Confessions of a Fallen Shepherd
"Therefore, confess your sins to one another [your false steps, your offenses], and pray for one another, that you may be healed and restored. The heartfelt and persistent prayer of a righteous man (believer) can accomplish much [when put into action and made effective by God - it is dynamic and can have tremendous power]". - James 5:16 (The Amplified Bible)
God knows this. It's why he spends so much time and effort teaching us about faith and then exercising it.
Satan knows this. It's why he spends so much time and effort trying to convince people God doesn't care, can't help, and/or doesn't exist.
Every believer who has ever walked away from God only to return after spending some time in the 'hog pen' knows this. It's why some of the most powerful testimonies in Christianity are those shared by contemporary prodigal sons. That is why I'm spending so much time setting up my story.
I'm one of God's 'prodigal sons' with a powerful redemption story to tell.
It has taken me a lot of time to write this blog post. I've wrestled with the concept of airing details of my dirty laundry in public because I know the risk inherent in doing so. It's a lot easier to keep my past in the past and just speak in vague terms about how bad I use to be.
But, vague references to past sins doesn't really address specific issues that Christians struggle with on a daily basis. Statistics bear out a very dark reality inside our sanctuaries with the number of church attendees who suffer with varying levels of anxiety and depression growing at an astronomical rate.
If the stats are to be believed, our churches are filled with people who are struggling with (and in far too many cases, losing to) debilitating mental, emotional, and spiritual health issues. This is a tragic reality that really isn't being addressed in a healthy way by too many churches... and this is especially true when the person struggling with their faith is the one standing behind the pulpit.
Here's one of the bigger elephants in the auditorium within modern Christianity. We really don't know what to do with fallen pastors, generally speaking. Most of us will happily acknowledge that we're all 'sinners saved by grace'. But what happens when someone in a position of spiritual leadership falls from that grace?
Most of us will acknowledge that pastoring is a very difficult profession. In fact, most people will confess they wouldn't be able to be a full-time pastor because of the plethora of conflicts, stresses, and challenges that come with the job. But, what happens when a pastor burns out and falls apart because of those conflicts, stresses, and challenges?
I ask these questions because, I am one of those pastors. I am a shepherd who 'fell from grace'; a pastor that burned out and fell apart because of...
Well, to be completely honest, I fell apart because of some very bad choices I made very early in my pastoral 'career'.
This is going to be a deeply personal blog post because I'm a big believer in the healing power of confession. No, not the 'name-it-and-claim-it' version of confession. I mean transparent and honest admission of our faults, our mistakes, and yes, the "Big S" - our sins. I know that last one isn't a very popular word in our culture, but I'm going to use it anyway because it is very relevant to this post's subject.
I have sinned quite a lot in my lifetime. You name it and I've done it... well, except for murder; at least so far. However, in 2008, I sinned the worst kind of sin that a full-time, evangelical, denominational, Christian pastor can sin. Yep, I'm talking about adultery. I cheated on my wife of 20+ years with a woman I had known since high school while serving as a full-time Christian pastor.
I've had a lot of opportunities to perform some pretty heavy self-examination over the last decade. Opportunities I've taken full advantage of in an effort to understand the 'why' behind my attitudes and conclusions that led me to make some very selfish and damaging choices that went completely against who I believed myself to be at the time.
I was not put on this earth to hurt anyone and I firmly believed myself incapable of hurting other people, especially not in the way I had been hurt time and time again. But, I am guilty of causing a great deal of pain and suffering, especially to the people I loved and valued above all others during those dark and lonely years.
As I look back on the man I allowed myself to become, I am still shocked at the transformation that took place. It is staggering to me to remember how dark my thoughts were, how strongly I embraced anger, bitterness, and the cynicism, pessimism, and deeply negative perspective of the universe that comes with them.
So, what happened? The short answer is, I made a very bad decision to get angry and stay angry 20 years ago.
Yeah, I probably should back up a bit.
Let's set the 'way-bac machine' to two decades ago. The place is a Baptist church in Galena Park, Texas. The year was 1998. I was in my 4th year of pastoring the then-45-year-old church filled with 65-to-85-year-old church members.
A small but politically potent group of these members had decided four years of my pastoral leadership was enough and felt they would all be better off without me than with me. Months of political wrangling from this group came to a head on a very emotionally charged Sunday evening service when this group did everything in their power to publicly remove me from my pastoral position.
I was accused of everything from embezzlement to harassing and abusing elderly people to the Kennedy assassination to El Nino. They failed to remove me that night. But what they DID do was load an emotional, psychological, and spiritual gun that I carried with me for a decade before finally pulling the trigger myself.
Twenty years removed from that night, I can laugh at their obviously clumsy coup attempt. But in 1998, my 28-year-old heart and my previously unshakeable faith in God was shattered. When the smoke cleared after that horrible night, my perspective of God, modern Christianity, and my role in the Kingdom of God was crushed under the weight of my disappointment, disillusionment, and, most of all, anger.
