. For example, a woman will normally feel intense cognitive dissonance if she secretly carries on an affair with another man while pretending to be happily married to her husband. Even if her husband suspects nothing, her own mind will constantly remind her that she is living with contradictions. Because the mind cannot sustain too much cognitive dissonance, it will seek ways to resolve the contradictions. Perhaps the wife will unconsciously let slip certain clues about her affair, or maybe she will accidentally call her husband by her lover’s name. In such unexpected ways the mind will attempt to bring together her two lives.

A sense of cognitive dissonance haunted me during my addiction to lust. I believed one set of things about Christian ethics, the dangers of separating physical appeal from other aspects of sexuality, and the irrationality of an obsession with body parts. But I acted contrarily. From the pulpit I preached that a person’s worth is measured internally, and that ugly people and fat people and the physically handicapped can express God’s image. But, like much of male America, I spent my time drooling over shapely women with well-formed legs.

Most urgently, I experienced cognitive dissonance in my marriage. I had roped off large areas of my sexuality from my wife, which I cultivated in private, usually on trips, in visits to adult movie theaters and magazine shops. How could I expect to find sexual fulfillment in my marriage when I was nurturing a secret life of sexuality apart from my marriage?

Guilt and fear finally forced me to deal with the cognitive dissonance. Guilt made it feel dissonant in the first place; it constantly reminded me that my actions did not coincide with my beliefs. And fear, especially the fear I experienced after I learned how sex had utterly destroyed my Southern pastor friend, forced me to face my own sin. It led me, kicking and protesting all the way, toward repentance.

I mention this because guilt and fear do not often get good press in our liberated society. Had I sought help from a professional counselor, that counselor may well have dealt with the symptoms of guilt and fear rather than with the root problem. I have come to believe that the guilt and fear were wholly appropriate; they were, in fact, the prods that led me to resolve the cognitive dissonance in my life.

Today, I hear cries of outrage against anyone who, like former President Reagan or Jerry Falwell, conveys a tone of judgment. President Reagan simply asked that sexual abstinence be taught as an option, possibly the best option, for young people who wish to avoid the health dangers associated with sexual promiscuity. “Don’t lay a guilt trip on us!” many people responded. “Don’t try to scare us.” But I have learned that guilt and fear may serve us well, as warnings against the direct dangers posed by a disease like aids, or against the more subtle dangers represented by an addiction to lust.

Yet guilt and fear are such powerful forces that they may also deceive. In my case, they deceived me into seeing God as my enemy. Now as I read “The War Within,” it reminds me of a testimony delivered at a revival tent meeting: “For many years I wallowed in the stench and filth of sin until finally I reached the end of my rope and in desperation turned to God.” Typically, as I did in the article, the testifier spends most of his time on vivid descriptions of the smells and sights of that sin.

I now view my pilgrimage differently. I believe God was with me at each stage of my struggle with lust. It wasn’t that I had to climb toward a state of repentance to earn God’s approval; that would be a religion of works. Rather, God was present with me even as I fled from him. At the moment when I was most aware of my own inadequacy and failure, at that moment I was probably closest to God. That is a religion of grace.

The title of one book on my shelf, He Came Down from Heaven, summarizes the gospel pretty well. Immanuel: God is with us, no matter what. He calls us to heaven but descends to earth to rescue us.

I wish we in the church did a better job of conveying God’s love for sinners. From the church, I feel mainly judgment. I cannot bring my sin to the church until it has been neatly resolved into a warm, uplifting testimony. For example, if I had come to the church in the midst of my addiction to lust, I would have been harshly judged. That, in fact, is why I had to write my article anonymously. Even after the complete cycle of confession and forgiveness, people still wrote in comments like, “The author cannot possibly be considered a Christian.”

Having said that, however, I also recognize that many people who struggle with addictions have been greatly helped by counselors or other mature Christians to whom they have made themselves accountable. They testify that knowing there is someone to whom they have to report honestly and regularly has been a key factor in resisting temptation.

I have attended a few meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, and they convinced me that we in the church have something to learn from that group. Somehow they require accountability and communicate the “Immanuel-ness” of God. He is with you when you succeed and when you fail. He does not wait with folded arms for you to pick yourself out of the gutter. His hands are stretched out toward you, eager to help. Where are the hands of the church?

Bearing Scars

So far I have given mostly good news: the good news that an addiction can be broken, that God’s love extends to the uttermost, that even guilt and fear can work for our good. But in honesty I must bring bad news as well.

In Sunday school we learn simple illustrations about the long-term effects of sin: “God will forgive you for the sin of smoking, but you’ll always have spots on your lungs.” Damage from sexual sins is rarely so easy to detect, but such sins do indeed have consequences.

I bear scars from my addiction to lust, even though the addiction seems broken. First, there is the scar of “spoiled innocence.” Sex has a certain “you can’t go back again” quality. p*rnographers understand this well: They know that what titillates this month will only bore next month, and they must constantly search for new and exciting sexual variety in order to hold a viewer’s attention. p*rnography feeds on our fascination with the forbidden, but as the rules of what is forbidden change, our fascination changes as well. We want more.

I don’t know exactly how to describe this long-term effect, but I definitely feel a sense of spoiled innocence. My sexual fantasy life far outstripped my sexual experience within marriage, and I have not been able to bring the two together. I was a voyeur, experiencing sex in loneliness and isolation. But sex is meant to be shared. To the degree that I indulged my voyeurism, I drifted away from my wife and our shared experiences.

And of course my years of deception undermined trust. Eventually, I told my wife everything about my addiction to lust, and she accepted it with astonishing grace and forgiveness. Still, though, she must wonder: When he travels alone, is he trustworthy? I sometimes wonder if I can even trust myself. By living in a state of cognitive dissonance for a number of years, I developed a great ability to live falsely. As I ignored the early warning signs of guilt, I opened up even greater possibilities for self-deception. Perhaps I have seared my own conscience. I continue to pray for the Holy Spirit’s healing of my receptivity to him.

These are some of the long-term effects from my experience with lust. Surely similar scars form as a result of adultery, divorce, or a decision to abort a child. God will forgive such actions and grant repentance and restoration. But healing does not come free of long-term cost.

How do I respond to sexual pressures now? I am still a sexual being, a male. That has not changed. I still experience the same magnetic force of sexual desire that used to pull me toward p*rnography. What do I do with those urges? What do any of us do? As I see it, we can respond in three possible ways: indulgence, repression, or reconnection.

The Way of Indulgence

“The War Within” described in detail — some say too much detail — a process of indulgence, of following my sexual desires wherever they might lead. Our society seems strangely schizophrenic on the wisdom of that approach. On the one hand, authors advocating “The New Celibacy” appear on talk shows, and Time features articles on the new ethic of intimacy. On the other hand, you need only flip through the advertisem*nts in a magazine like Vogue or Glamour to realize our society’s approving attitude toward lust.

“Lust is back!” heralded an article in Esquire a few years ago. The sexual revolution of the sixties stemmed from an overall assault against tradition and authority. Soon feminism put a damper on anything that treated women as sexual objects. But now it seems perfectly acceptable to treat either women or men as sexual objects. Today’s sexual revolution is fueled not so much by a reaction against authority as by The New Paganism that glorifies the human body (witness the incredible boom in body-building, fitness, and exercise).

Cable television and videocassettes now make p*rnography available to nearly everyone. The recent book Vital Signs reports that of Christian households hooked into cable television, 23 percent subscribe to p*rno channels — the same percentage as the nation as a whole.

What harm is there, after all, in displaying a little skin? Christians tend to be so uptight about sex; why not experiment with p*rnography to help loosen us up? There are many answers, I suppose, but one especially seems to fit my experience: p*rnography radically disconnects sex from its intended meaning. Human sexuality, a gift from God, was designed to express a relationship between a man and a woman, but p*rnography separates out one aspect of that gift — physical appeal — and focuses exclusively on it.

The specialists like to remind us that sexuality reveals our animal nature. It is a matter of biology, they say, of glands and hormones and physical maturation. Sex is technique: it can be learned, and mastered, and perfected. And perhaps p*rnography can assist you in mastering the technique.

But certain facts about human sexuality still puzzle the experts. While it resembles animal sexuality in some ways, it also expresses fundamental differences. Human beings possess disproportionate sexual equipment: among mammals, only human females develop enlarged breasts before their first pregnancy, and among primates the human male has the largest penis. In contrast to virtually all other animals, human beings engage in sex as a year-round option rather than limiting intercourse to the time of estrus. Behaviorists puzzle over these anomalies. What evolutionary advantage do they offer?

Perhaps the answer does not lie in “evolutionary advantage” at all. Perhaps it lies in the nature of human sexuality as an expression of relationship rather than as an act of instinct for the purpose of reproduction.

The most telling difference between human and animal sexuality is this: all other animals perform sexual acts in the open, without embarrassment. Only human beings see any advantage to privacy. “Man is the only animal that blushes, or needs to,” said Mark Twain. For us, sex is different. It has an aura of mystery about it, and instinctively we want to keep it separate, to experience it in private. We treat it as we treat religion, with an aura of apartness, or “holiness.”

As free creatures, human beings can, of course, rebel against these natural tendencies that have characterized all human societies. We can treat sex as an animal function, separating out the physical act from any aspect of relationship. We can tear down all the fences that societies have traditionally erected to protect the mystery surrounding sexuality. That, in fact, is precisely what p*rnography does. And it does so at our peril.

A few years ago in major cities like San Francisco, you could find certain establishments that catered to the sexual interests of gay men. Some of these reduced sex to its most base nature. A man could enter a stall and insert his genitals through an opening in the wall at crotch level. He could thus have a sex act performed on him without ever seeing his sexual partner. Such parlors offered efficient and anonymous sex, free from the trammels of relationship. In 1970, at the height of the gay sexual revolution, Kinsey Institute researchers found that 40 percent of white male hom*osexuals in San Francisco had had at least 500 sexual partners and 28 percent reported over 1,000 partners. (The hysteria over aids has greatly reduced those statistics, although now “safe sex” is being touted as a way to enjoy such pleasures without the risk of infection.)

What does all this frenetic sexual activity prove? It demonstrates, of course, the enormous power of the sexual drive in human beings, who are capable of indulgence at a rate without precedent in the animal kingdom. And it also shows that sex can be reduced to an utterly anonymous act, disconnected from relationship. The San Francisco statistics make that point most dramatically, but our society offers many other, more subtle reminders. “What’s love got to do with it?” Tina Turner bellows into a microphone. Surely you can have great sex without the complications of love.

As I look back over the lessons I have learned, this seems the most important. Lust, and its expression in p*rnography, led me away from relationship toward raw desire. It enticed me with the promise of relationship: Cheryl Tiegs and Madonna and the monthly Playmates would remove their clothes and smile at me from the pages of magazines. But the photos lied. I was developing a relationship with ink dots printed on paper, not with real human beings.

Gradually, at a deep level, I was learning to view sex as mere technique, an exercise like gourmet dining. I was forgetting the crucial distinction between gourmet dining and gourmet sex: I have no human relationship with the food I eat, but I must have some sort of relationship with a sexual partner. p*rnography attempts to abolish that distinction.

The magazines, especially the soft p*rno magazines, convey the message that sex is merely a physical act, a matter of technique. Television soap operas, in their own way, express much the same thing: only 6 percent of the sex depicted on them occurs between a husband and wife. Through them, we learn that we can disconnect the sex act from normal social mores.

And yet society can never sever the connections completely. Inconsistencies continue to surface. Consider two examples:

— Every society on earth acknowledges incest taboos. The United States, if anything, has recently become even more sensitive to incest and sexual abuse of children. But why? If sex is merely a physical act, a matter of technique, what difference should it make if parent and child have sex together, or brother and sister? The taboo against incest shows that human relationships are a part of sex at its most basic level.

— Movies very often depict an affair that begins “just on a physical basis.” But rarely can the characters continue the affair on that basis. It grows, dominating the characters’ emotions and gradually undermining their marriages. The old cycle of cognitive dissonance sets in, and what began as a physical affair soon blossoms into a full-fledged relationship. Linda Wolfe, a feminist author, wrote a book called Playing Around: Women and Extramarital Sex, in which she expressed amazement that so many physical affairs begun “to preserve a marriage by giving me a sexual outlet” ended up destroying that marriage.

I have come to realize that the greatest danger of p*rnography lies in its false depiction of sexuality. It focuses exclusively on physical appearance and technique, without recognizing sex as an expression of relationship between two human beings. Because p*rnography begins with a false premise, the more I follow where it leads, the less able I will be to find a well-integrated, healthy experience of sexuality.

Gay men in San Francisco with 1,000 partners may be light years beyond me in sexual technique and proficiency. But I doubt whether they have found a high level of mature sexual satisfaction. They have addressed the “animal” aspect of their sexuality, but at the expense of developing relationships. We are more than animals: that is the basic Christian contribution to sexuality. (And, in fact, as the anomalies of human sexuality show — disproportionate sexual organ size, the need for privacy, the constant availability — in sexuality we may be least like other animals.) Whatever leads me to emphasize exclusively the “animal” side of my sexuality will likely lead toward confusion and dissatisfaction.

I have learned that my addiction to lust probably expressed other human needs. What was I searching for in the p*rno literature and movies? The image of the perfect female breast? More likely, I was searching for intimacy, or love, or acceptance, or reinforcement of an insecure male ego, or maybe even a thirst for transcendence. I was searching for something that could never be satisfied by two-dimensional photos printed on slick magazine paper. And not until I recognized that could I begin to turn toward a more appropriate sexual identity.

In my search, I “de-mystified” sexuality. I made the female body as common as a daily newspaper, rather than as rare as the one woman I had chosen to spend my life with. I destroyed the fences around sexuality, chasing away any remnants of “holiness.” Nudity became not the final mutual achievement in a progression toward intimacy, but the very first step. These are the results of my choices toward indulgence. From all of them, I am still trying to recover.

The Temptation of Repression

Some people writing in response to my original Leadership article could not identify with my struggle at all. They offered me stern advice, mostly consisting of admonishments from the Bible.

Wrote one pastor: “Nowhere does the Bible say to pray for victory over lust. It does say to flee immorality (1 Cor. 6:18). It does say to saturate our minds with Scripture (Ps. 119:9, 11). It does say to make a covenant with our eyes so that we do not gaze on a virgin (Job 31:1). It does say to take every thought captive to Christ (2 Cor. 10:3-5).”

Several people also cited the apostle Paul’s statement about the perversions of Ephesus, “It is disgraceful even to speak of the things which are done by them in secret.”

Reading so many of these letters in one sitting, I had to question my own experience. In my struggles with lust, was I making complex something that should have been simple? I had written page after page about “the war within” and the forces that pulled me toward lust. The letter writers seemed to think the solution to lust was the same as the solution to the drug problem in America: Just Say No!

But then I read the letters of people who had felt every moment of my struggle. These, among them godly men and women, had succumbed to temptation. A firm resolution to say no did not seem enough.

What is the difference between “fleeing immorality” and simple repression? By automatically turning away from any impulse toward sexual desire, will I dam up a reservoir of repression that will one day overflow? I don’t know, but I do believe that we who learn to practice repression at an early age may be woefully unprepared to face real temptation.

