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| Renewal Center offers help when a pastor could use a pastor | ||||||||
| Missionaries heed call despite rising risks | ||||||||
St. Paul Pioneer Press, Faith and Values section, Saturday, August 5, 2000
By Clark Morphew
Renewal Center offers help when a pastor could use a pastor
Let me tell you a little story about a pastor who finally awakened to his purpose when another man reached the end of his rope.
The two met after a worship service casually, one a layman and a visitor, the other the pastor of the church. Immediately the pastor introduced himself and they chatted for a moment. The next day the visitor called and asked to talk to someone right away, and the pastor happened to be sitting at his desk wishing for a needy person.
So they chatted again, this time over the phone. It was fairly simple: the pastor thought the man had an angry wife, many debts and a work situation that probably was not going to get better. Even though the man said several times that he was at the end of his rope, the pastor was confident everything would work out fine. They made an appointment to meet in person and work on the issues.
The day arrived and the man did not appear at the pastor’s office. A week passed, and by that time the pastor was so busy he could not find the time to track the man down and set up another appointment. Weeks later the phone rang, and the announcement was tragic. In fact, the man did literally reach the end of his rope: His son found his lifeless body hanging from a rafter in the garage.
This death sent the pastor into a tailspin. Suddenly his entire system for maintaining his self-worth was destroyed. He saw himself as a phony. He picked apart his history, beginning with childhood and continuing through all the lies he told to that minute.
He catalogued every failure he had ever committed and obsessed about them, reliving them over and over, night and day, bringing himself to the point where he could not continue ministry. He resigned short of a year of the man’s suicide. He walked away from the dream of his life.
This is not a typical story of a pastor’s ministry. But it’s true that clergy are sometimes so busy taking care of others that they cannot take care of themselves.
At the Minnesota Renewal Center, Patrick Repp, the director and chief counselor, sees how clergy are struggling.
“This is a very difficult time to be in ministry,” Repp said. “Pastors have many tools to deal with their own problems, and yet they have many more pressures. For one thing, baby boomers are skeptics. And they don’t trust leadership. So the clergy become very isolated.”
Repp says 70 percent of clergy do not have someone they consider a close friend.
Almost all of them work too many hours and at least half of them feel unable to meet the demands of their work. They fear their job is negatively affecting their families. Their self-esteem has been lowered by the job. Forty percent inappropriately get involved sexually, and more than half say they have no one with whom to discuss their sexual temptations.
“And the pedestal thing still exists,” Repp said. “We idolize these people – at least what they are upfront. And the congregation does not want to know if they have failings.”
That’s the trouble spot for a good many people who serve congregations: All of those people sitting in the pews might be considered friends. But they don’t act like friends. They don’t show concern. Sometimes they are judgmental and punitive. Sometimes they expect the pastor to be the perfect caregiver.
“They want to be leaders,” Repp said. “There’s an ethos that says, ‘I’m the one who gives help, not the one who gets help.’”
So when the clergy get their sexual temptations under control and develop a growing marriage, when they start growing spiritually and learn how congregations work, they often still have to deal with their own unrealistic expectations.
“We’ve had people in here who believe their career goal is to win the world for Christ,” Repp said. “We’ve had people in here who have had successful ministry, but they still feel like failures.”
Clark Morphew’s religion column runs on Saturdays. He can be reached at cmorphew@pioneerpress.com or (651) 228-5586
Missionaries heed call despite rising risks
Chuck Haga and Martha Sawyer Allen, Star Tribune
Political and social strife, cultural conflicts, primitive conditions -- danger always has been part of Christian missionary work, Minnesota-based missionaries say.
The killing of three Southern Baptist medical workers in Yemen this week will sadden and frighten other missionaries, they say. But it won't stop most of them.
"Churches and mission agencies are rethinking safety issues in light of the past few years, particularly since 9/11," said Patrick Repp, director of the Minnesota Renewal Center in Shoreview, which trains missionaries to deal with potential risks overseas and counsels church workers who return suffering from such problems as post-traumatic stress.
"What happened in Yemen will make folks think twice," Repp said. "But those who go to communicate the gospel or do works of service to the less fortunate know there are risks, and they are still dedicated. It's hard to keep them here.
"They're courageous people. Some would say they're foolhardy, but I don't think so. They really see their missionary work as spiritual war, not unlike people who serve their country in a regular war."
Betty Lynn Cadle recalled the last e-mail from her friend Kathleen Gariety, one of the three killed Monday.