Oh yes, I was very angry. I was angry with "those people" who falsely accused me and tried to run me and my family out of town on a rail simply because they did not like the direction I was trying to take "their" church. Eventually that anger extended to ALL Christians of every size, shape, color, and creed. But the big kicker was when the focus of my rage centered onto God Himself.
It didn't take long for me to conclude that the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God I had been serving was not only NOT any of those descriptives but he was hardly worthy of the sacrifices I had given to him over my lifetime. Months of fervent, heartfelt prayers to my Protector for protection from this group of "Christians" had apparently fallen upon deaf ears. My cries for help in my time of trouble were not answered as I expected them to be. I had begged my savior to save me and his answer appeared to be an emphatic and unmistakable "no".
It took a couple of months of processing the events of that night before I came to the inescapable conclusion that God could only be one of three things:
1. A sadist who took pleasure in watching his 'children' suffer, Job-style.
2. A lying liar who lies because he failed to fulfill his promises to be my 'shield', my 'mighty fortress', or my 'strong tower'.
3. A figment of ancient man's fevered dreams and insane imaginations.
Oh, I really, Really, REALLY wanted number three to be true. Because if God doesn't exist, then the Bible and all of it's commandments and rules were fiction. The rules I had committed my life to were fables and fairy tales. If God didn't exist, I was 'free' to do whatever I wanted.
And, I did. With gusto.
Oh, it didn't happen all at once. After all, it's quite difficult to deprogram nearly 30 years of beliefs in a few months. In fact, it took a full decade before I finally pulled the plug on my dying faith in God. From 1998 to 2008, I continued serving in some form of pastoral position in a couple of churches. I did this because it was all I knew and I had to pay the bills. I had a wife and a family to provide for and pastoring was all I had been prepared to do. But, my heart wasn't in it. I struggled from one position to the next desperately trying to ignore the growing doubts about everything I had been taught and was still trying to teach others.
It was during this time that I revisited well-known Biblical stories with my pessimism filter set to 'maximum'. I didn't get far into the creation story before red-lining my personal male bovine feces detector. That 'Tree of Knowledge' just jumped off the page and with it all of the questions I raised in my last post.
My conclusion about the logic behind the Bible was the same as all the agnostic and atheistic artists I'd started paying attention to: none of this made any sense. My doubts about the faith of my childhood took on a life of their own.
Every run-in with a hard-headed 'Christian' just fueled those doubts. Every church confrontation was just more evidence that if God existed at all, He simply did not give a rip about any of 'his people' on earth, least of all his shepherds. By the time 2008 rolled around, I was a 38-year-old struggling preacher facing a full-blown mid-life crisis of faith.
By the end of 2008, I was hell-bent on destroying everything I had built. I wanted nothing to do with God, Christians, Christianity, or church. I was done with serving a 'God' who couldn't be bothered to help a helpless servant who was constantly finding himself at the mercy of merciless church people.
When I resigned my pastoral position in January 2009, I did so with the full intention of never entering another church building for the rest of my life and I made good on that vow for a couple of indescribably miserable years. I packed up my family and moved them from our home in Pearland, Texas to live with my wife's brother and his family on the other side of Houston. My resignation and subsequent move cemented my break from Christianity and I quickly proceeded to turn my life into a dumpster fire of Biblical proportions.
All the vices and abuses I had avoided in my teens and 20s for the 'cause of Christ' I now fully embraced. I drank like a fish. Smoked like a chimney. Cussed like the love-child of a trucker and a sailor. I did everything humanly possible to exorcise every shred of Christianity's scent from me all while cursing God and His kingdom with every step I took.
Naturally, I accumulated all of the horrible consequences that comes from those horrible seeds I planted. Every negative consequence I 'suffered' simply proved my conclusion that God did not care and could not be bothered to lift his omnipotent finger to help his suffering children. My downward spiral was spectacular and devastating.
It's taken me twenty years to write about these events in any kind of detail. There was a time that I could not drive anywhere near Galena Park, Texas without flying into a rage. For 20 years I struggled with everything that comes with anger and bitterness: depression, anxiety attacks, indifference to people I was in relationship with, selfishness, and more. For twenty years I fought against the demons in my soul with little more than a water pistol. I very nearly ended my life more than once.
As for my 20+ year marriage and my family, I did the same thing to my wife and children that had been done to me. I loaded an emotional, psychological, and spiritual gun with my selfish actions in 2008 and 2009 and then watched helplessly as my wife and children each pulled the trigger on our relationships five years after I had repented from my horribly selfish sins and begun a new journey with God...
...because 'hurt people hurt people'.
Of course, with all good testimonies there has to be a turning point towards redemption and there most definitely was. I'll get into those details in my next post but before I end this one I want to share a two verses of scripture God introduced to me many years before I crashed and burned.
I'm quoting from the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible for a very specific reason which I will get into later. But, for now, here are the two verses of scripture God has used to not only re-introduce Himself to me but to open doors of revelation about Himself that has absolutely set me free from the emotional, mental, and spiritual anguish I've lived with for most of my life and set me on a new journey with him that has been more powerful than my eye has ever seen or my ears have ever heard...
And the Lord said, Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat. But, I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren. - Luke 22:31-32
(more to come)
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