The Pit and the Pastor
Depression by Don Baker and Emery Nester, Multnomah, $9.95
Reviewed by Tom McKee, pastor, Sun River Church, Rancho Cordova, California
“I had visited Ward 7E many times. . . . It resembled most of the psychiatric wards and mental hospitals where I had gone to minister to members of my congregation. … I’ve never felt comfortable with the mentally ill. This time, however, my discomfort had been replaced by fear. … This time I was being led down the silent halls of Ward 7E, not as pastor, but as patient.”
So begins the personal narrative of Don Baker’s depression. His hospital admission, his counseling, his withdrawal, his desire for a God who seemed absent, his fellow sufferers, his family-all are talked about with compelling honesty, which makes it easy to identify with him.
Among the stacks of books on depression, this one is unique. It is not primarily a self-help book or an analysis but the journey of a pastor who is broken and restored. The assurance given Baker by a counselor upon admission-“It may take time, but you will get better”-speaks through the pages of his story.
Baker had to turn to the world of psychiatric medicine, alien turf to most pastors. Co-author Emery Nester, associate professor of psychology at Western Conservative Baptist Seminary in Portland, writes the second half of the book. While Baker helps us understand the feelings of the patient, Nester, who helped counsel Baker, provides the perspective of a trained therapist.
Baker takes us inside the black hole of despair. As he checks into Ward 7E we feel his humiliation when the nurse, a member of his congregation, unthinkingly says, “Pastor, what are you doing here?” We sense his shame in the group therapy sessions-how could he tell them he was a pastor? We feel his fear as he rooms with a man criminally insane, arrested on charges of rape and assault with a deadly weapon. We absorb with him the pain of withdrawal and rejection as his church board votes to let him go, and he is unemployed for the first time in thirty years. What will he do? We sense the feeling of alienation from God as he thinks of suicide. The chapter describing a counselor’s dialogue with him about suicide, forcing him to take this possibility through to its logical extensions, is superb.
In a recent interview, Baker says he struggled in presenting the chapters on hypoglycemia and Satan. He was afraid they would be pulled out of context and made the focus of the book when they are merely ingredients to the whole-but ingredients that cannot be left out. Today Baker is on medication and a careful diet to control the sugar imbalance in his system. He says he has never worked harder and felt less threatened or less harassed by time. The difference is that he now knows what to do about his physical, spiritual, and emotional needs. While he doesn’t want to underemphasize or overemphasize the role of Satan in his life-certainly not to sensationalize this important part of his struggle-he still declares, “I had underrated my enemy. I had ignored the pleas of Scripture.”
After his release from the hospital and a literal mountain-top experience alone at a cabin at Hume Lake, California, Baker was “out of my black hole.” But what next? Surely no church would call a pastor who had spent time in a psychiatric ward. Despite the fact that “I was depressive and . . . could possibly give way again if I became exhausted or was placed under too much stress,” Portland’s historic Hinson Memorial Baptist Church called him and has enjoyed God’s rich blessing during his nine-year ministry there.
The second half of the book is by Emery Nester, who spent approximately one hundred hours with Baker in the evenings after his own regular counseling schedule.
Nester, using illustrations from Baker’s story as well as other case studies, describes the nature of depression. Particularly helpful is a chapter on how to help a family member who is in depression. He urges the family to avoid taking responsibility for the problem but to realize that there are “types of lifestyles in a family that can contribute in a general way to depression.” Included in his list of suggestions is the caution that family members should not try to be therapists. “Be stingy with advice. Offer encouragement by ‘walking with the person.’ ” And if it is clear that the depressed person is not handling his condition, if routine activities have become difficult-then the family should assist in finding professional help.
Other valuable sections include how to help children to be nondepressive, what a depressed person can do to help himself, and common misconceptions of Christians about depression.
Why another book on depression? Baker said he wrote the book to give hope to the depressed and eliminate false impressions about depression. He also wanted to open the doors for the Christian community to admit weakness.
“In the presence of mental illness, we’re all total cripples,” he said. “I had never felt so deserted in all my life. For seven years I had given my time, my energy, my love, and all my abilities to a wonderful church family. And yet in my deepest need, they were unable to respond. Unable-not unwilling. Church families are just like human families. It’s easy to tend to wounds that are visible and pray for ailments that are definable, but mental illness still carries with it the stigma of the Dark Ages. The Christian community really hasn’t advanced very far when it comes to ministering to the depressed.”