I think of the classical distinction between virtue and innocence: virtue, unlike innocence, has successfully passed a point of temptation. Perhaps a person who grows up in a Christian subculture, attends Christian schools, watches Christian television, reads Christian books, and listens to Christian music can survive these days in something like a state of innocence. But there is a danger also: a person reared in such a hothouse environment may wilt once he or she steps into the broader society.

I grew up in a sheltered Christian background, where I learned to rely on simple, black-and-white, just-say-no repression as the best defense against all forms of temptation. But that defense failed me in the matter of lust. I was utterly unprepared for the force, the almost magical force, of human sexuality.

Since those days of innocence, I have read thinkers like Wilhelm Reich, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Sigmund Freud, each of whom explains almost all human behavior on the basis of the sexual instinct. I do not agree with them, but they do underscore the enormous power of human sexuality.

“I feel as if I have escaped from the hands of a mad and furious master,” said Sophocles when old age finally quelled his sexual drive. Sex cannot be reduced to neat, rational formulas and explained away. And I wonder whether any degree of repression can withstand its force. Will any amount of repression ever prepare us for virtue?

Yet I must confess that in the past five years, I have often used pure repression as a response to temptation. Once the back of my “addiction” to lust had been broken, I was able to repress temptations in that direction. But just saying no became possible only after I had dealt with the nature of the lust impulse.

Different people develop different ways of controlling their sexual impulses. I recently read of the French Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain, who together with his wife took a vow of celibacy. Both in their early thirties and having been married ten years, they kept the vow the rest of their lives. Maritain revealed his secret only after Raissa’s death: “We decided to renounce a thing which marriage fulfills, a deep need of the human being — both of body and spirit.… I do not say that any such decision was easy to take.… It implied no scorn for nature but a desire to follow at any price at least one of the counsels of the perfect life.” Maritain also reported that “one of the great graces of our life was that … our mutual love was infinitely increased.” I stand in awe before such a decision, even as I choose another way for myself. But whatever you think about the Maritains’ choice, it hardly seems like repression. They made the choice in full awareness of their sexuality, in full commitment to their relationship. It sounds more like virtue than like innocence.

I ultimately came to reject repression as the best response to my sexuality for the same reason that I rejected indulgence: it fails to satisfy the underlying human needs. Indulgence meets temporary needs but disconnects them from the underlying needs of intimacy. Similarly, repression may give me an escape from an immediate temptation toward lust, but it will not satisfy the state that made me susceptible to lust in the first place.

Reconnecting the Sexual Self

The only ultimate solution for my sexual needs, I am convinced, will involve finding a balanced and mature way of expressing the full range of my sexuality within my marriage. I experienced sex in its “disconnected” form, as a voyeur of other people’s bodies, apart from a relationship. My healing process will surely involve reconnecting that sexual power and energy with the growth toward intimacy it was designed to accompany.

G. K. Chesterton once likened this world to the desert island site of a shipwreck. A sailor awakes from a deep sleep and discovers treasure strewn about, relics from a civilization he can barely remember. One by one he picks up the relics — gold coins, a compass, fine clothing — and tries to discern their meaning. According to Chesterton, fallen humanity is in such a state. Good things on earth still bear traces of their original purpose, but each is also subject to misinterpretation or abuse because of fallen, “amnesiac” human nature.

Evil is a kind of subverted echo of goodness and spirituality. Power, a wonderful human gift, can be used for great good or can through violence be used to dominate others. Wealth may lead to charity or to exploitation; delicious food may inspire gratitude or gluttony.

Sexual desire, one of the most powerful “relics” we find on this earth, invites obsession. When we experience sexual desires, it seems only right to follow where they lead. As the modern song puts it, “It can’t be wrong when it feels so right.”

John J. McNeill, the Jesuit psychotherapist who was expelled from his order for his teachings in his ministry to gay people, wrote, “I was convinced that what is bad psychologically has to be bad theologically and that, conversely, whatever is good theologically is certainly good psychologically.” McNeill then concluded, “Every human being has a God-given right to sexual love and intimacy.”

McNeill’s philosophy sounds very appealing. Who could argue against our psychological good corresponding to our theological good? His philosophy has only one basic problem: If I am the one determining my psychological good, there will be no end to my rationalization. A bulimic teenager may, for example, determine that vomiting will make her feel better psychologically, and thus starve herself to death. An alcoholic may determine that one more pint of Scotch would provide oh so much psychological relief.

The problem is that we are the problem. The good things on earth — food, drink, sex, recognition, power, wealth — are not spoiled; we are. They are relics of Eden. But our amnesia affects our very ability to determine their proper use.

Christians, of course, believe that we have a message from the one who designed the relics, the ship, and the sailor. That message teaches us that sex is tied to relationship, and desire finds its best and most satisfying fulfillment within marriage. It’s a message I do not always like, and one I have often rebelled against. But I am convinced it is true. And thus the only hope for me to find balance and maturity in my sex life is to pray and work toward a healthy marriage relationship, which includes sex.

The authors of the best-selling book Habits of the Heart reported that, of all the people they interviewed, only evangelical Christians were able to articulate a reason for continuing to believe in marriage. We have been given a message from God that connects and gives meaning to such things as physical desire, gender differences, reproduction, love, and mutual sacrifice.

I now see the challenge before me as a process of reconnecting what, during my addiction to lust, I had so tragically separated. Can my physical desire for my wife develop along with my desire for union with her emotionally, and even spiritually? Can our experience of union, interpenetration, and shared pleasure convey the very deep spiritual — more, sacramental — significance that lies at the heart of a Christian view of marriage?

I would like to conclude with a glowing profile of how that has been accomplished in my marriage. I cannot, not yet. My wife and I are both committed to that goal, and we both seek it. We will continue to seek it even as we recover from the distrust and distance that entered our lives during my addiction to lust.

Easy Lie or Hard Truth

I tremble to say this in an age when anyone who focuses on the differences between the sexes is held up to ridicule, but I am convinced that the experience of lust is one in which gender differences stand out strongest. The same Kinsey Institute survey that discovered almost half the male hom*osexuals in San Francisco had more than 500 partners also revealed that more than half the gay white women surveyed had had less than ten sexual partners. Most of those women rarely had casual sex and tended toward monogamy with one gay partner.

The striking difference in statistics might shed light on this whole issue of lust. Wives wrote to me confessing that my article had touched on an area of great conflict in their marriages. When their husbands had admitted some acquaintance with p*rnography, the wives found that disgusting and perverted.

I would not attempt a theory on why sexual aggression and lust seem more of a danger to men than to women. But the picture comes clear if you simply compare the number of p*rno magazines directed toward men with those directed toward women. Or, simply stand outside an adult movie theater and count the number of men and women who enter. The compulsive thirst for sexuality that leads to the voyeurism seems to fall more within the male domain. It contains within it an element of sexual aggression that seems foreign to most women.

What does a man want in sex? What need was being met in the days when I would fawn over photos of women I would never meet? What lay behind the appeal? Pastors’ wives wrote to ask me the question, and in turn I have asked it of myself.

Here is the answer that seems closest to me. In sex, I want to feel welcome. I want to feel accepted, not rejected. In some primal sense, I want to feel like a conquering king, like a warrior (and I know how out of fashion those images are in this liberated age).

Yet, ironically, sex combines aggression and insecurity in a precarious balance. I think most women would be surprised to learn how intimidating, even terrifying, sex is for many men. p*rnography lowers the terror. It’s an easy form of arousal. And the key to the arousal is the illusion of welcomeness. Miss October arches her back and spreads her legs. Beautiful women from around the globe smile at me, beckon me to enjoy them.

Real life is never so easy. Sex comes, for most of us, after months or years of courtship. There is romance, yes, but there is also conflict, boredom, and incompatibility. The woman I desire is busy asserting herself, seeking her identity, fending off a culture that tends to treat her like a sex object. She has kids around the house, a career to juggle with her other chores, and financial hassles. Unlike Miss October, she doesn’t spend all day preparing herself to look appealing and available.

So I am left with an easy lie or a hard truth. The easy lie is the illusion of p*rnography. It offers its own rewards, and I would be dishonest if I said its appeal eventually vanishes. It doesn’t. I miss the thrill that lust used to provide me, just as a recovered drug addict misses the highs he once experienced. How can sex in marriage, complicated by real-life commitments, intricacies of compatibility, and the inconveniences of children, possibly compete with the illusory thrills of Playboy women?

But there is a hard truth suggested by Chesterton’s analogy of the shipwreck. Why are we here? Are we on earth primarily to experience pleasure, to have fun? If so, Christianity, with its offer of a cross and sacrificial love and concern for the weak and the poor, seems pretty thin. If we are here for no real reason, why go through all the bother of trying to connect glandular desire with lofty goals like intimacy and marriage?

Or are we here on a mission? Are we indeed creatures who will best find fulfillment by living up to the demands of the Creator? If the latter, then the thrills offered by the easy lie of p*rnography will not permanently satisfy. Indulgence is not an option for me, and neither is repression. I have only one option: to seek God with all my heart, so that God may continue his process of healing and bring me to sexual fulfillment — at home, with my wife, where I belong.

Copyright © 1989 Christianity Today

Driving through Wisconsin on vacation, a Leadership staff member passed a huge sign in the middle of the bucolic countryside. “Naughty Things for Nice People,” it proclaimed, and as if to prove it, a gigantic cuddly bear peered out from beside the words “Adult Novelties.”

“What’s that mean, Dad?” came the question from the 10-year-old boy in the back of the station wagon. “Yeah,” piped up the siblings, “what’s that all about, Dad?”

Such questions abound these days, as media penetrate our homes and station wagons with not just sleazy sex but carefully packaged titillations. One report has it that a recent convention of youth pastors prompted the most rentals of adult movies in the hotel’s history. More than 80 percent of all customers signing up for cable TV opt for the erotic films. The availability—the near-ubiquity—of so much sexual enticement, the constant barrage of innuendoes, and the nonstop polemic for indulgence inevitably attracts.

Many rationales tempt the mind of the Christian leader: “I have to know what’s going on. Voyeurism is better than adultery. I need moderation—total deprivation isn’t necessary.”

Admittedly, there are no easy answers. We cannot shut off either our brains or our glands. But consider the following chapters by individuals in full-time ministry. The chapters are blunt. But we felt it important to be just this blunt and realistic. Sexual temptations in many forms have always lured Christians, but today’s opportunities and climate make this article especially relevant to all of us.

Chapter 1, “The War Within,” is written by a Christian leader who prefers to remain anonymous so he can speak more personally and with more candor. This chapter was originally published as an article in Leadership in 1982.

Chapter 2, “Perils of the Professionally Holy,” offers some thoughts about why those in ministry are particularly susceptible to sins of the body. It is written by Bill D. Hallsted, who ministers at the Truman (Minnesota) Church of Christ.

Chapter 3, “The War Within Continues,” is written by the same anonymous writer who penned chapter 1, but was written five years later. It updates the continuing but hopeful battle against lust.

Chapter 4, “After the Affair,” is the story of a pastor’s wife whose husband confessed to a series of adulterous relationships. Heather Bryce is a pen name for this woman, who continues to live with her husband in the midwestern United States.

Marriage does not remedy lust. If anything, it complicates the problem by introducing a new set of difficulties.
Name Withheld

Lust is the ape that gibbers in our loins. Tame him as we will by day, he rages all the wilder in our dreams by night. Just when we think we’re safe from him, he raises up his ugly head and smirks, and there’s no river in the world flows cold and strong enough to strike him down. Almighty God, why dost thou deck men out with such a loathsome toy?— Frederick Buechner Godric

I am writing this anonymously because I am embarrassed. Embarrassed for my wife and children, yes, but embarrassed most for myself. I will tell of my personal battle with lust, and if I believed I were the only one who fought in that war, I would not waste emotional energy dredging up stained and painful memories. But I believe my experience is not uncommon, is perhaps even typical of pastors, writers, and conference speakers. No one talks about it. No one writes about it. But it’s there, like an unacknowledged cancer that metastasizes best when no one goes for x-rays or feels for lumps.

I know I am not alone, because the few times I have opened up and shared my struggles with Christian friends, they have replied with Doppelgänger stories of exactly the same stages of awakening, obsession, possession. Years from now, when socio-historians sift through the documents describing our times, they will undoubtedly come up with elegant explanations of why men who grew up in church homes were oversexed and vulnerable to attacks of lust and obsession, and why women who grew up in those same environments emerged uptight and somewhat disinterested in sex. But I leave that to the future analysts.

I remember vividly the night I first experienced lust. Real lust—not the high school and college variety. Of course as an adolescent I had drooled through Playboy, sneaked off to my uncle’s room for a heart-thumping first look at hard-core p*rnography, and done my share of grappling and fumbling with my fiancee’s clothes. I date my lust awakening, though, to the adult onslaught of mature, willful commitment to lust.

It hit on one of my first trips away from home. My job required me to travel at that time, and as I sat in a dingy motel room near the airport and flipped through the city guide of what to do in Rochester, New York, I kept coming back to one haunting photo of an exotic dancer, a former Miss Peach Bowl winner, the ad said. She looked fresh and inviting: the enchanting kind of Southern girl you see on TV commercials for fried chicken—only this one had no clothes on.

Somehow, I had survived the sixties sheltered from strippers and Woodstock-type nudity. And when I first saw the ad, I instinctively ruled her show out of bounds for me. But as I settled down to watch an inane TV show, her body kept looming before my mind with the simple question, “Why not?”

I began to think. Indeed, why not? To be an effective Christian, I had to experience all of life, right? Didn’t Jesus himself hang around with prostitutes and sinners? I could go simply as an observer, in the world but not of the world. Rationalizations leaped up like flying buttresses to support my desires, and within ten minutes I was bundled in the back seat of a taxi headed toward the seamy side of Rochester.

I got the driver to let me off a few blocks away, just for safety’s sake, and I kept glancing over my shoulder expecting to see someone I knew. Or perhaps God would step in, efface my desires, and change my mind about the wisdom of the act. I even asked him about that, meekly. No answer.

I walked into the bar between acts and was then faced with the new experience of ordering a drink. My forehead sweating, I scanned my memory of Westerns for an appropriate drink to order. Finally I decided on whiskey. I tried to make it sound casual, but the waitress flummoxed me by asking another question.

“How do you want it?”

How do I want it? What did she mean? What could I say? It seemed everyone in the bar was staring at me.

“A double,” I stammered.

Sensing my naivete’, she rolled her eyes slightly and asked, “Is on the rocks okay?”

Bolstered by my first fiery sips of whiskey, which I tried to stretch out so as not to have to order another, I sat with my eyes glued to the stage.

Miss Peach Bowl was everything the ad had promised. With a figure worthy of a Wonder Woman costume, she danced superbly and was something of an acrobat. She started fully clothed and teased us with slow removals of each sequined article of clothing. Toward the end, when she wore only a G-string, whooping men near the stage bade her lean over and stuffed folded bills under the tiny swatch of cloth. She grinned invitingly. I stared in disbelief. In one final strobe-lit routine she cartwheeled nude across the stage.