"She said that she wanted to stay 'as long as God allows.' Those were her words," said Cadle, director of mission ministries for the Southern Baptists in Minnesota and Wisconsin. "Evidently this was as long as that man with a gun allowed.
"Kathy was a very loving, compassionate person," she said. "She was very excited about her work."
Cadle was a missionary in what was then Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, but back in the United States on a visit when a fellow missionary was killed. The denomination did not allow her to return to Africa -- not because of the danger, but for health reasons.
"If God had opened the door for me to go back, I would have gone," she said.
The Rev. Ric Koehn, 52, pastor of Grace United Methodist Church in Paynesville, Minn., has been to Africa three times and to the Middle East seven times. Despite the risks, he's eager to trade the comforts of home again.
"It's a way to travel that gets you out of the tourist bus and into the culture you're visiting," he said. "In Uganda, I lived in a mud hut for a week and helped build a church out in the bush.
"Some people will stop going on missions because of what's happened. But the dyed-in-the-wool people who have traveled and know what the situations are will continue.
"They know there's always dangers, and it's not always from terrorists. Some places I've been, the drivers were a greater threat. That's how I've almost lost my life, in traffic accidents."
An evolving role
Cadle said Southern Baptists in the Rochester, Minn., office were in shock over the deaths in Yemen.
"We have training on how to go into a country where it's not the safest place to live," she said. "The training helps us to understand the culture and values of those countries and how to live there with respect for the culture and the people."
The missionaries were in Yemen with the permission of the Yemeni government. All Christian denominations now go only where host governments allow them, according to Pat Pattillo, spokesman for the National Council of Churches, an umbrella organization.
For centuries, Christian missionaries teamed with conquering armies to force faith and culture on people, Pattillo said. Now, while Christians still take seriously the "great commission" teaching of Jesus -- that is, to go and make disciples of all nations -- they also try to be sensitive to the needs and desires of other cultures.
"They believe that Jesus had a message that would change lives," he said, "and the service they do, itself, is the witness."
The Rev. Lee Snook, a retired professor at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, was working in Zimbabwe in the mid-1980s when several missionaries were killed in a nearby village.
Some missionaries may antagonize people through an evangelical spirit that borders on cultural imperialism. But the vast majority "have this compassionate vision of the love of God that's irresistible," he said. "They go there because God is already there calling them."
That's why it's unlikely that the killings in Yemen and the tension generally in Islamic nations will keep missionaries away, Repp said.
"There are so many willing to go because they really do believe in the biblical imperative of spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ to every human being," he said. "Secondly, they really believe in the commands of scripture to serve others, whether it be by providing medical care like those folks in Yemen, or agricultural training or development."
Shock and remorse
Repp, 52, a psychologist, started the nonprofit, interdenominational Minnesota Renewal Center eight years ago. A staff of five trains missionaries and other Christian leaders and counsels, heals and renews those returning from difficult postings.
"They may be feeling shock, numbness, anger, remorse, anxiety," Repp said. "Mission work is an extremely stressful endeavor already: leaving family behind, the cross-cultural stresses, the stresses between personalities. Then you put the threat of terrorism and political strife on top of that.
"Mission agencies certainly are tightening up on where they're willing to send people. They're trying to do a better job of assessing the safety issues, especially in the Middle East. If there's a higher risk, they will pull missionaries out."
But that in itself can be traumatic for a missionary.
"Many are keen to get back" to their posts, Repp said. "Just after 9/ll, we did a debriefing with four missionaries -- two from Minnesota -- who had been pulled out of Pakistan because of events in Afghanistan. The sponsoring agencies thought they might be at risk. But the missionaries were heartbroken at having to leave."
Repp and his wife, Janell, took two young daughters along on a year's mission to Nigeria in 1990. They were there during the Gulf War.
"A number of friends and relatives were quite concerned we were putting our children at risk," he said. "But we wanted to be there, and we believe in the line that 'you are never safer than when you're in the will of God.' I know that's probably not much comfort to the families of those who were killed in Yemen, but it's what missionaries believe."
Daughter Hannah, now 20, left Tuesday for Thailand, where she will spend her college interim period teaching English to college students. She and Jessie, 17, have worked in orphanages in Mexico and Guatemala.
"They would call themselves 'world Christians,' " Repp said. "They have a world awareness that most American kids don't have."
The writers are at crhaga@startribune.com andmallen@startribune.com