When Calvary Church of Grand Rapids, Michigan, called Ed Dobson as their pastor 14 years ago, they welcomed a man whose bold nature and strong opinions had already sparked controversy nationwide. Ed was a leader in the Moral Majority and an associate of Jerry Falwell. When he came to Calvary, the church began launching ministries that defied stereotype and convention—across racial lines, to AIDS patients, and to the homeless.
Today Calvary Church has grown in size and influence. They recently released nearly a thousand members to help plant Mars Hill, a church for those disillusioned with the typical Sunday morning meeting house.
Calvary Church is going strong. But its pastor is growing weaker.
Ten months ago Ed was waiting on a diagnosis. Symptoms of something ominous were growing worse. The doctors couldn’t be absolutely sure, but they determined Ed most likely was suffering from Amyotropic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. The neuro-muscular disease is a debilitating, degenerating condition with no known cure and only one known outcome—death.
Today, Ed is still waiting—Ed and his family and his church. Though his condition has stabilized and he maintains the strength to do ministry, Ed’s health could begin deteriorating again at any time.
Leadership editors Marshall Shelley, Eric Reed, and Drew Zahn traveled to Grand Rapids to probe the prayer life of a man and a church walking through the valley of the shadow of death.
What happens to your prayer life when you’re diagnosed with a terminal disease?
When the doctors said they were 99 percent sure I had ALS, I began realizing I might have only a couple of months to a couple of years left, and most of that time would likely be miserable as I watch my body slowly quit on me. My natural assumption was that this suffering would lift my prayer life to levels it had never known before.
The truth was, I didn’t feel like praying. I didn’t feel like talking to God.
Near Bethany in Israel, I once visited a place called Lazarus’s tomb, where you can walk down a winding stone staircase into a cave at the bottom that leads to a deep, dark, first-century tomb. You can crawl in and find yourself confined in that narrow, dark space.
When the doctor said, “You will lose your ability to walk, to sit up, to swallow, to breathe, and all we can do is help you manage the pain,” I went through several months where I felt like I was in Lazarus’s tomb—cold, dark, trapped.
You’d think my first instinct would be to pray for healing. I couldn’t even bring myself to ask. I prayed for wisdom, because of all the medical options. But I didn’t pray for healing for a long time.
Were you angry?
No, I was never angry. There was a woman in our church who lost two husbands while she was still young. She had little children.
At the funeral for her second husband, she got up and said, “I have chosen not to ask why. I don’t want to waste what limited energy I have on a question for which I don’t think I’ll get an answer.”
After I was diagnosed, I told her how much her words meant to me. So from day one I chose not to ask, Why, God? because I feared that had the potential of causing anger. So, no, I’ve never been angry.
How did you crawl out of Lazarus’s tomb?
That’s a journey that really began before I was diagnosed. Three summers ago I had a friend who challenged me to think of the journey of faith not as a Christian life, but as a Christian walk. David argued that we can “live” passively, but choosing to “walk” a journey is a deliberate decision made moment by moment. He was so convinced that we needed to understand this that he proposed we go on a pilgrimage, a walking tour all over Israel.
Amazing things happened to us there. We walked up to the Mount of Beatitudes one day. We had no food. And when we got to the church at the top, it was closed for a couple hours. What were we going to do?
We spotted an Arab man selling things to tourists from a little stand in the shade. We asked him if we could sit for a while.
He said, “What are you doing? You walked here? From where?”
He was so stunned that we were walking the dry, ancient paths, that he took his own sandwich, broke it to share with us, and even squeezed some fresh orange juice. He fed us from his own meal, for free.
David and I shared his shade and read the Sermon on the Mount. When we got to Jesus’ teaching the people to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread,” we began to cry. For the first time in our lives, someone had given us our daily bread when we had no ability to get it on our own.
I learned many things on that trip that I needed later when I was diagnosed.
God was preparing you spiritually for the trial you’re facing now?
I think so, yes. While we were there, David got very sick and was hospitalized. He ended up needing heart surgery. Our walk across Israel came to a screeching halt. I went there to grow spiritually, and I was stuck doing hospital visitation.
One evening in Jerusalem, waiting for David to recover, I was reading through the Psalms, and I got to Psalm 48:12-14: “Consider the walls of Jerusalem. Walk around them. Count the fortresses. See what God has done. This God is our God. He will be our guide even to the very end.”
So I read, “Walk around the walls,” and I was thirty feet from that very wall. I sat there wondering, Do I go walk around the walls? Is this the message? I couldn’t shake the thought.