The flush of excitement created by my first whiskey, drunk too fast in spite of myself, the eye-popping spectacle of this gorgeous woman baring all and jiggling it in front of me, and the boisterous spirit of the all-male audience combined to overpower me. I walked out of the bar two hours later feeling strangely warmed, intensely excited, and surprised that nothing had actually happened to me. I suppose it’s the same feeling that washes in after a big event like marriage, or graduation, or first intercourse for that matter. Afterward you realize that although in one sense everything has changed, in another sense nothing has changed. You are the same person.

Lust shares with sins like envy and pride the distinction of being invisible, slippery, hard to pin down. Was what happened that night a sin? I denied it to myself on the way home. To really rate as lust, I told myself, you must look on a woman so as to desire sexual intercourse with her. Isn’t that what Jesus said? Whatever happened that night, I certainly couldn’t recall desiring intercourse with Miss Peach Bowl. It was more private and distant than that. What happened, happened quickly, was gone, and left no scars. Or so I thought at the time.

Ten years have passed since that awakening in wintry Rochester, ten years spent never far from the presence of lust. The guilt caught up with me, and back in my motel room that very evening, I was already praying slobbery prayers for forgiveness. For a while that guilt kept me out of live shows and limited my voyeurism to magazines and movies, but only for a while. For ten years I have fought unremitting guerrilla warfare.

Being the reflective sort, I have often pondered the phenomenon of lust. It is unlike anything else in my experience. Most thrills—scary roller coasters, trips in airplanes, visits to waterfalls—lost a certain edge of excitement once I had experienced them and figured them out. I enjoy them and will duplicate the experiences if given the chance, but after a few tries, they no longer hold such a powerful gravitational attraction.

Sex is utterly different. There is only so much to “figure out.” Every person who endures high school biology, let alone a snigg*ring sex education class, knows the basic shapes, colors, and sizes of the sexual organs. Anyone who has been to an art museum knows about women’s breasts. Anyone who has hauled down a gynecology book in a public library knows about genitalia. Somehow, no amount of knowledge reduces the appeal—the forces may, in fact, work concordantly. What strange power is it that allows a male gynecologist to clinically examine female sexual organs all day long—there is nothing left for him to “learn”—and yet return home and find himself quickly aroused by his wife’s peekaboo blouse?

“An ape that gibbers in my loins,” wrote novelist Frederick Buechner about lust, and no experience comes with such a feral force. And yet, maybe by labeling it an “animal drive” we have missed the main point of lust. No animal I have heard of spends its life fixating on sex. Females in most species invite attention only a few times a year or less; the rest of the time males obediently plod through the mundane routine of phylogeny, apparently never giving sex another thought.

Humans are different. We have the freedom to center our lives inordinately in this one drive, without the harmony enforced by nature. Our females are biologically receptive the vast majority of the time, and no instinct inhibits us from focusing all our thoughts, behavior, and energy on sex.

I have tried to analyze lust, to fractionate it down into its particulars. I take a Playboy centerfold and study it with a magnifying glass. It consists only of dots—dots of four primary colors laid down by a printing press in a certain order. There is no magic on that page, only stipples of ink, which under magnification, show flaws and blurs. But there is magic on that page. I can stare at it, burn the image in my mind, fondle it mentally for hours, even days. Blood steams up when I gaze on it.

Early Marxists, heady with revolution, added sex to their list of human foibles needing alteration. Lenin pronounced his famous Glass of Water Theory, legislating that the sexual act was of no more consequence than the quenching of thirst by a glass of water. Surely bourgeois morality would topple along with bourgeois banks and industries and religions. But in a few years, Lenin had to abjure the Glass of Water Theory. By all reductionist logic, sex was like a glass of water, but sex proved immune to reductionist logic. It resisted being made of no consequence. Lenin, a historian, should have known better. Kings had renounced their thrones, saints their God, and spouses their lifetime partners because of this strange demon of lust. Dialectical materialism hardly stood a chance.

Books often question God’s wisdom or goodness in allowing so much pain and sorrow in the world, and yet I have read none that question his goodness and wisdom in allowing so much sex and lust in the world. But I think the two may be parallel questions. Whether through creation or marred creation or whatever (we can’t get into that here), we ended up with sex drives that virtually impel us to break rules God laid down. Males reach their sexual peak at age 18, scientists tell us. In our culture, you can’t even legally marry before then, so when a male marries, if he has remained chaste, he has already forfeited his time of greatest sexual prowess. Mark Twain railed against God for parceling out to each human a source of universal joy and pleasure, at its peak in teenage years, then forbidding it until marriage and restricting it to one partner. He has a point.

Couldn’t our hormones or chromosomes have been arranged so that mates would more easily find sexual satisfaction with just one partner? Why weren’t we made more like the animals, who, except for specified periods, go through their daily routine (nude to a beast) with hardly a thought of sex. I could handle lust better if I knew it would only strike me in October or May. It’s the not knowing, the ceaseless vulnerability, that drives me crazy.

Lust, I read somewhere, is the craving for salt by a man who is dying of thirst. There’s a touch of perversion there, isn’t there? Why were we not made with merely a craving for water, thus removing salt’s attraction from every newsstand, television show, and movie?

I know what you are thinking. You are protesting that God never makes me lust, that I choose it, that he probably allows it as an opportunity for me to exercise my virtue. Yes, yes, I understand all that. But some of you know firsthand, as I do, that those pious platitudes, albeit perfectly correct, have almost no relevance to what happens biologically inside me when I visit a local beach or pick up any of a hundred magazines.

Some of you know what it is like to walk with your eyes at breast level, to flip eagerly through every new issue of Time searching for a rare sexy picture, to yearn for chains on the outside of your motel room to keep you in—unless it comes with that most perverse of all modern inventions, the in-room p*rno movie. And you also know what it is like to wallow in the guilt of that obsession, and to cry and pray with whatever faith you can muster, to plead with God to release you, to mutate you, to castrate you like Origen—whatever it takes to deliver you. And even as you pray, luscious, bewitching images crowd into your mind.

You also know what it is like to preach on Sunday, in a strange city, to preach even on a topic like grace or obedience or the will of God, or the decline of our civilization, with the awful and wonderful memories of last night’s lust still more real to you at that moment than the sea of expectant faces spread out before you. You know the self-hatred that comes with that intolerable dissonance. And you muddle through the sermon swearing never to let it get to you like that again, until after the service a shapely woman comes beaming and squeezes your hand and whispers praise to you, and all resolve melts, and as she explains how blessed she was by your message, you are mentally undressing her.

The night in Rochester was my first experience with adult lust, but by no means my last. Strip joints are too handy these days. The drug store down the street sells Hustler, High Society, Jugs, anything you want. I have been to maybe fifteen truly p*rnographic movies, including the few classics like Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door. They scare me, perhaps because it seems so deliberate and volitional to stand in line (always glancing around furtively), to pay out money, and to sit in the dark for an hour or two. The crowd is unlike any other crowd I mix with—they remind me I don’t belong. And the movies, technically, aesthetically, and even erotically, are vapid and boring. But still, when a local paper advertises one more Emmanuelle sequel, I drool.

I learned quickly that lust, like physical sex, points in only one direction. You cannot go back to a lower level and stay satisfied. Always you want more. A magazine excites, a movie thrills, a live show really makes the blood run. I never got as far as body tattooing, personal photograph sessions, and massages, let alone outright prostitution, but I experienced enough of the unquenchable nature of sex to frighten me for good. Lust does not satisfy; it stirs up. I no longer wonder how deviants can get into child molesting, masochism, and other abnormalities. Although such acts are incomprehensible to me, I remember well that where I ended up was also incomprehensible to me when I started.

A cousin of mine subscribes to at least fifteen of the raunchiest magazines I have ever seen. Books I have peeked at for just a few seconds in airport newsstands litter his house. He has told me that, even surrounded by vivid depictions of every sex act, every size and shape of woman he can imagine, he still wants more. He still devours the new issues. He and his wife are experimenting with orgies now, and numerous other variations I won’t mention. It is not enough. The thrill will fade before long, and he will want more.

Psychologists use the term obsession to label what I have been describing, and they may say that I have more innate obsession than the average male. They would trace its genesis back to my repressive upbringing, and they are undoubtedly right. That is why I am writing to others of you in the Christian world. If you have not fought such obsession yourself, every Sunday when you step to the pulpit you speak to many who have, although you could hardly read it in their blank, freshly scrubbed faces. Lust is indeed an invisible sin.

At times the obsession has felt to me more like possession. I remember one time especially that scared me. I was in Washington, D.C., one of the places in the United States where any kind of lust is easily attainable. At three o’clock in the afternoon, after touring the cherry blossoms, I sauntered into a dark bar that advertised nude dancing. I fended off the girls who came to my table and asked for drinks, and instead directed my attention to the dancers. There were only two, and maybe five customers at most. One black girl with an unspectacular figure weaved over to the part of the stage nearest my table.

This was somewhat different than the other strip shows I had seen. There was no teasing or “visual foreplay.” She was already naked, unashamedly so, and she wiggled maybe a foot from my head. She stared right into my eyes. This was so close, so intimate, that it seemed for a terrifying moment to be nearer a relationship than a performance. What I felt could only be called possession.

I found myself—it seemed as though I had not made the decision, that someone else’s hand inside mine was doing it—fumbling in my pocket, pulling out bills and stuffing them in a garter belt high up on her thigh. In appreciation she maneuvered herself to grant an even better view. She had no secrets.

I staggered out of that bar. I felt I had crossed a line and could never return to innocence. That weekend I had important business engagements, but throughout them indelible images of that anonymous girl filled my mind. I yearned to flee and go home to my wife, to demonstrate to her my fear so that she could shelter me and mother me and keep me from following where all this was leading.

Just a few years before, I had sat with a distant, reproachful view and watched men lose control and act like country-fair churls as they stuffed bills down the G-string of Miss Peach Bowl. I would never stoop to that—I was smugly confident in Rochester. After all, I was intelligent, happily married, sophisticated—a committed Christian known by friends for my self-control. It would never happen. But it did.

When I went home, I did not tell my wife. How could I? The story was too long, and she, who had hardly ever known lust and had never been unfaithful to me, would not comprehend it. It would likely rupture my marriage, and then I would be cast loose on a sea I could not navigate.

I made a vow then—one more in a series. I vowed I would only look at Playboy and other “respectable” erotic magazines. No more raunchiness. I had certain rationalizations about lust, and pained realism about my inability to stay pure. I simply needed some safe boundaries, I decided. Here are some of my rationalizations that supported my conclusion to contain, not destroy, my lust:

• Nudity is art. Go to any museum in the world, and you will see nudity openly displayed. The human form is beautiful, and it would be puritanical to cut off appreciation for it. Playboy is photographed well, with an aesthetic, not prurient tone.

• Playboy and its kin have great articles. There’s the Jimmy Carter interview, for example, and Penthouse’s conversation with Jerry Falwell. I must keep up with such material.

• Some stimulation will help my sex life. I have a problem approaching my wife and communicating my desire for sex to her. I need a sort of boost, a stimulant to push me to declare my intentions.

• Other people do far worse. I know many Christian leaders who still do all the things I toyed with, and worse. For that matter, look at Bible characters—as randy a bunch as you’ll ever meet. There’s probably no such thing as a pure person anyway; everybody has some outlet.

• What is lust anyhow, I kept asking myself. Is fantasizing wrong in itself? If so, then erotic dreams would count as sin, and how could I be responsible for my dreams? I reminded myself of the definition of lust I had started with long before: desiring intercourse with a specific sexual partner. I experienced a general sexual heightening, a raising of the voltage, not a specific desire for the act of intercourse.

Some, perhaps all, of these rationalizations contain some truth. (Do they sound familiar?) I used them as an overlay of reason and common sense to help calm the cognitive dissonance that tormented me. Yet I knew inside that the lust I experienced was not subject to reason and common sense. To my dismay, on several occasions I had already felt it burst out of containment and take on a sinister power. At other times, I could analyze lust and put it in perspective, but at the moment when it was occurring I knew I would not stop and analyze. I would let it take its course. Secretly, I began to wonder what that course would be.

Don’t let me give the wrong impression. My entire life did not revolve around lust. I would go days without fixating on sex, and sometimes a month or two without seeking out a p*rnographic magazine or movie. And many, many times I would cry out to God, imploring him to take away the desire. Why were my prayers not answered? Why did God continue to curse me with freedom, even when that freedom led me away from him?

I read numerous articles and books on temptation but found little help. If you boiled down all the verbiage and the ten-point lists of practical advice for coping with temptation, basically all they said was “Just stop doing it.” That was easy to say. I knew some of those authors, and knew that they too struggled and failed, as I did. In fact, I too had preached many a sermon on handling temptation, but look at me. Practical “how-to” articles proved hopelessly inadequate, as if they said “Stop being hungry” to a starving man. Intellectually I might agree with their theology and their advice, but my glands would still secrete. What insight can change glands?

“Jesus was tempted in all points as you are,” some of the articles and books would say, as if that would cheer me up. It did not help. In the first place, none of the authors could possibly describe how Jesus experienced sexual temptation, because he never talked about it, and no one else has ever been perfect. Such well-meaning comments reminded me of telling a ghetto dweller in East Bronx, “Oh, I used to be poor, too. I know how you feel.” Try telling that to a poor person, and prepare to duck.

I felt a similar reaction when I read accounts of people who had overcome lust. Usually, they wrote or talked in a condescending, unctuous tone. Or, like Jesus, they seemed too far removed from my own spiritual quagmire to comfort me. Augustine described his condition twelve years after conversion from his lusty state. In that advanced spiritual place he prayed to overcome these besetting sins: the temptation to enjoy his food instead of taking it as a necessary medicine “until the day when Thou wilt destroy both the belly and the meat”; the attraction of sweet scents; the pleasure of the ear provided by church music lest he be “more moved by the singing than by the thing that is sung”; the lure of the eye to “diverse forms of beauty, of brilliant and pleasing colors”; and last, the temptation of “knowing for knowing’s sake.” Sorry, Augustine, I respect you, but prayers like that led to the climate of repression and body-hatred that I have been vainly trying to escape all my life.

I got a perverse pleasure out of knowing that this same Augustine a few years earlier had prayed, “Give me chastity, but not yet.” He delayed purity for a while also, to sample more delights than I would likely get around to. Why is it that I scoffed at accounts of saints who overcame temptation but loved hearing about those who gave in? There must be a name for that sin, too.

Most of this time I hated sex. I could not imagine it existing in any sort of balance in my life. Of course I knew its pleasure—that was the gravitational attraction—but those short bursts of pleasure were horribly counterbalanced by days of guilt and anguish. I could not reconcile my technicolor fantasy life with my more mundane experience of sex in marriage. I began to view sex as another of God’s mistakes, like tornadoes and earthquakes. In the final analysis, it only caused misery. Without it, I could conceive of becoming pure and godly and all those other things the Bible exhorted me toward. With sex, any spiritual development seemed hopelessly unattainable. Maybe Origen had the right idea after all.