Charles and Cynthia Swindoll (Cynthia pens a moving foreword, mentioning her own bout with depression) told him his story was the “best-kept secret in Christendom,” encouraging him to write it.
Depression: Finding Hope and Meaning in Life’s Dark Shadows provides a rainbow of hope for those in despair. Nester points out that in God’s pattern for our lives, everything becomes purposeful and good, moving us toward conformity to the image of Jesus. “The Don Baker of today is not the Don Baker of twenty-five years ago. The four years of depression and despair are part of God’s conforming him to Christ’s image.”
Becoming Bullish on the Family
A New Design for Family Ministry by Dennis B. Guernsey, Cook, $6.95
Reviewed by John F. Anderson, pastor, First Baptist Church, La Crescenta, California
“All things considered, we can be bullish about the family,” writes church lover and critic Dennis Guernsey. His passionate appeal is for the church to become a “family of families.”
Guernsey, associate professor of marriage and family ministries at Fuller Theological Seminary, considers himself called to be a “missionary to the family.” A former pastoral staff member, Guernsey was prompted to write the book after a church leadership retreat, where a pastor friend asked, “Dennis, why such an emphasis and concern about the family? People have been hurting since the Fall. The greater importance to me is God’s institution, the church.” Guernsey feels that attitude is typical of too many church workers today.
The underlying thesis of the book is that the church and the family are God’s two unique and special creations. Therefore, they must do more than tolerate each other. They must work together, with mutual love, knowing that as one flourishes, so will the other.
Of practical help is the author’s fresh thinking about how family relationships change with time. Families, like individuals, pass through stages. Understanding the “family systems” is crucial to effective ministry.
“Only, perhaps, in the case of premarital counseling is the church involved in anticipating the dangers that lie ahead and providing needed information about the future,” writes Guernsey. “But what about the other stages? Who teaches young parents how to survive the intrusion of a squalling infant? … Who prepares parents to handle the storms of adolescence or the uncertainty of midlife? It is this vacuum that provides the church with its most exciting opportunity for ministry today.”
Most materials on family education are written topically, Guernsey points out. “Take the issue of communication. It is usually dealt with across the life cycle even though the communication demands of a couple are different at one stage than another. Or take books on sex. Most are written as if sex in marriage does not change according to how old you are or how long you’ve been married. However, sex in marriage does change. … If we teach without reference to these differences, we are less than effective.”
The book divides family life into three stages: The Beginning Years (between families, neo-marital, neo-parental); The Building Years (young children, first teenager); The Maturing Years (empty nest, retirement). In addition, Guernsey discusses The Single Years (single person, single parent) as a separate category.
How should the church relate to persons in the changing family settings? Guernsey believes the issues can best be addressed by a family-systems approach, which deals with the interaction of a family as a whole rather than focusing upon individual members. Success of the systems approach depends upon getting and processing information.
“Where does the family system learn the functions of both positive and negative feedback? … The same place they learn about their stage in the life cycle, and they must learn it among a caring community which will reassure them when they needlessly panic or confront them when they must change.”
The church is the place. The church is where a large challenge (or burden) is placed. At points I felt the author was asking too much. When personally confronted with the question, “Aren’t you expecting more than the church can deliver?” Guernsey didn’t budge.
“We need an ombudsman for the family in every church,” he said. “The church, as an institution, often acts selfishly for its own interest. We need someone in every church watching family life and reminding the church when it’s wrong. Pastors need to ponder this question: ‘What will God hold me accountable for?’ In the long run, I don’t believe it will be the big, successful program.”
I was pushed back to Guernsey’s image of the church as a “family of families.” In an age of change characterized by individualism, narcissism, and future shock, the church and the family are indeed the hope of the world. “The dreadful lack in the world today is in the area of meaningful and permanent relationships. The world is not only distant from God, it is also a conglomeration of people distant from one another.”
The future can be scary as we see family structures changing, but as Guernsey writes, “The family of the future may well be somewhat unlike the family of the past. The task for the church is … to engage in creative ministry. The family is changing, and change is often hard. But we must remember that it has been in times of change that God has brought about much good.”
It is that note of hope based upon biblical, theological confidence that makes Dennis Guernsey bullish on the family. Not only does the book A New Design for Family Ministry make a more convinced, troubled, and hopeful believer of me, it calls me to respond.