It is true there is difficulty in entering into godliness. But this difficulty does not arise from the religion which begins in us, but only from the irreligion which is still there. If our senses were not opposed to penitence, and if our corruption were not opposed to the purity of God, there would be nothing in this painful to us. We suffer only in proportion as the vice which is natural to us resists supernatural grace. Our heart feels torn asunder between these opposed efforts. But it would be very unfair to impute this violence to God, who is drawing us on, instead of to the world, which is holding us back. It is as a child, which a mother tears from the arms of robbers, in the pain it suffers, should love the loving and legitimate violence of her who procures its liberty, and detest only the impetuous and tyrannical violence of those who detain it unjustly. The most cruel war which God can make with men in this life is to leave them without that war which He came to bring. “I came to send war,” He says, “and to teach them of this war. I came to bring fire and the sword.” Before Him the world lived in this false peace.
— Blaise Pascal Pensees

This chapter is divided into two parts. The first part, which you have just read, recounts the downward spiral of temptation, yielding, self-hatred, and despair. If I had read this article several years ago, I would have gleefully affirmed everything. Then, when I got to the second part, which describes a process of healing, I would have turned cynical and sour, rejecting what follows. Such is the nature of self-deception.

I have described my slide in some detail not to feed any prurient interests in the reader and certainly not to nourish your own despair if you too are floundering—God forbid. I tell my struggles because they are real, but also to demonstrate that hope exists, that God is alive, and his grace can interrupt the terrible cycle of lust and despair. My primary message is one of hope, although until healing did occur, I had no faith that it ever would.

Scores, maybe hundreds of times I had prayed for deliverance, with no response. The theologians would find some fault in my prayers, or in the faith with which I prayed them. But can any person assume the awful right to judge the prayers of another who writhes in mental torment and an agony of helpless unspirituality? I would certainly never assume the right, not after a decade-long war against lust.

I have not mentioned the effect of lust on my marriage. It did not destroy my marriage, did not push me out to find more sexual excitation in an adulterous affair, or with prostitutes, did not even impel me to place unrealistic demands on my wife’s sexual performance. The effect was far more subtle. Mainly, I think, it cumulatively caused me to devalue my wife as a sexual being. The great lie promulgated by Playboy, television commercials, and racy movies is that the physical ideal of beauty is attainable and oh, so close. I stare at a Playboy centerfold. Miss October has such a warm, inviting smile. She is with me alone, in my living room. She removes her clothes, just for me, and lets me see all of her. She tells me about her favorite books and what she likes in a man. Cheryl Tiegs, in the famous Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, sweetly walks toward the camera, letting the coral blush of her breasts shine out boldly from underneath a fishnet bikini. She lets me see them—she has no inhibitions, no pudency.

The truth is, of course, that if I sat next to either Cheryl Tiegs or Miss October on an airplane, she would not give me the time of day, let alone take off her clothes for me. If I tried to strike up a conversation, she would brush me off. And yet, because I have stared at Cheryl’s breasts and gone over every inch of Miss October as well as the throng of beauties that Madison Avenue and Hollywood recruit to tantalize the masses, I start to view my own wife in that light. I expect her to have Farrah’s smile, Cheryl’s voluptuousness, Angie’s legs, Miss October’s flaming red hair and sparkling eyes. Envy and greed join hands with lust. I begin to focus on my wife’s minor flaws. I lose sight of the fact that she is a charming, warm, attractive woman and that I am fortunate to have found her.

Beyond that, lust affected my marriage in an even more subtle and pernicious way. Over time, I began to view sex schizophrenically. Sex in marriage was one thing. We performed okay, though not as often as I liked, and accompanied by typical misunderstandings. But passion, ah, that was something different. Passion I never felt in my marriage.

If anything, sex within marriage served as an overflow valve, an outlet for the passion that mounted inside me, fed by sources kept hidden from my wife. We never talked about this, yet I am sure she sensed it. I think she began to view herself as a sex object—not in the feminist sense of being the object of a husband’s selfish greed, but in the deprived sense of being only the object of my physical necessity and not of romance and passion.

Yet the sexual schizophrenia pales in comparison to the schizophrenia of my spiritual life. Can you imagine the inner rupture when I would lead a spiritual retreat for a weekend, winning sighs of admiration and tears of commitment from my devoted listeners, only to return to my room and pore over the latest copy of Oui? I could never reconcile it, but somehow I could not avoid it. If you pinned me down on what degree my succumbing to temptation was a conscious choice, I would probably search for an enigmatic response such as the one a Faulkner character gave when asked about original sin. “Well, it’s like this,” he said. “I ain’t got to, but I can’t help it.”

Paradoxically, I seemed most vulnerable to temptation when speaking or otherwise performing some spiritual service. Those who see Satan as personally manipulating all such temptation to sin would not be surprised by that observation.

Lust became the one corner of my life that God could not enter. I welcomed him into the area of personal finance, which he revolutionized as I awakened to world needs. He cleaned up many of my personal relationships. He gave stirrings of life to the devotional area and my sense of personal communion with him. But lust was sealed off, a forbidden room. How can I reconcile that statement with my earlier protestations that I often cried out for deliverance? I do not know. I felt both sensations: an overwhelming desire to be cleansed and an overwhelming desire to cling to the exotic pleasure of lust. A magnet is attracted equally to two opposite forces. No matter how small you cut a magnet or rearrange it, the two ends will still be attracted to opposite forces. One force never cancels out the other one. This must be what Paul meant in some of those strange statements in Romans 7 (a passage that gave me some comfort). But where was Romans 8 in my life?

Even when I had lust under control, when I successfully limited it to brief, orderly perusals through Playboy at the local newsstand, I still felt this sense of retaining a secret corner God could not enter. Often I would get bogged down in sermon preparation. For motivation to keep going, I would promise myself a trip to the newsstand if I could finish the sermon in an hour and a half. Can you sense the schizophrenia?

Just as I can remember graphically the precise incident in Rochester when adult lust moved in, I can remember the first flutterings of a commitment to healing. They also came on a trip out of town, when I was speaking at a spiritual-life conference. The conference was scheduled for a resort hotel in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, near my favorite part of the country. Nothing affects me like the long drive up the rocky coastline of Maine. It is an invigorating, almost religious experience. Some people find deserts affect them like that, some wheat fields, and some mountains. For me, the magnificence of creation unwinds with each curve on the road up Maine’s coast. I made plans to fly into Boston, rent a car, and spend three days cruising the coast just to refresh myself before the conference.

My mistake was spending the first night in Boston. I was then practicing a fairly rigid regiment of “controlled lust.” I hadn’t given in to any scary splurges like my Washington, D.C. encounter in some time. But sure enough, that night I found myself stalking the streets of the seedy areas looking for temptation. I did not have to look far. Like many cities, Boston offers strip shows, p*rno movies—a veritable menu of lust. I usually avoided p*rno movies because they had proved so unsatisfying. But, Boston also features live nude girls on a revolving platform that you can watch for twenty-five cents. I went in one of those booths.

The mechanics are simple. Twenty curtained booths encircle a revolving platform. Each booth has a glass window covered by a piece of plywood. When you insert a quarter, a mechanical arm somewhat like a toll gate lowers the piece of plywood and lets you see the nude girls revolving on the platform. Then, about three minutes later the toll gate goes up, and you have to drop in another quarter to continue. This is lust at its most unadorned.

The girls employed by such places are not beautiful. Imagine for yourself what kind of women would willingly settle for such employment. You lie under bright lights, revolving like a piece of roast beef at a buffet table, masturbating occasionally to keep the quarters clinking. Around you, leering, furtive stares of men appear for three minutes, then disappear, then appear again, their glasses reflecting your pale shape, none of them looking at your face.

Maybe such booths do serve a redeeming purpose for society—by exposing lust in its basest demythologized form. There is no art or beauty, no acrobatic dancing. The woman is obviously a sex object and nothing else. The men are isolated, caged voyeurs. There is no relationship, no teasing.

The girls are bored stiff: over the whir of the timing mechanism you can hear them trading talk about grocery prices or car repairs. They masturbat* as a routine for the customers, like an ape at the zoo who learns to make faces because the onlookers then laugh and point. This is what the richest, freest society in history spends its wealth and freedom on?

And yet, there I was, a respected member of that society, three days away from leading a spiritual-life retreat, dropping in quarters like a frantic long-distance caller at a pay phone.

For fifty cents you could go to a private booth, and one of the girls would entertain you personally. A glass wall still separated you from the girl, but you could, if you wished, pick up the receiver and talk to the girl. Maybe you could talk her into doing something special for you. I went into the booth, but something restrained me from picking up the telephone. I could not make that human an act—it would expose me for what I was. I merely stood, silent, and stared.

Guilt and shame washed over me in waves that night, as usual. Again I had a stark picture of how low I was groveling. Did this animal lust have any relation to the romance that had inspired the Symphonie Fantastique, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets, and the Song of Solomon? Certainly each of those works contained traces of glandular desire, but what I had experienced was devoid of all beauty. It was too naked, and shameful.

I had felt all that remorse before. What shocked me more was my trip up the coast the next two days. I followed my usual practice of staying in homey inns with big fireplaces, and of eating by the waterfront and watching the sailboats bob in the shimmering sea, of taking long solitary walks on the rocky promontories where huge waves crashed with thunder, of closing my eyes and letting salt spray splash across my face, of stopping at roadside stands for fresh lobster and crab. There was a difference this time: I felt no pleasure. None. My emotional reaction was the same as if I had been at home, yawning, reading the newspaper. All romance had drained out, desiccated.

The realization disturbed me profoundly. By all counts, those wonderful, sensuous experiences rated far higher than the cheap thrill of watching a fat, pock-marked body rotate on plywood. And yet, to my utter disbelief my mind kept roaming back to that grimy booth in Boston. Was I crazy? Would I lose every worthwhile sensation in life? Was my soul leaking away? Was I becoming possessed?

I limped through the conference, and everyone warmly applauded each talk. They were all blessed. Alone in my room at night, I did not pore over p*rnography. I pored over what had been happening inside me for ten years. I did not like it.

Exactly three days later, I spent the night with a very dear friend, a pastor of one of the largest churches in the South. I had never shared intimate details of my lust life with anyone before, but the schizophrenia was building to such a point I felt I must. He listened quietly, with compassion and great sensitivity as I recounted a few incidents, skipping over those that showed me in the worst light, and described some of my fears to him.

He sat for a long time with sad eyes after I had finished speaking. We both watched our freshly refilled cups of coffee steam, then stop steaming, then grow cold. I waited for his words of advice or comfort or healing or something. I needed a priest at that moment, someone to say, “Your sins are forgiven.”

But my friend was no priest. He did something I never expected. His lip quivered at first, the skin on his face began twitching, and finally he started sobbing—great, huge, wretched sobs such as I had seen only at funerals.

In a few moments, when he had recovered some semblance of self-control, I learned the truth. My friend was not sobbing for me; he was sobbing for himself. He began to tell me of his own expedition into lust. He had been where I was—five years before. Since that time, he had taken lust to its logical consequences. I will not dwell on sordid details, but my friend had tried it all: bondage, prostitution, bisexualism, orgies. He reached inside his vest pocket and pulled out a pad of paper showing the prescriptions he took to fight the venereal disease and anal infections he had picked up along the way. He carries the pad with him on trips, he explained, to buy the drugs in cities where he is anonymous.

I saw my friend dozens of times after that and learned every horrific detail of his hellish life. I worried about cognitive dissonance; he brooded on suicide. I read about deviance; he performed it. I winced at subtle fissures in my marriage; he was in divorce litigation.

I could not sit in judgment of this man, because he had simply ended up where my own obsession would likely take me. Jesus brought together lust and adultery, hatred and murder, in the Sermon on the Mount, not to devalue adultery and murder but rather to point to the awesome truth about hatred and lust. There is a connection.

If I had learned about my friend’s journey to debauchery in a book like this one, I doubtless would have clucked my tongue, questioned the editor’s judgment in printing it, and rejected the author as an insincere poseur in the faith. But I knew this man, I thought, as well as I knew anyone. His insights, compassion, and love were all more mature than mine. My sermons were like freshman practice runs compared to his. He was a godly man if I had ever met one, but underneath all that … my inner fear jumped uncontrollably. I sensed the power of evil.

For some weeks I lived under a cloud that combined the feelings of doom and terror. Had I crossed some invisible line so that my soul was stained forever? Would I too, like my trusted friend, march inexorably toward the systematic destruction of my body and soul? He had cried for forgiveness, and deliverance, and every other prayer he had learned in church, and yet now he had fallen into an abyss. Already lawyers were dividing up his house and possessions and children. Was there no escape for him—for me?

My wife could sense the inner tension, but in fifteen years of marriage she had learned not to force a premature explanation. I had not learned to share tension while it was occurring, only afterward, when it fit into a logical sequence, with some sort of resolution. This time, I wondered whether this particular problem would ever have such a resolution.

A month after my conversation with my friend, I began reading a brief and simple book of memoirs, What I Believe, by François Mauriac. In it, he sums up why he clung to the Roman Catholic church and Christian faith in a country (France) and an age when few of his contemporaries seriously considered orthodoxy. I had read only one novel by the Nobel prize-winning author, Viper’s Tangle, but that novel clearly showed that Mauriac fully understood the lust I had experienced, and more. A great artist, he had captured the depths of human depravity. I would not get pious answers from him.

Mauriac’s book includes one chapter on purity. He describes the power of sexuality—”the sexual act has no resemblance to any other act: its demands are frenzied and participate in infinity. It is a tidal wave”—and his struggles with it throughout a strict Catholic upbringing. He also discounts common evangelical perspectives on lust and sex. The experience of lust and immorality, he admits, is fully pleasurable and desirable; it is no good trying to pretend that sin contains distasteful seeds that inevitably grow into repulsion. Sin has its own compelling rewards. Even marriage, Christian marriage, he claims, does not remedy lust. If anything, marriage complicates the problem by introducing a new set of difficulties. Lust continues to seek the attraction of unknown creatures and the taste for adventure and chance meetings.

After brazenly denying the most common reasons I have heard against succumbing to a life filled with lust, Mauriac concludes that there is only one reason to seek purity. It is the reason Christ proposed in the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” Purity, says Mauriac, is the condition for a higher love—for a possession superior to all possessions: God himself.

Mauriac goes on to describe how most of our arguments for purity are negative arguments: Be pure, or you will feel guilty, or your marriage will fail, or you will be punished. But the Beatitudes clearly indicate a positive argument that fits neatly with the Bible’s pattern in describing sins. Sins are not a list of petty irritations drawn up for the sake of a jealous God. They are, rather, a description of the impediments to spiritual growth. We are the ones who suffer if we sin, by forfeiting the development of character and Christlikeness that would have resulted if we had not sinned.

The thought hit me like a bell rung in a dark, silent hall. So far, none of the scary, negative arguments against lust had succeeded in keeping me from it. Fear and guilt simply did not give me resolve; they added self-hatred to my problems. But here was a description of what I was missing by continuing to harbor lust: I was limiting my own intimacy with God. The love he offers is so transcendent and possessing that it requires our faculties to be purified and cleansed before we can possibly contain it. Could he, in fact, substitute another thirst and another hunger for the one I had never filled? Would Living Water somehow quench lust? That was the gamble of faith.

Perhaps Mauriac’s point seems obvious and predictable to people who respond to anguished problems with spiritual-sounding cliches. But I knew Mauriac and his life well enough to know that his observation was the culmination of a lifetime of struggle. He had come to that conclusion as the only possible justification for abstention. Perhaps, just perhaps, the discipline and commitment involved in somehow allowing God to purge out the impurities formed the sine qua non, the essential first step toward a relationship with God I had never known.

The combination of grave fear struck in me by my pastor friend’s grievous story and the glimmer of hope that a quest for purity could somehow transform the hunger I had lived with unabated for a decade prepared me to try once again to approach God in confession and in faith. I knew pain would come. Could God this time give me assurance that, in Pascal’s words, pain was the “loving and legitimate violence” necessary to procure my liberty?

I cannot tell you why a prayer that has been prayed for ten years is answered on the 1,000th request when God has met the first 999 with silence. I cannot tell you why I had to endure ten years of near-possession before being ready for deliverance. And, most sadly of all, I cannot tell you why my pastor friend has, since our conversation, gone into an unbelievable skid toward destruction. His marriage is now destroyed. He may go insane or commit suicide before this book is published. Why? I do not know.

But what I can tell you, especially those of you who have hung on every turn of my own pilgrimage because it so closely corresponds to yours, is that God did come through for me. The phrase may sound heretical, but to me, after so many years of failure, it felt as if he had suddenly decided to be there after a long absence. I prayed, hiding nothing (hide from God?), and he heard me.

There was one painful but necessary step of repentance. Repentance, says C. S. Lewis, “is not something God demands of you before He will take you back and which He could let you off if He chose; it is simply a description of what going back is like.” Going back for me had to include a very long talk with my wife, who had suffered in silence and often in nescience for a decade. It was she I had wronged and sinned against, as well as God. Perhaps my impurity had kept our own love from growing in the same way it had blocked the love I could experience with God. We lay side by side on our bed one steamy summer evening. I talked about nothing, in a nervous, halting voice, for an hour or so, trying to break the barrier that held me back, and finally about midnight I began.

I told her nearly everything, knowing I was laying on her a burden she might not be able to carry. I have wondered why God let me struggle for a decade before deliverance: maybe I will one day find out my wife required just that much time to mature and prepare for the one talk we had that night. Far smaller things had fractured our marriage for months. Somehow, she incarnated the grace of God for me.

I hurt her—only she could tell how much I hurt her. It was not adultery—there was no other woman for her to beam her resentment toward, but perhaps that made it even harder for her. For ten years she had watched an invisible fog steal inside me, make me act strangely, pull me away from her. Now she heard what she had often suspected, and to her it must have sounded like rejection: You were not enough for me sexually, I had to go elsewhere.

But still, in spite of that pain and the vortex of emotions that must have swirled around inside her, she gave to me forgiveness and love. She took on my enemy as her enemy too. She took on my thirst for purity as her thirst too. She loved me, and as I type this even now, tears streak my face because that love, that awesome love is so incomprehensible to me, and so undeserved. But it was there.

How can I give you up, O Ephraim?
How can I hand you over, O Israel?…
For I am God and not man,
The Holy One in your midst.
— Hosea 11:8-9

Saint Augustine, who wrote so eloquently of his own war within, describes our condition here on earth as a simultaneous citizenship in two cities, the city of man and the City of God. The lure of the city of man often drowns out the call of the City of God. Man’s city is visible, substantial, real; as such, it is far more alluring. God’s city is ephemeral, invisible, cloaked in doubt, far away.

Cheryl Tiegs coming toward me out of the page, her teeth flashing, her eyes sparkling, her body glistening, is that city of man. She, and what she represents, fits well with my body and the hormones that surge inside it and the complexes that grew in my repressed childhood and whatever else contributed to my obsession with lust. The pure in heart shall see God. Set against luscious Cheryl, sometimes that promise does not seem like much. But that is the lie of the Deceiver, and the dyslexia of reality we are asked to overcome. The City of God is the real, the substantial, the whole. What I become as I strengthen my citizenship in that kingdom is far more worthy than anything I could become if all my fantasies were somehow fulfilled.

A year has passed since the late-night talk with my wife. During that time, a miracle has occurred. The war within me has fallen away. Only a few snipers remain. Once I failed, just a month later, when I was walking the streets of San Francisco. I felt myself pulled—it felt exactly like that—into another of the twenty-five cent peep shows to watch an undulating girl on a revolving table for three minutes. Not ten seconds had passed when I felt a sense of horror. My head was pounding. Evil was taking over. I had to get out of there, immediately.

I ran, literally ran, as fast as I could out of the North Beach district. I felt safe only when I got out of there. It struck me then how much had changed: previously I had felt safe when I had given in to lust, because the war inside died down for a moment, but now I felt safe away from the temptation. I prayed for strength and walked away.

Other than that encounter, I have been free of the compulsion. Of course, I notice girls in short dresses and halter tops—why else would they wear them?—but the terror is gone. The gravitational force has disappeared when I pass in front of newsstands. For twelve months I have walked by them and not picked up a magazine. I have not entered a p*rno theater.

I feel a sense of loss, yes. I enjoyed the beautiful women, both the art and the lust of it. It was pleasurable; I cannot deny that. But now I have gained a kind of inner gyroscope that is balanced correctly and alerts me when I am straying off course. After ten years I finally have a reservoir of strength to draw on as well as a conscience. I have found it necessary to keep open and honest communication with God and my wife on every little temptation toward lust.

The war within still exists. Now it is a war against the notion that biology is destiny. Looking at humanity as a species, scientists conclude that the fittest must survive, that qualities such as beauty, intelligence, strength, and skill are worthy factors by which to judge the usefulness of people, that lust is an innate adaptation to assure the propagation of the species. Charity, compassion, love, and restraint fly in the face of that kind of materialist philosophy. Sometimes they defy even our own bodies. The City of God can seem like a mirage; my battle is to allow God to convince me of its reality.

Two totally new experiences have happened to me that, I must admit, offset by far my sense of loss from avoiding lust.

First, I have learned that Mauriac was right. God has kept his part of the bargain. In a way I had never known before, I have come to see God. At times (not so often, maybe once every couple of months), I have had an experience with God that has stunned me with its depth and intimacy, an experience of an order I did not even know existed before. Some of these moments have come during prayer and Bible reading, some during deep conversations with other people, and one, the most memorable of all because of my occupation, while I was speaking at a Christian conference. At such moments I have felt possessed, but this time joyfully so (demonic possession is a poor parody of the filling of the Spirit). They have left me shaken and humbled, renewed and cleansed. I had not known that level of mystical experience, had not, in fact, even sought it except in the general way of seeking purity. God has revealed himself to me. The City of God is taking on bricks and mortar.

And another thing has happened, again something I did not even ask God for. The passion is coming back into my marriage. My wife is again becoming an object of romance. Her body, no one else’s, is gradually gaining the gravitational pull that used to be scattered in the universe of sexes. The act of sex, as often a source of irritation and trauma for me as an experience of pleasure, is beginning to take on the form of mystery and transcendence and inexpressible delight that its original design must have called for.

These two events occurring in such short sequence have shown me why the mystics, even some biblical writers, tend to employ the experience of sexual intimacy as a metaphor of spiritual ecstasy. Sometimes, lingering remnants of grace in the city of man bear a striking resemblance to what awaits us in the City of God.

Copyright © 1989 Christianity Today

The rite of ordination does not override the rite of marriage. Both are noble callings, and one is not the “higher calling.” Both were instituted by God for the sanctification of his people. By some curious act of his grace, this sanctification includes the clergy.
Gregory P. Elder

Eventually, every minister’s wife runs into some element of church life that makes her life difficult. Sometimes the experience is jarring. Consider the following true story:

“We arrived at our first pastorate at the end of September, having been delayed by an accident on the way in which my tailbone was broken. Since I was nearly eight months pregnant at the time, it did not heal until after the delivery. I had to do my work alternating between periods of standing up and lying down. I carried an inflated rubber ring everywhere I went, since sitting on it helped to ease the pain a bit.

“Somehow, I managed to get some boxes unpacked, and even started toilet training my toddler. The ordination service, at which my husband was to be officially installed as pastor, was set for the end of October. I played the organ for the service while perched on my rubber ring. Afterward I served sandwiches, dessert, and coffee to about thirty people in the parsonage. Everyone seemed to think it was my job, and I never questioned it.

“Our second baby was born on November 14. This released pressure from my tailbone, so it started healing. I was nursing the baby, and all was going well. The basem*nt still contained boxes needing to be unpacked, many windows were waiting for curtains to be sewn, the toilet training of our toddler had hit an impasse, and I remember brief moments when I doubted that, should I live to be eighty, I would ever get my dishes and ironing all done at once, but all was well. My husband was enjoying his work, and the people were generous. We were showered with everything from eggs and chickens to cookies, honey, and cream.

“Then, about the middle of December, it happened. One of the Sunday school teachers asked me what I was doing about ‘the Christmas concert,’ referring to the Sunday school program. I had no idea what she meant. I repeated her words back to her, stalling for time: ‘The Christmas concert?’ Then she explained, as one might to a not-very-bright child, that the minister’s wife always took care of the Christmas concert. This meant she produced and directed it and usually wrote the script as well.

“The previous minister’s wife was an older woman with no children. She loved to do this sort of thing and had lots of experience. I, on the other hand, was a very young, very busy mother of two babies, one only a few weeks old, and I had never even taught a Sunday school class.

“The incredible part of this episode is that I did it. I really did, on two weeks’ notice, throw together some sort of a program. I still remember standing up there directing with perspiration streaming down my face. Immediately afterward I went home, nursed the baby, and collapsed in bed.

“They never should have asked, I never should have even considered the request, and my husband should not have allowed me to accept. But at that time none of us knew any better.”

An extreme case, perhaps, but this type of experience is not uncommon. Not many years ago, the accepted model of the minister’s wife was that of an active partner in ministry, and this was accompanied by certain expectations about how she would dress and tend the home, and what she would and wouldn’t do in congregational life. One wife said, “If I do too much, I’m ‘running things.’ If I’m quiet and reserved, I’m ‘not doing my share and fulfilling my role as the pastor’s wife.'”

Though most pastors’ wives I contacted said that changing times were easing some of the traditional expectations, some irritating assumptions remain. For instance, when the church can’t find anyone else for a particular job, “of course” the minister’s wife will do it, or “we can always get the minister’s wife” to give the devotions at the women’s gathering.

“It’s interesting that I’m the only woman in the church who is never thanked for doing a job,” observed one wife. “I like sharing my talents, but it’s hard to be taken for granted as if I’ve been hired to work here.”

Most wives find they are expected to fill in for their husbands as a listener and counselor. Many find that having people trust them with personal concerns is gratifying. Others, however, feel uncomfortable and ineffective in this role.

Some pastors’ wives take naturally to the challenges of the role. For most, however, there are at least moments when they feel lonely or out of place. According to the Leadership survey, it may be a greater problem than their pastor/husbands are aware of. When asked, “Has your spouse ever felt lonely or out of place in the congregation?” 68 percent of the pastors said yes. But when we asked the pastors’ spouses, “Have you ever felt lonely or out of place in the congregation?” fully 76 percent said yes.

One pastor who did recognize his wife’s feelings described the situation this way: “I have the greatest wife in the world, so any victory in ministry is a shared victory. But sadly, for her, the victory is always vicarious. But the loneliness is personal.”

The first step in addressing an issue is understanding the factors that contribute to the problem. What factors lead to this sense of loneliness?

Alone in a Church Crowd

Some of the factors can simply be peculiarities of a given church. For instance, sometimes the age of the pastor and spouse inhibits close friendships within the congregation.

“The leaders in our congregation, the people with whom we spend the most time, tend to be older than my wife and me. As a result, we feel a bit left out of relationships with people our age,” wrote a pastor on the survey. “Plus, we have no social life apart from the church.”

Neither are younger pastoral couples immune from the fact that mothers of preschoolers will naturally tend to feel isolated. “My wife’s most difficult times were when our children were very small and she was tied to home duties, while I was seldom at home during the day and sometimes not in the early evening,” confessed a pastor. “Her complaints struck sympathetic chords in me, but sympathy was not what she wanted!”

Another pastoral couple felt the same problem from the opposite side. “As we got older, the people who were coming onto our staff seemed younger and younger. We were mentors to them, but not exactly friends. We were old enough to be their parents. In the past, we’d been close with others on the pastoral team, but now they find their own web of relationships. And I think my wife feels the loneliness even more than I do.”

A more common reality that can increase the loneliness factor is that church members often see pastors and their spouses as different from ordinary folk. Some wives have mentioned that in Bible studies or small groups, people turn to them, expecting answers to troubling questions simply because they are married to a minister. These spouses feel awkward sharing their own honest doubts and unnamed terrors for fear of shaking the faith of younger, more fragile believers. Thus, instead of being a source of relief from loneliness, these groups only reinforce it.

“We pastored in a small town in the Midwest,” said one pastor’s wife. “The people were warm and friendly in church, but no one seemed to want to be close friends. I figured maybe they thought pastoral families wouldn’t be around long enough to form lasting friendships. But then I met a woman who seemed friendly and tenderhearted. She always asked how I was doing and how I felt about things. She would tell me she missed me if I was not at a service, but she never invited me to her home. After a Wednesday night prayer meeting, I invited her over for tea while our husbands had a meeting. She appeared hesitant, but she came. During the conversation, she told me she couldn’t be close friends with the pastor’s wife because it might offend other people. I was hurt, to say the least, and it made me hesitant to try to be close to any other woman in the church.”

Fortunately, not all churches share that attitude, But in any church, a bright spotlight seems to focus on the clergy marriage. The feeling of being watched can increase the feelings of loneliness.

David and Vera Mace, in their 1980 study of clergy couples, found that 85 percent felt their marriage was expected to be a model of perfection. They wrote, “Clergy couples are almost obsessed with the feeling that they are expected to be superhuman and to provide models for the congregation and community.” Another study notes that “Protestants consider their minister’s personal and family life as ‘tools for ministry.’ Unfortunately, family modeling is often measured by moralistic ‘thou shalt nots’ of public behavior rather than by how families handle deeper issues.”

The problem is not so much the high expectations but how the pastoral couple responds to them. If clergy couples are trying to live out other people’s expectations of a perfect marriage, it can be hard for them to deal with their own real marriage, which leads to a game of “let’s pretend.” As one minister said, “Congregations desperately need clergy marriages to work. They think that if their ministers can’t make it work, how can they? That’s an awful burden!” Even more stressful is when the couple knows they are falling short of these expectations, but they don’t feel able to ask for help.

Other contributors to loneliness emerge not from the congregation but from the natural tendencies of ministers themselves.

The education and emotional gap. A few years ago, I met Mary LaGrand Bouma, a pastor’s wife who has written Divorce in the Parsonage, and asked her, “What makes for meaningful communication in a ministry marriage?”

She said, “If I had to pick one thing, it would be commensurate education. That may surprise you — I know it certainly did me when I was doing research for a book on pastors’ wives. I interviewed two hundred ministry wives, and when I read through my notes, I said, ‘I can’t believe this.’ Healthy marriages in the ministry were those in which the wife’s education had not been cut short.

“Many wives work hard and long to put their husbands through seminary, and what do they get? A silent husband who assumes she cannot function on the intellectual level at which he has now arrived. I thought I had found an exception to this rule when I interviewed a pastor’s wife in Seattle whose marriage I knew was strong. I asked if she had studied beyond high school — and was suddenly embarrassed: she had not even finished high school. But as it turned out, neither had her husband. They were part of a group that didn’t require seminary or even college, and they had done a lot of informal learning together. As a result, they got along extremely well.