A Calm Word on Spirited Debate
Those Controversial Gifts by George Mallone, InterVarsity, $4.95
Reviewed by Dean Merrill, senior editor, LEADERSHIP
Who writes books on manifestations of the Spirit? (1) Scholars; (2) lay people with a story to tell; (3) Pentecostals.
George Mallone is none of the three. He is rather a working pastor seeking to open the church door to the Spirit’s gifts without having pews and hymnals go flying through the air. A “teaching elder” among the Brethren of British Columbia, Mallone speaks from experience about safely incorporating the gifts into congregational life-not only administration and showing mercy but also prophecy, dreams, visions, healing, and even tongues and interpretation .
“I’m trying to be a sober evangelical who doesn’t exegete like a Pentecostal but is still open to all the gifts,” he says.
Interestingly, it was the 1980 book of another West Coast pastor-John MacArthur’s The Charismatics-that set Mallone to writing. “I felt John was highly unfair in places,” he says, “possibly because he had not seen some of the helpful things I’d been exposed to and the thoughtful people who had challenged my traditions.” He drew up the outline for Those Controversial Gifts and then recruited three like-minded Vancouver pastors to help him write it. (“This book is really a city effort,” he notes.)
The complimentary foreword by Anglican Michael Green is followed by the first chapter asking whether the gifts really did cease at the end of the first century. Mallone’s conclusion: no. His pastoral approach quickly surfaces as he tells about arriving home from a summer holiday and finding charismatic fever among some of his members. “My immediate reaction was to stamp it out as quickly as possible before it spread. I began to notice in the lives of certain people, however, a genuine spiritual renewal. My next step was to attempt to teach rather than to stamp out. But as I began to teach I found that I, as a cessationist, had much to learn also. About that time God sent us a couple from England who had the experience of living in harmony with those who manifested particular gifts as well as those who did not. … We began to grow in love toward one another. It was this love which was able to cast out all fear.”
The subsequent chapters include biblical review as well as practical pastoral strategy. A prophetic “thus saith the Lord” needs to undergo three tests, he says: theological, confessional, and moral. Hence, “prophecies that come through the electronic church are suspect. The viewer simply cannot investigate the character of the person who has spoken. Without a character reference, we are to remain quietly agnostic about what is said.”
In fact, Mallone wonders (citing theologian James Dunn) whether the charisma called “discernment” may not have originally had less to do with demons than with judging prophetic utterances. After prophecy died out in the ancient church, interpreters apparently sought an alternate field of use for the gift and settled on exorcism.
Dreams and visions are welcomed and then safeguarded in chapter three (by John Opmeer). Mallone returns in the next chapter to deal with tongues, “the biggest Christian friendship and oneness buster of the century.” Pentecostals will not like him calling their view (individual tongues as a visible sign of the Spirit’s infilling) “one of the greatest theological tragedies to befall the church.” Yet both he and his wife speak in tongues and have even aided others who longed to do so. A seasoned discussion of both the potential abuses and the benefits is enlightening.
The chapter on healing (by Jeff Kirby) traces Old Testament, New Testament, and church history roots, shows the gift in action today, but is also candid about those left unhealed. “With our practice of the healing ministry, we must build a parallel theology of suffering, not as a place to hide when healing does not come, but as a way of understanding another mode of the work of God in the lives of his people-suffering.”
Paul Stevens then contributes a chapter on “Equipping for Spiritual Gifts.” His methods: exposure to those with experience in the gifts, experimentation in a loving setting under guidance (e.g., house groups), and extension into the world at large. His cheerful philosophy: “Everyone doing anything should get help to do it better.”
Perhaps the best chapter in the book is Mallone’s finale, “From Fear to Faith.” He gently names why we hesitate to embrace the controversial gifts: fear of others, fear of ourselves (“I’m not worthy to be used in this way”), and fear that God might be displeased if we stumble. “Let us put off fear and put on love and exercise the gifts-all of them-with all the diligence and energy God provides.”
Pastors who have felt pushed and prodded by eager charismatics in their congregations will be able to relax with this book even as they absorb its helpful insights. And all Christians who hope for rapprochement between the church’s charismatic and noncharismatic wings will appreciate the light George Mallone and his friends shed on the path.