“The marriages in trouble were the marriages with big educational gaps. Why is that? You think differently once you’re college trained. That’s why I counsel ministry wives to get their college education, even belatedly if necessary.”

Another idea: “My husband and I would never have developed our common interest in evangelism if we had not gone to several seminars together. We would discuss the material and new ideas we had heard. After this refreshing time together, we would be inspired again for our ministry. We would set goals together to try some of the new ideas.”

The education gap can be narrowed, but often a major chasm, an emotional gap, remains.

David and Helen Seamands point out that this emotional distance often begins during ministerial training. “A communication problem often arises because the man is oriented to books and theology, and shows little interest in the practical things of the home,” says Helen. “He is attracted to the ministry because he loves studying the Word and digging into ideas; he conceptualizes everything. The kind of woman most attracted to the life of a minister’s wife is a warm, loving, people-person, who sees everything in terms of relationships. When these two get together, they have little common ground for communication.”

As a result, the wife can feel starved emotionally, because the husband is unable to express emotions well. “Often, instead of saying what he’s really feeling, he preaches at her a principle of marriage from Ephesians 5,” says David. “We’ve found that ministers who come to marriage enrichment retreats are tough to handle because they cannot identify or express feelings. Instead of sharing themselves, they preach.”

The secret is to work on staying in touch with one another on both intellectual and emotional levels.

The preoccupied pastor. Ministry demands concentrated energy and attention. Unlike an hour spent chatting about sports, an hour spent counseling a couple considering divorce can leave a minister emotionally exhausted. One pastoral couple described it as the difference between a bucketful of feathers and a bucketful of rocks — the measured amount is the same, but the scales tell a different story.

Many ministers struggle not to lose touch with their spouses in the midst of touching everyone else. If the ministry becomes a “mistress,” many times the children can adjust — they may not know any other lifestyle — but the wife is more likely to take it personally. She finds herself losing out to the other love in her husband’s life — his work. The irony is that part of the job of a pastor is to encourage marriage. As a pastor’s wife put it, “I know my husband is committed to marriage, but I’m not sure he’s committed to me.“

“At the church I’m a man on a mission,” confessed a pastor. “But at home my wife is asking, ‘But what about me?'” Even church successes can be misinterpreted. “I’m glad the ministry is going well,” wrote a pastor’s wife. “But when that’s the main thing he talks about, I feel that’s more important to him than I am.”

These factors, then, contribute to the all-too-common feeling among ministry spouses that they don’t quite fit. How can those of us in ministry help our spouses have a healthy church experience?

Helping the One Closest to Us

One ministry couple, Dennis and Barbara Rainey, discovered that the key to ministering to one another was shoring up one another’s self-esteem. Here’s how they described it in an article titled “What You See Is NOT All You Get” in the February 1988 issue of Christian Herald:

She was as smart as she was pretty. In fact, she was chosen as one of the university’s “Top Twenty Freshmen Women.”

As a child, this young lady received love and encouragement from her parents — and the example of a stable marriage. There was little stress for her. Life seemed perfect … until junior high.

While her other friends reached puberty quickly and began to develop physically, she did not. Her chest remained flat and her legs skinny, and her hips developed no contours. Throughout the first six years of school, she had felt confident, sure of herself, popular. But as she was slow to develop, she began to question her worth. This self-doubt was further fueled by her best friend, who one day asked, “Are you sure you’re a girl?”

Those words hit like a lightning bolt from a dark cloud. Fear that she would never develop began to whisper in her inner spirit. Her personality changed. She became quiet, reserved, shy. Comparing herself with others, she always came up short in her own eyes. She felt unpopular, unattractive, awkward, and alone. And no one knew of her fears.

Eventually, she began to blossom. In fact, she became very pretty, yet inwardly she continued to see herself as inferior, and she thought everyone else saw her that way, too.

Determined to forge a new identity, the young woman decided to go to an out-of-state college where she could start fresh. She succeeded. Honor after honor came her way. She pledged one of the top sororities on campus. She earned good grades, participated in numerous campus activities, and became very popular.

Yet no one, not even she, realized that at the heart of her performance was a little girl who was afraid to be known. The accomplishments gave her confidence a boost, but she still needed someone who really knew her to accept her for who she was apart from her achievements.

One year after her college graduation, she fell in love with a young man who appeared to have it all together. He was the extroverted, confident person she was not. Their whirlwind romance found them married after only four months of dating.

She later found out that, although he was secure, he had needs, too. He was impulsive, brash, and overzealous. And behind his air of bravado and pride, he was hiding some insecurities of his own.

After nearly a month of marriage, both began to realize much more was going on inside each other than they had bargained for. One night, after an evening out with some friends, they stayed up talking about how inferior she felt in public settings. Her questions about her worth stunned him. He couldn’t believe that this beautiful woman, his wife, could possibly feel that way about herself. He had confidence in her. But her withdrawn behavior at social gatherings began to irritate him. He silently questioned, Why does she retreat into her protective shell of silence, when I feel so comfortable with people? Why can’t she be like me?

After several of these late evening “chats,” he finally realized his wife really did have some serious self-doubt.

That young couple was us more than fifteen years ago. At that time, we had critical choices to make. Would Dennis accept Barbara fully and love her during her periods of self-doubt? And would Dennis be vulnerable and risk being known by a young woman who might reject him? The choices were real. The decisions were tough. In retrospect, we believe those days were among the most crucial in our marriage. In those initial months, the foundations of acceptance and the patterns of response were laid.

As our fears and insecurities surfaced, we also discovered the critical importance of a healthy, positive self-concept to a marriage. We began to recognize the magnitude of the responsibility we each carried in building up or tearing down the other’s self-esteem. And we both began to see that our own self-image either crippled or completed our marriage relationship.

This couple learned the importance of building up each other, which not only strengthened their marriage but also benefited their children and those to whom they minister. Because when people see how Dad treats Mom in everyday life, they also, without realizing it, develop an understanding of how Christ relates to us, his church.

What are some specific ways to shore up self-esteem in your spouse? Any good marriage book would suggest: showing warmth and acceptance, sowing positive words, seeing the past in perspective, offering freedom to fail, and so on. But in ministry families, the ministry to a spouse takes on some added dimensions.

Show her you enjoy your time together. You may not have twenty hours a week of private time together, or even ten, but carving out some relaxed, enjoyable time with your spouse is one of the most significant ways of telling her she’s important to you.

Robert Crosby, a youth pastor in New York, revealed the dawning of this realization upon him: “Twenty-five youth workers were, for the first time, cooperating to reach thousands of high schoolers for Christ. Definitely the biggest citywide outreach I had ever worked on was only two weeks away. Over the past six months, I’d spent countless hours of planning, promotion and perspiration. We were about to make history. I was ecstatic. My comrades were thrilled. My wife was disgusted. And I didn’t even realize it until I pulled out my personal calendar one day to look at the harried upcoming week only to find Thursday penciled in, please keep this day open for pam and kristi (my wife and daughter).

“We hadn’t had any heated debates or snide comments, but this action cut me to the heart. I had been having so much fun with the youth event that I had been perfunctory in my prior covenant of Christian service — spousing and parenting. Instead of a haven of rest and relationship, my home had digressed into a fast-food restaurant and a place to sleep at night.”

How do pastors find enjoyable time with their wives? Here were three of the more unusual ideas I came across:

1. “After the kids are off to school, my wife and I have a long, leisurely breakfast every Friday. We each take our calendar, and we talk about the schedule for the upcoming week and develop our ‘to do’ list. But we also talk about what’s happening in the family and make sure we’re looking ahead and asking, ‘When are we all going to be together this week, next week, and so on.'”

2. “My wife, Karen, helped me understand that staying away from home ‘to do the Lord’s work’ was oftentimes just veiled selfishness on my part. So we’ve divided each of our days into trimesters: morning, afternoon, and evening. We’ve agreed to give outside pursuits (including my church work) eleven segments, and no more than two are allowed each day. So, if I work in the morning, and I have an evening meeting, I do not work in the afternoon. Unless an emergency arises — and it rarely does — after eleven segments, I’m done for the week. It was difficult, but in time, I worked five days a week. At the same time, Karen enjoyed two sacrosanct segments per week to be away from the children (and me, if she desired).”

3. “Between the kids and church activities, we have virtually no uninterrupted hours in the evenings. At night we’re both emotionally exhausted, and I realized if that was the only time we were spending together, that was poor planning. So we look forward to a regular midmorning rendezvous. The kids are off to school, and I’ll come home from the church for a couple of hours. It’s quality time to get reacquainted emotionally and sexually.”

Protect her from the system. At times, “the system” — the expectations of a church — can become overwhelming. One way to build self-esteem is to help confront those unrealistic expectations. Sometimes it’s easier for the pastor to say “enough is enough” for his wife than it is for her to do it herself, and this support is a powerful affirmation. Here are a few ways this has been done by pastors surveyed:

“I recognized that I’d encouraged my wife to be involved in church ministries — Sunday school, children’s church, etc. — which is good, but in our case it had been overdone. She was missing valuable contact with people our age. She didn’t have any fellowship. We worked together to be sure she had a chance for social times.”

Another pastor on the survey wrote: “My wife has sometimes felt out of place, usually as a result of unfair criticism or gossip suggesting she does too much or not enough, says too much or not enough, etc. We talk it out, and then, at times, I’ve stepped in with a loving confrontation with the critics over the phone or in person. In most cases, this has resolved the issue — and it’s certainly brought my wife and me closer together.”

A pastor’s wife wrote: “Recently a group in our congregation asked my husband to volunteer me for a certain job that he knew would have been an emotional trauma for me. He told them he wasn’t even going to ask me, because he knew it was not something I should be doing. I was grateful he protected me that way. Knowing he’ll back me up is a big morale booster.”

Encourage her search for friendship. Most pastors recognize they cannot be everything their spouse needs: confidant, companion, counselor, pastor, closest friend. As one wife said, “When my husband is my pastor, I keenly feel the lack of having someone else to turn to in times of personal or spiritual need. If I’m ‘spiritually dry,’ for instance, or if I’m having difficulties with my husband, I wish I had another pastor to go to.”

In addition, because of their position, pastors’ spouses may find it harder to talk to a counselor — sometimes because of their own reluctance to admit difficulties, other times because of the attitudes of would-be counselors.

One wife told of being at a large hospital during the time her son was dying. She desperately needed someone to talk to besides her husband. A social worker came to see her, but as soon as she learned this grieving mother was married to a minister, the social worker said, “Then you won’t be needing me.”

The answer, of course, is to find a friend. For some, this has been someone in the congregation; for others, someone from the community; for still others, another minister’s spouse has become a close friend. But for both the spouse and the pastor, these friendships have proved a treasured gift. As one pastor wrote, “The greatest help for me in dealing with the pressures of ministry was when my wife found some other ministers’ spouses who shared her outlook on life and ministry.”

To Serve and to Protect

One of the most sensitive issues in the husband-wife relationship is whether or not to have secrets. Are there things that should not be shared with a spouse? This is a particularly complex area for ministry couples.

The task of a spouse is to both serve and protect his partner. Serving includes self-disclosure — discussing what’s going on, especially things that affect your emotional condition, job performance, or future in the church. On the other hand, pastors must maintain varying degrees of confidentiality, which may preclude telling everything they know. In addition, a number of pastors feel that “to protect” their spouses includes not revealing information that would only cause unhealthy emotional distress.

Here’s how some pastors have sorted the times to share and not to share.

What to share. Michael E. Phillips, who pastors at Lake Windermere Alliance Church in Invermere, British Columbia, discussed in a 1988 Leadership article some of the things he makes sure to tell his wife: “Almost everything that goes on in my life. From the seedling thoughts of a sermon series to the interesting details of a half dozen home visits, my wife shares my day. She relishes the high points, looks appropriately concerned over the troubled moments, and adds her observations whenever she feels it’s proper.”

That scenario holds true in most pastors’ homes. But to be a bit more specific, Phillips identifies two subjects that he’s always prepared to discuss with his wife:

1. Difficult decisions. “Every so often, my wife and I celebrate ‘Want Ads Day.’ It’s an event that is cherished by neither of us but demands dual participation. At regular intervals, the pressure of pastoral responsibilities convinces me there must be a softer wall to beat my head against. Therefore, I tell my wife that we are going to look through the classified ads to see what other job I could pursue. Kathy’s role is to convince me I really don’t want to do anything else. But she has to be subtle; I feel I’m facing a tough decision.

“At the end of this madness, we fold the paper, and then my wife asks me what’s getting under my skin. Usually, I’m trying to decide if God is calling me to adjust my ministry, or even to change the location. It’s always a difficult decision, so I share it with the one who would be directly affected by it. Life throws up difficult decisions the way a plow digs up rocks. They seem to be always there, always annoying, and always tricky to handle by yourself.

“Several months ago, I became concerned that most of the elders were not attending prayer meeting. I decided to confront the issue at the next board meeting by proposing changes in the format of the prayer time, lecturing the board, and soliciting their attendance on Wednesday nights. With glee, I described my plan to Kathy. Her face soured, and she came right to the point: ‘Do you really want a prayer meeting full of guilty, shamed elders? Maybe they all have good reasons for not being there.’ She then left the room, leaving me to my decision. I knew instantly that she was right. The beauty of her intimate counsel is that it combined objective integrity with conjugal caring. She knew me and she knew my board. And because she wasn’t directly involved, she saw the problem with greater discernment than I did.”

2. Points of growth. “In my ministry, I take great pains to be transparently honest, showing the congregation that I’m flesh and blood, failing and burdened. I believe it has been effective in that people accept the Word of God from their sinner-pastor with a belief that if I can live it, so can they. Over the years, I have found it progressively easier to discuss intimate failures and personal points of growth.

“Yet it is so hard to do the same with my wife. She even remarked to me a few years ago that if she wanted to find out what God is teaching me, she would have to pay closer attention to my sermons. I was properly corrected. It’s part of human nature to fear pain from our most intimate relationships. But it’s part of good mental health to overcome that part of human nature.

“A caution: it’s essential to understand our problems prior to laying them out before anyone else. We need to be sure we can describe things accurately before we alarm our loved ones. Can you imagine a company’s telling its stockholders every conceivable problem in the firm? The stock would be worth zero, even if the company had very little the matter with it.”

Other pastors have added a third category of subjects that should be shared with spouses.

3. Problem resolutions. A pastor in Kansas told this story: “My temptation is to tell my wife about church problems, but when the problem is resolved, I’ll forget to tell her how it has worked out. As a result, she can get a picture of the church that’s skewed toward the negative.

“I had a problem with our former pastor talking with members of our congregation and second guessing my initiatives. I shared my frustration with my wife, and she joined in my feelings. Later, when I was able to sit with the former pastor and clear the air, I discovered he had not been trying to sabotage my ministry; the people in the congregation had misrepresented what he’d said.

“My mistake was in not talking about that with my wife. Oh, sure, I told her I’d patched things up with Mel, but I’d spent hours talking about the frustrations and a minute or so describing the resolution. It wasn’t fair to my wife. I notice she’s still defensive when we’re around Mel. I did her a disservice by poisoning her attitude.”

What not to Share. Marriage counselors talk about open, honest communication between husbands and wives. But there are dangers in openness, depending upon the spouse’s interests and capacity to handle stressful information. As one Canadian pastor said, “God lays upon each person a different yoke. There are aspects of my calling that my wife is not called to bear.”

One pastor who responded to the survey was concerned about raising his wife’s frustration level with a troubling situation when she couldn’t do anything about the situation: “When I return from a difficult meeting, usually I can work through the personalities and pressures that cause people to criticize me, but if I give too detailed an account to my wife, she carries it around for several days, and it affects the way she sees these people. So there are some things, especially conflicts, I don’t share with her because I’ve learned she doesn’t take it well.”

Other pastors want their spouses to be unbiased toward certain people, so they don’t share negative things that might prejudice them. Others want their spouses to be free of intra-church controversies as much as possible. “My wife finds that some people will test her to see how much she knows,” says one minister. “They’ll say things like, ‘It’s a shame about MaryLou, isn’t it?’ And my wife is glad she can honestly say, ‘I don’t know. What happened?’ It allows her to be free, spontaneous, and affectionate toward people.”

Michael Phillips identifies a few other categories of unwise topics of conversation.

1. Others’ attacking me. “I once asked my wife to describe the one thing I had told her that was harder to handle than any other. Without hesitation she said, ‘The letters you showed me last fall.’ The previous autumn, I had received a series of nasty notes from a former member of our congregation. Clothed as prophetic words, they were vindictive slanders and generally throw-away advice. After a while, they were laughable. Without thinking, I showed them to Kathy one night. It took her a long time to go to sleep that evening. All she could think about was the dirt this person had thrown my way.

“She was much more upset than I was. Her protective feelings were creating a whirlwind of emotions, alternating between bitterness and anger. Thus I learned that it’s a major mistake for us to unload second-hand attacks on our wives.

“What I do now with a situation like that is simple. If I have to tell someone, I tell my prayer partner. He’s a good friend, has broad shoulders, and never gets upset at attacks on me. He thought the letters were funny; he even got me laughing over them. Kathy still doesn’t laugh when she sees the letter writer and his wife downtown. She has, however, worked her facial muscles up to a smile, bless her protective heart!”

2. My attacks on others. “Inevitably, I will have opinions on various members of the flock I pastor, some of them negative at times. This doesn’t mean I don’t love them and desire the best for them, and God is able to adjust my opinions in the course of time, too. But when one person in a family lets off steam, pressure begins to build up in those who are listening. If I voice my personal misgivings about others to my wife or children, I no longer have any control over what those careless words will produce. Understand that my wife is not a gossip and is certainly not vindictive. My comments will taint her viewpoint, however, even if only slightly.

“Several years ago, we had a young Sunday school superintendent who I felt was not getting the job done. I told my wife about his mistakes, and I told her on numerous occasions how upset I was with him. Finally, God convicted me of being the one in the wrong, for I had not spent any time praying for and training the man. As I rectified this, he showed smooth progress in his ministry. My wife was not aware of this turnaround, however, and I noticed over a year later that she still had a critical attitude toward the man. The blame lay firmly on my shoulders. I apologized to her and asked her to forgive me for tainting this young man in her eyes. I also vowed inwardly to keep my most vindictive vents of steam to myself.”

3. Ultra-sensitive issues. “With one of my college professors, it was common knowledge that if you asked him a question about black holes, even if it were only remotely connected to the topic at hand, he would wax eloquent on the subject, and the rest of the class would be history. We used to call him ‘Black Hole Rollie.’ We knew the topic that set him going. In the same way, I know the kinds of discussions that set my wife’s mind buzzing. Each person, and each pastorate, has a different set of these terrible topics. For some of us, it may be learning of a church member’s financial irresponsibility or doctrinal deviation. For others, hearing about even long-past sexual misconduct may create only unhealthy agitation. For still others, talking about how other people discipline their children gets the blood boiling.

“So Kathy and I have discovered that there are some issues too sensitive to discuss — unless we’ve got a long, uninterrupted time together to fully process the topic. Ours are so sensitive I’m not even going to tell you what they are.”

Phillips offers some help in discovering what those ultra-sensitive issues might be. You’ve probably found one when you uncover a topic that:

1. Contributes to obvious feelings of uneasiness in your spouse;

2. The two of you cannot constructively deal with;

3. You yourself feel uncomfortable discussing;

4. Leads to conversations whose long-term effect is only negative.

It takes time and mistakes to discover what these “don’t tell me” issues are — for yourself and for your spouse.

These elements help a spouse have a healthy church experience. But perhaps the most critical element is developing a vital and authentic spiritual life as a family, the subject to which we now turn.

Copyright ©1988 Christianity Today

Children of the ministry are not volunteers; they are conscripts.
Doug Toussaint

My job as a parent is a temporary responsibility with eternal consequences.
Tim Kimmel

What do Alice Cooper and Cotton Mather have in common? Not much, except that both grew up as sons of ministers.

The same is true of Aaron Burr, Orville and Wilbur Wright, Walter Mondale, John Tower, Marvin Gay, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Sir Laurence Olivier. Other “preacher’s kids” include Albert Schweitzer, Christian Barnaard, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

There’s no guarantee, of course, that any child — whether born into the home of a preacher, professor, plumber, or prince — will decide to live in a way that brings honor to God and joy to parents. Nor can pastoral couples guarantee even that their children will find church a place to enjoy rather than endure. Some factors are beyond parental control — critics, conflict — but parents can help prepare children for church life, interpret what’s happening, and create an atmosphere that makes church life much more appealing and increases the chances of the child’s developing a strong relationship with God.

Let’s look at some of the key elements in helping kids have a healthy experience in their church life. Family-conscious ministers have identified several general strategies.

Fathering or Pastoring Your Family?

The first is to recognize the difference between being a father to your family and being your family’s pastor.

When your family is part of your congregation, you’ll wind up pastoring them. As one Nazarene pastor pointed out about his children, “I’m the only pastor they’ve ever had.” Through preaching, counsel, and example, pastors provide spiritual direction for everyone in their congregations, including their families.

But there’s danger when a pastor sees his family only as objects of pastoral care and not as intimates with whom he has a qualitatively different relationship from the one he has with ordinary members of the congregation.

“I may pastor my family, but I don’t want always to be their preacher,” says a pastor from San Diego. “I struggle with dads who preach at their kids but don’t listen, who have an agenda for every conversation: Dad speaks, kids listen. I have a tendency to be like that. But I’m grateful that God gave me a wife who won’t let me. I don’t want to be the family preacher, except on Sunday.”

A pastor from Michigan says, “I don’t think of myself as my family’s pastor. I do pastor them on Sundays. But when I walk in the door at night, I don’t think of them in congregational terms. My home is my escape, a place where I don’t have to be The Pastor.”

In some ways, fathering is a much easier role, a more natural fit, one that doesn’t require us to maintain the poise and energy level of pastoring. But in other ways, it’s a more uncomfortable role.

“I can stand up in front of hundreds of people on Sunday and articulate a spiritual principle and illustrate it. People even take notes. But that afternoon, sitting with my wife and kids, it’s a lot harder. No notebooks come out!” says Joseph Stowell with a smile. “I’m not nearly as articulate or convincing. I’ve given talks to teenagers on dating, morality, and handling temptations. I tried to sit down and cover that with my kids. It didn’t work. I wondered, What’s wrong with me? I just lost the gift. That’s the difference between fathering and pastoring. Fathering is a very different role — our impact goes beyond the realm of precept. Our impact comes from our character, attitude, integrity — our caring and love for them.”

One way to make sure the preacher/authority role is occasionally shucked for the “just plain ol’ Dad” role is to capitalize on situations where we are not in charge. A minister living in New Hampshire illustrates: “My son plays soccer, and I enjoy games as a spectator. But I’ve turned down all invitations to coach or even be an assistant. Why? Because whenever Mark enters my world, he always sees me in charge. I want soccer to be one area where he is in charge, where he knows more than I do, and where he knows he knows more than I do. All I do is show an interest, ask questions, and learn from him.”

Orienting Children to the Ministry

Orientation is important in helping children handle the realities of life in a ministry home. If they are prepared, they aren’t as likely to be jolted by difficult people or situations.

Most pastors and spouses surveyed indicated they brief their children to expect people not to be perfect. But they also try to help them see the importance of ministry.

“I try to teach them that the church is not above hurts, criticism, and conflict. These are growing areas — great teaching times,” writes one pastor. “As a family, we endure the bad, enjoy the good, and grow in both. We’re teaching them to be liberal in gratitude, and to write notes of thanks and praise to encourage others. I often speak of the faithfulness of God’s people through the ages.”

“We pray as a family for hurting members,” writes another.

Yet another pastor is not quite so delicate in his choice of words: “The number one issue for me has been to let them know I love the Lord and the church he died for — and because sheep are sheep, there’s frequently lots of sheep dung to clean up. So we’re not shocked when sinners sin.”

Each of these expresses in a different way the same truth: children of ministry benefit from periodically being briefed on what to expect.

Entering Each Other’s World

Parenting books stress the importance of spending time with your children. And who would argue? But many of these books leave the impression that parents should eliminate the important and interesting activities they enjoy and bore themselves silly with coloring books and Parcheesi.

While it probably wouldn’t harm any of us to join our preschoolers with the Play-Doh or our junior highers with the video games, involvement doesn’t always have to mean descending to the level of a child in order to relate.

Preacher’s kid Tim Stafford describes his own upbringing: “My father didn’t join the neighborhood football games; we probably would have been embarrassed if he had. He never played Monopoly with us. He encouraged us in our chosen vocation of fishing, but he never bought a rod and reel himself. I always had the impression that we were kids, allowed the kiddish dignity of going about our kiddish affairs in all seriousness, without adult interference.

“I am not certain I can recommend my father’s lack of involvement in our interests, but I strongly recommend his alternative — involving us in his. He allowed us to enter his world when we were interested in doing so. He and I trekked hundreds of miles in the back country of the Sierra Nevada together, not so much (I believe) because he was being a good father but because he wanted to go. We talked baseball because he was avidly interested. He also liked taking us to meetings with him. I remember particularly one Sunday night when after the evening service, I went with my father to a hotel restaurant to join a small circle of pastors chatting with Addison Leitch, one of my father’s most admired seminary professors. I didn’t know what they were talking about, but to this day my memory can bring back the rich pleasure of being allowed in adult male company as a sort of equal.”

In some ways, the elder Stafford was showing his son the same respect he’d show for any friend — he sought common ground. Hopefully, one of those mutual interests will be ministry. This was the situation for another pastor’s son, who grew up to become a pastor himself: “I was raised in a parsonage, and my dad was never there. Most nights it seemed he had some meeting to attend. But I never resented it because he included me in his life.”

One way to begin doing this is, as some church leaders do, to grant kids an open-door policy.

Bill Bright, the founder and president of Campus Crusade for Christ, says that when his children were small they always had access to him. No matter what important visitor might be in his office, the boys were always allowed in for at least a brief greeting. Dr. Bright wanted them to know that their concerns took precedence over any other problems he might be dealing with. He did not want them to feel they had to make an appointment to see their father.

Developing a Ministry Mindset

Most pastors would love to have family members share their commitment to ministry. How can that commitment be encouraged?

One key is to teach children to do what we are trying to do — live for God’s glory and not our own. This results in their becoming what sociologist David Riesman calls “inner-directed.” They learn to act on the basis of the strength God gives, to do what they know is right, instead of bowing to pressure from their peers (or even their parents).

A pastor’s wife from Indiana offered the following example from when her daughter was in third grade. “One of her classmates had parents who both worked during the day, and he would come home to an empty house. One day he started playing with a cigarette lighter, and the house caught fire and burned to the ground. After that, everyone at school made fun of him and called him ‘Lightning Bug’ or ‘Firefly.’ When he would take his lunch to a table to eat, the others would get up and move away. Our daughter told me about it; she was quite upset. She explained that he was not a special friend of hers — she didn’t even like him very much — but she was concerned about the way he was being treated.

“I asked, ‘What do you think Jesus would want you to do about it?’ She thought a minute and said she thought Jesus would want her to take her lunch and go sit with him. I agreed. So the next day at lunch she sat next to him, taking her little sister along for moral support. The following day a couple of others joined them. By the end of the week he was integrated into the group again. This was an amazing incident for me to observe. A basically timid child had found the power to resist peer pressure to help someone in trouble.”

By pointing the child to God, this approach can help avoid a contest of wills between parents and child, because the parents aren’t saying, “This is what we want you to do.” They aren’t even saying, “The Bible says.” They are helping the child to develop his conscience and to make decisions on the basis of his growing knowledge of God and faith in him. This, of course, is much different from using “God’s will” to pressure children into bowing to “parents’ will.”

One minister’s 12-year-old daughter, who had been raised with a ministry mindset, was able to use her sanctified social skills to help some of her friends at a party. During the games the popular boys were continually choosing her and her pretty friends for partners. The hostess, who was not pretty or socially skilled, was being neglected. The minister’s daughter was sensitive to this and cornered two of the most attractive boys. She told them they had a responsibility to pay attention to the hostess. After all, they had accepted her hospitality. “We can take care of ourselves,” she said. “You go pay attention to her.” And they did.

These, then, are some general strategies for helping children have a healthy church experience. Now let’s turn to specific situations.

When the Children Are Young

Pastors have several techniques when their children are preschoolers or in the early elementary grades.

Bedtime briefings. Even preschoolers can benefit from briefings, if they’re handled simply and with imagination.

One church leader says that bedtime has proved the best time for this with his daughters. He explains: “Saturday night, or any night before a church event, as I’m tucking the girls in, I tell them about the good things to expect the next day — the friends they’re going to see, the things they’re going to do. And I’ll try to tell them what to be listening for; I give them a foretaste of any lesson or sermon they’ll be hearing. If I know the Sunday school lesson, for instance, I’ll tell the Bible story. My girls like that because (1) they feel more confident the next day when they hear the story, and (2) I throw in more detail than their teachers usually do. Our daughters especially like to know names for each of the characters.

“Once, for instance, my 3-year-old’s teacher was telling the story of Jesus’ healing the blind man. Stacey was eager to tell the class, ‘His name was Bartimaeus!’ a detail the teacher had somehow managed to overlook. Right now, our daughter is troubled because she knows the names of Noah’s sons — Ham, Shem, and Japheth — but I can’t tell her the names of the sons’ wives who were on the ark, and her inquiring mind wants to know! But I’m glad to supply her with little details. I like to fire her imagination for the next day’s activity.”

Church as second home. Because they’re at the church so often, children will naturally begin to see it as their second home. A number of pastors have tried to use this fact to their advantage.

“As our children were growing up, we tried to let them see the privileges that go along with the pastorate,” said Kent Hughes. “For example, they got the run of the church building during the week — gymnasium and all.”

Jamie Buckingham, now pastoring in Florida, said that when his kids were small, “we wanted them to feel the church was an extension of their house, so they were welcome in the office — and occasionally during worship one of them would come up on the platform and stand with me during the congregational singing. I allowed that because it didn’t disrupt our worship, and it helped reinforce that the church was their place, too.”

Warm associations. Many pastors try to make sure their kids associate church with positive feelings. Part of this comes naturally through friends, caring teachers, and the positive perspective of parents. But at least one pastor did even more.