Making a Rancher Out of a Shepherd
How to Start Lay-Shepherding Ministries by Charles A. Ver Straten, Baker, $4.95
Reviewed by James Berkley, pastor, Dixon Community Church, Dixon, California
Were I a sheep, I would choose Chuck Ver Straten’s flock. Once a Wyoming sheep rancher and now a veteran Baptist pastor of nearly thirty years, Ver Straten personifies the consummate pastor/shepherd. Like the sheep dog, his every instinct is to shepherd his people. He breathes it in conversation and reveals it in his book.
Ver Straten will not be content while any part of his flock suffers. In smaller churches early in his ministry, he felt reasonably able to bind most of the wounds. However, as his flock increased at Mission Hills Church in suburban Denver from a handful to six hundred, problems developed.
“On paper it appeared to be a successful church,” he writes. “As the senior pastor, I was frustrated, overextended, and ready to resign. My greatest strength had proved to be my undoing. God had given me a pastor’s heart to care deeply for people.” Yet Chuck had more people to care for than time to do the caring.
He resolved to work harder, but the harder he worked, the more people brought their needs to his doorstep. Then he added staff. Adding pastors, however, was like extinguishing a fire with gasoline. The staff built programs that attracted yet more people with pastoral needs. What’s a pastor to do?
He found his answer in lay shepherds. This hardly qualifies as original, yet Ver Straten progressed one step beyond most of us: he actually implemented a lay-shepherding program. Most pastors I know succumb to the common wisdom that grumbles, “Every church needs lay shepherding, but nobody can make it work.”
His thin book tells how he pulled it off. In an easy-reading style, Ver Straten walks through his own thought processes and the step-by-step methods of lay-shepherding ministries.
First he outlines his theology, a deeply rooted belief in the ministry of the laity. Although it reads like a dissertation chapter-which it was-it lays a solid footing for his approach.
Second comes the method for choosing lay shepherds. Ver Straten used the board of deacons, capitalizing on their inherent spiritual authority, which allows them to minister more effectively as lay shepherds.
I immediately thought of some deacons I know whose gifts were definitely not evident as shepherds. Were Ver Straten’s deacons a blue ribbon batch? When asked, Ver Straten assured me that he began with typical people. “There was a natural attrition from the boards as people’s terms ended. I had no resignations, but some chose not to be re-elected.” When looking for new deacons, Chuck sought people who were not interested in “running the church in monthly business meetings.” He wanted “people-to-people types-people wanting to grow, people wanting meaningful ministry.”
A prior move that vested church business matters in another body freed the deacons to concentrate on spiritual matters. For churches not so structured, he advises: “If the board is entrenched, I would introduce a new group of lay shepherds. But it is better if they are elected to their spiritual ministries.”
Their shepherding ministries were quite a task, involving weekly training for three years. Ver Straten devotes a considerable portion of the book and appendices to the subject of training. Probably this is where most defunct lay-shepherding programs failed. Ver Straten almost flagged: “In the initial stages of planning the program and writing the training manual, plus preparing lessons for each week’s session, I wondered if I had made a mistake. Adding this expenditure of time and effort to an overextended life appeared to be foolhardy.” However, the wisdom of continuing won out, and the resulting lesson plans benefit us all.
To keep his work from sounding like pure theory, Ver Straten provides a smorgasbord of specific ways his shepherds have ministered. From securing the burglary-plagued home of a single woman to financial counseling to bringing a pot of beans to praying with people, the lay shepherds serve with imagination and love.
One unexpected effect changed Ver Straten’s perspective. He struggled when people began taking their needs to their shepherds and not to him. “The Lord has made me a shepherd!” he moaned. His adjustment to leading the shepherds rather than shepherding the sheep was not easy. He has continued with some front-line pastoral ministry so he isn’t completely removed.
A problem can arise from the success of lay shepherding. Close fellowship can be a formidable nut for an outsider to crack. Shepherding must find ways to include outsiders. Ver Straten is aware of this, and in his present church, Emmanuel Baptist in Mount Vernon, Washington, he is seeing that church attenders are added to the little flocks as soon as possible.
Moreover, lay shepherding cannot take the place of evangelism. “To add evangelism to the work of the lay shepherds is too much,” he cautions.
Within a year at his new church, Ver Straten began a lay-shepherding ministry. A few adjustments for a small-town situation were necessary, but he is using it much as he wrote in the book.
The real test of his ideas, however, was what happened at the old church. After a year without him, the Mission Hills Church has continued to thrive with lay shepherds. The ubiquitous pastor became expendable. Ver Straten concludes: “The Lord has reassigned me. I’ve been given a new job on the same ranch.”
Copyright © 1983 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