“I’ve always sat on the front row with my family during worship services, not up on the platform,” wrote this pastor. “I go to the pulpit only when I have a specific task to perform. Otherwise I’ve always been sitting there stroking my children’s hair, scratching the back of their necks, kneading their shoulders — and they never wiggled a muscle for fear I would stop. We never had a behavior problem in church with either of them. Now that they’re older, they simply would not miss a church service — and I’ve pondered whether their faithfulness is not built to some extent on a subconscious association with good feelings of warmth and intimacy.”

Avoiding after-service neglect. The period right after the worship service is an important time for the pastor to make contact with people. But a crowded narthex can be a confusing place for young children, especially when both parents are concentrating on greeting worshipers.

One pastor’s daughter told about trying to talk to her father in the foyer after the Sunday morning service. She shouted, “Dad, Dad,” but she couldn’t get his attention. Finally she said, “Pastor!” and got his immediate attention. Understandably, she felt her father was more interested in others than in her.

“I know that my children will superimpose the image of their father, to some degree, upon their understanding of God,” says David Goodman, pastor of Winnetka (Illinois) Bible Church. “Most kids do. I don’t want my kids seeing God as one who is interested only in others and not in them. At the same time, the time in the foyer after a Sunday service is crucial ministry time.”

So he has devised an arrangement. “We get someone, usually one of the single women, to get our two youngest kids from their classrooms and watch them for the forty-five minutes right after church while we’re busy. We pay her, and sometimes she takes them to the park across the street, or, if the weather is bad, she plays with them in a room in the church.

“We don’t need child care for our 10-year-old; she’s seeing her friends and talking to other people. (I think one of the advantages for kids growing up in a church home is that they tend to be well socialized; they get more interaction with adults.) But for the two younger ones, we had to get child care because otherwise they get into mischief. After all, they’ve been in church two to three hours already, and if we’re too harsh on them, they begin to resent the whole experience. That’s the last thing we want. We want them to enjoy going to church as we enjoy going to church.”

When Children Are Older

In the later elementary-school years and beyond, strategies change. Here are some methods used by ministry parents who have preteens and adolescents.

The first and most common is to involve the children in various aspects of the ministry. One way is to pay them for office work. “I’ll often bring one of my kids to the church when he or she needs to earn a little money,” said John Yates of The Falls Church in northern Virginia. “There’s always some filing or sweeping that needs to be done, and I pay them out of my pocket.

“My dad was in the department store business when I was young. I started working there when I was 12, and he’d pay me out of his pocket. It made me feel special that my dad was in charge of this organization, and that I could work there, too. And the employees loved Dad’s children. Well, I see that same kind of feeling among the children here. This is a happy church, and my kids feel loved when they come here to work.”

Another way to involve children is to take them along on certain kinds of visitation. Hank Simon of Signal Hill Lutheran Church near St. Louis, Missouri, takes his 10-year-old along every time he visits Mrs. Keller, a long-time member of the church who is a shut-in. And over the years Christy has grown very close to “her shut-in.” Mrs. Keller often has little treats for Christy. For instance, when Christy took her an Easter basket, Mrs. Keller had some chocolate-covered peanuts for her.

“Christy is learning that caring is part of the Christian life,” says Mary Simon, Christy’s mom. “Now she’s worried because the woman’s cat is more than 14 years old. Recently she asked me, ‘What will Mrs. Keller do when her cat dies?’ I was touched that a 10-year-old could care so deeply for her elderly friend.”

Another time, Mary Simon remembers, Christy stood on the footrest of a wheelchair so one of the blind people could feel her face. Finally the woman said, “Thank you. I’m so glad to see you.”

“Our daughters remember visiting the 101-year-old lady in the nursing home — and going to a funeral of a young child,” said Mary. “By being involved in ministry this way, they have developed a good sense of life’s stages.”

John Yates took his 11-year-old son to a dinner where John was to be the speaker. “They invited my wife and me, but Susan was busy that night, so I asked if I could bring my son. The hosts agreed. Well, you might think he would have been bored stiff at a formal dinner with a bunch of old people. But he wasn’t. Afterward he said, ‘Dad, that was a great talk.’ And he even enjoyed talking with some of the people. Later one of the older ladies wrote him a letter and sent him a gift — a Bible. It turned out to be a great experience for both of us.”

Yet another strategy is occasionally to single out children for special treatment. A number of pastors’ kids recall their parents doing something especially for them, even amid the busyness of ministry. This event often made a profound and lasting mark on their attitudes toward ministry.

Richard Strauss remembers: “When I was about 5, my dad had a portrait taken of just him and me with our arms around each other, and he wrote across that portrait, Pals. He hung it in his study. I used to go in when he wasn’t there and just stand and look at that picture. It meant more to me at that age than anything in life. In fact, I’ve got it at home now.”

At times, pastors’ kids seem to need an occasional reminder that they’re “more special” than the members of the congregation. One of the best reminders: periodically spending time one-on-one. Sometimes this requires firm resolve. One pastor, who was also the son of a pastor, recalled a key moment in his upbringing.

“In addition to pastoring, my dad worked a second job, 3-11 p.m. five nights a week, to support our family. But about once every other month, he would do something one-on-one with each of us kids. One Saturday morning, it was my turn, and Dad and I were getting ready to go hunting.”

Suddenly a car pulled in front of the house. It was Wilbur Enburg, one of the elders, and he wanted the pastor to come with him.

“It’s Joe and Laura,” Wilbur said. “They’re upset and say they’re going to leave the church. I think you should go see them.”

“I talked with Joe last week, and with Laura the week before that,” the pastor said. “The situation can wait.”

Wilbur wasn’t happy. “I think you should see them today.”

“Sorry,” said the pastor as his son watched silently. “I’m going hunting today.”

Wilbur’s face got red. “If you go hunting, don’t bother to come back.” Then he turned to get back into his car.

“I don’t think you mean that, Wilbur,” the pastor said. “I’ll see you in church tomorrow.”

The pastor’s son reflects, “As Dad and I headed off to the woods, I had to ask, ‘Is this going to cost you your job?'”

“‘I don’t think so,’ Dad said. ‘But if it does, the job is not worth keeping.'”

Sure enough, the matter with Joe and Laura was not an emergency. They did not leave the church, and the pastor’s ministry remained intact. And the pastor’s son learned a lasting lesson: his dad considered him more important than pleasing a particular elder. That affirmation has lasted nearly forty years.

This story, however, raises another question in giving children a healthy church experience: How to handle the conflicts and difficult people that arise in any church? How do these affect the children?

The Critical and the Contentious

When difficulties arise in church life, parents face the challenge of explaining to the kids what’s happening without souring the children’s attitudes toward the church. The approaches will differ depending on the ages and maturity levels of the children, of course, but some of the key principles remain constant.

Most pastoral families try to shield their children, especially in their younger years, from exposure to the criticisms and conflicts of church life.

“We don’t want to poison their attitudes toward the church or toward any individual,” said one minister’s spouse. “So we don’t roast the congregation at the dinner table. We try to focus on the positive things happening in the church.”

Of course, there will be times when children will eavesdrop on conversations, or, when a critic phones you at home, they’ll overhear your side of the conversation. They may sense your discomfort or hear you desperately trying to phrase an appropriate response. Then, after you’ve hung up the phone, what do you say?

“After I’ve been discussing a church problem on the phone,” said a California pastor, “often our young children will ask me, ‘Who was that on the phone?’ I’ll say, ‘Someone from church,’ and if they press for details, I’ll simply tell them, ‘It’s not your conversation.'”

As children get older, however, and begin answering the phone themselves, they’ll know who the other person is, and when they sense from your responses that there is tension, a bit more explanation may be in order.

Most pastors let their children know that other people often see things differently — and that’s okay. They don’t bad-mouth the people but try to explain the differing points of view.

One tough situation is explaining why a particular family is leaving the church.

“I’ll try to give people the benefit of the doubt — ‘they felt they had legitimate reasons, and people need to find a church where they feel comfortable,'” said one pastor on the survey.

The most important principle seems to be: Don’t overstate the seriousness of the conflict. If you’re going to err, err on the side of understating the problem. Children don’t have the perspective their parents do. They have a hard time understanding that “5 percent of the congregation is giving us a hard time.” Instead, their lasting impression is likely to be “the whole church gave us a raw deal” — an attitude that can have long-lasting effects.

One pastor tells of a mistake in handling church tensions: “A man has been harassing me recently. He wants me to do something I can’t do. Our board has discussed the issue, and their decision has been clear. But this man feels I should override the board’s decision. He and I have discussed the situation many times; he has called me at all hours — even 4 o’clock in the morning! I had to hang up on him a time or two.

“The other night my 11-year-old daughter answered the phone and told my wife that Mr. Smith wanted to talk to me. I was upstairs, but my wife, knowing the situation, said, ‘Tell him your Daddy can’t talk to him right now.’

“My wife immediately regretted that she hadn’t told Mr. Smith herself, because it tore up my daughter. She didn’t know the situation, but she knew I was home. She naturally wondered, Why won’t Daddy talk to him? She sensed the tension, and she was scared. So that night I tried to explain that I’d tried to help the man, but couldn’t, and he kept bothering us. When she realized there wasn’t a genuine need, she could accept that. But she should never have been put in that position.”

Learning from that mistake, the parents now vow to handle such encounters themselves.

Gordon MacDonald, reflecting on his three pastorates in three different states, said: “I don’t think the kids ever heard us talk negatively about people. Frequently Gail or I would say, ‘This is a tough week for us, kids. Dad’s under a lot of pressure.’ Or ‘Dad’s had a few disappointments, so I may not be myself.’ But I wouldn’t say, ‘Joe Brown is really socking it to me this week.’

“Yes, there would be times when they knew somebody had called frequently. So it was not unusual to say, ‘You need to know that Mr. and Mrs. Smith are having a rough time these days. Mom and Dad are helping them. You may see them here at the house for a while tomorrow night. We’d really appreciate it if you’d just breathe a prayer for Mom and Dad that we can find the best way to help.’ As the kids grew older, they would join us in praying for these people and would delight when we would bring them good news about so-and-so. We didn’t break confidences. But we did paint broad-stroke pictures for them so they understood the things they observed.”

Another pastor, F. Dean Lueking of Grace Lutheran Church in River Forest, Illinois, established specific ground rules for talking about church conflicts.

“I always try to operate by this principle when I’m with my children: to talk about adversaries in such a way that if they were present, they’d feel their views had been fairly represented. I often find myself saying, ‘I can see why he feels that way, even though it distresses me.'”

This practice gives children a healthy perspective on conflict. They see that even while people differ, respect can be maintained.

At times, though, Lueking found he needed to invoke a second ground rule, “our four-minute rule.”

“Especially at the dinner table,” he says, “we would put a limit of four minutes on conversation about congregational troubles. Then it would be on to the Cubs, vacation plans, our reading, or whatever. Pastors can go on and on about church problems, and I wanted to make sure that didn’t dominate our talk and our thoughts.”

Dealing with the Curious

Sometimes parishioners treat the pastor’s kids as sources of inside information. One pastor reported the following encounter:

Ed Bailey, a middle-aged parishioner, approached the pastor’s 10-year-old son in the narthex after a morning service.

“Hi, Josh. How’s school?”

“All right,” said the pastor’s son.

“That’s good. Say, you know Marilyn Mason, don’t you?”

Josh nodded. Marilyn was a single woman who sang in the choir and occasionally helped in his Sunday school class.

“Has she ever come over to your house?”

Josh didn’t know what to say. He knew Marilyn had come over to talk to his dad and mom, but he didn’t know about what. So he said, “I think so.”

“How many times has she been there? A lot? Did you see her there this week?”

“I don’t know,” said Josh. Finally Ed quit the inquisition. Josh felt uncomfortable, and at home that afternoon he told his dad what had happened.

The pastor was irritated. “Marilyn had been coming to my wife and me for encouragement and counsel about some family concerns. Ed was a friend of Marilyn’s older brother. I told my son that the situation was none of Ed’s business and that I was sorry he had been put under that pressure.” He let his son know that he had done the right thing in pleading ignorance. “I told him it wasn’t his fault and assured him that I would handle the situation. I wanted to take all the burden for this off my son.”

So later that week, after he had calmed down, the pastor called Ed. “I told him that Josh had mentioned the conversation and felt uncomfortable because he didn’t know what to say. I asked Ed please not to put my children on the spot. I suggested that if he needed information, he should get it from me.”

Ed was silent. He didn’t offer an explanation for his curiosity, nor did the pastor ask for one. But the calm confrontation was effective.

“That was two years ago,” says the pastor, “and Ed didn’t seem offended. More important, he hasn’t grilled my kids since.”

How do you prepare children to respond to nosy members of the congregation?

Some ministry families tell their children only what they would be willing to share with the whole church. This is reasonably effective with younger children, but as they get older they will naturally observe the seamier side of ministry — frayed nerves, differences of opinion, criticism, conflict. Some children develop a sixth sense for what is appropriate to talk about with church members; other children may need some guidance.

One pastor instructs his children simply to say “I don’t know” or “You should ask Dad about that” when people ask for information about specific people.

Another ministry couple teaches their children that certain things are talked about only within the family. “When our kids were young, we distinguished between ‘good words’ (which they could use anytime) and ‘bad words’ (which they were never to use) and ‘secret words’ (mostly bodily parts or functions, which we were to talk about only within our own family). They’ve been pretty good about honoring our understanding about secret words. As they’re getting older, we’re able to build on that concept to explain that other kinds of things also stay within the family.”

Another pastor put it this way: “We’ll tell our children what other people in the congregation are likely to know. We want them to hear the story from us rather than from anyone else, if possible. So with sensitive information about someone, I’ve often said, ‘Here’s what other people know, but let’s not be the ones to talk about it, okay? That’s gossip.’ Our kids respond well to that. We let them know we’re trusting them, and we want to continue to develop that attitude of trust.”

Capitalizing on the Compensations

Perhaps the most important element in helping children have a good experience in the church is not to prepare them for the bad times but to accentuate the good experiences.

“I remember how rude people at church seemed to be to us kids,” says Chuck Smith, Jr. “After a service, I’d be standing there holding Dad’s hand, and they would step right between Dad and me — coming between us both literally and figuratively. They either ignored me or seemed annoyed that I was there, since their lives were falling apart and they had to talk to the pastor. I grew up hating adults, these people I always had to be polite to.

“But Dad was sensitive to what I was feeling. He would let me hang on to him, grab his pant leg, and I never heard him say, ‘Go away. I’m trying to talk to this person right now.'”

In addition, Chuck remembers his father’s going out of his way to make sure his son also realized the benefits of being the preacher’s kid. “He had a saying — ‘When your dad owns the candy store, you’re treated to certain privileges.’ For instance, one time Dad was the director of a week-long summer camp. He took me along, and most of the time I was kind of lonely because he wasn’t really there for me. There was always a crowd of people around him. I caught him only coming and going.

“But one evening, everyone was finishing dinner, and he came to my table and whispered, ‘Grab your swimsuit and meet me at the pool.’

“The pool was closed then. But he opened the lock and we got in. I’ll never forget it — just Dad and me swimming in the pool. It was like he ‘owned the candy store’ that weekend. As camp director, he had access to the pool, and he wasn’t breaking any rules by going in there with his son. Things like that were very special to me.”

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