The next morning I got up to walk the walls and I kept repeating, This God is our God, he will be our guide to the very end. About halfway around the wall something came over me. Now, I’m Irish—I’m practical, rational—but for an hour and a half I was caught up in something bigger than myself. My feet were barely touching the ground.
When I was diagnosed, those prayers, “This God is our God, he will be our guide to the very end,” came back to me. They were the comfort that allowed to me to trust him again.
So “considering the walls” became a key element of your prayer life.
That time in Israel opened up a whole new appreciation of prayer from outside my usual box of understanding. For instance, I came back with a great appreciation for how the Jewish rabbis pray. We ask God to bless the food; Jews think that’s ridiculous. “God sent the rain, the sunshine, the nutrients. What do you mean, bless the food? It’s already blessed! You bless God for giving the food.”
I discovered in Judaism they have a blessing for everything. When they go to the bathroom, they bless God for their colon. We would consider that earthy and mundane. But I learned there’s a world of thankfulness that we rarely explore.
There’s also that gratefulness in the African-American community, where I’ve heard prayers like, “Thank you, Lord, for waking me up this morning.” I never used to thank God for that. After getting ALS—I do now.
The major change in my prayer life is that most of my prayers now are prayers of gratitude as opposed to a long list of requests. I’m just happy to be alive. I’m happy that you came here today. I’m happy to be able to do everything I’m able to do. I feel like Lou Gehrig in his final speech, “I’m the luckiest man on Earth.” Except I’m not lucky, I’m blessed.
How has the prospect of death affected you spiritually?
Dying has forced me to wrestle with confession. When I was diagnosed I thought, If I’m going to die, I want to die with a clear conscience and whole relationships. I knew there were people I had offended, people I needed to ask for forgiveness. So I made a list and began calling.
I called Jerry Falwell, Bob Jones, and many others and said, “I want to ask your forgiveness for anything I’ve said or done that has hurt you.” It was freeing.
Then I got a call myself from Jim Dobson. He called to tell me he and Shirley had been praying for me. “I believe God healed me when I had a stroke,” he said, “and we’re praying that God will heal you.”
I cried as I realized his call was providential, and I asked him for his forgiveness. And then he said, “I’ve said things I know were hurtful to you, too, and I want you to forgive me.”
Now that I face death I understand why Jim is so passionate, even inflexible over certain issues. It’s because he’s faced death too.
Has your ministry been affected?
Many in the church claim my preaching has changed, but I suspect it may be their listening that’s changed. We’re learning a greater sensitivity to broken people because I’m broken. They know I may not preach many more times.
I’m probably a little bolder now, too. I’ve set my heart on finishing with grace and dignity and integrity; so I don’t care what people think any more. We’re not a hand-raising kind of church, but once in a while I lift my hands to worship. I know that aggravates some people. So I told the congregation, “Look, I know some of you are a little concerned about me raising my hands. But I’m dying, so I really don’t care.” They laughed with me.
How has Calvary Church responded?
It has been overwhelming. I get hundreds of cards and notes. People pray for me at every meal. I’m especially touched when kids tell me they pray God will heal me. I have a strong sense this has brought the church to its knees in prayer.
What is the church learning in prayer?
We’ve been riveted to learning dependence on God.
In most cases, we can pray, God, guide the surgeon, use the chemotherapy, direct the radiation. With ALS you can’t pray for any of that because there’s nothing the doctors can do. And there’s nothing we can do. We have to depend solely on God.
But this season is only one step on the walk of faith that the whole church has been on for years. God used the wilderness of Israel to shape my life’s walk for this, and God used a wilderness experience to prepare Calvary as well.
When I first came to Calvary, like many churches, there was a disparity between what we believed about prayer and what we actually practiced. On a personal level, one of my weaknesses has always been a dependence on my own abilities rather than on God. Our church was largely the same way.
We had the ability, like most large churches, to create endless programs for recruiting endless people to get involved in. At one point I felt like we were going a hundred miles an hour, in every direction, without paying attention to God like we should. We professed dependence on God, but we were running on our own fuel.
I decided Calvary needed to remove the distraction and busyness to seek God. We agreed to take a one-year time-out. We shut down all our programs and activities except Sunday morning and evening church. For one year we devoted ourselves to nothing but personal Bible reading, prayer, and personal evangelism. During that year we talked about prayer, taught about prayer, created opportunities for prayer. We tried to get away from the mindset that prayer is just another program. We tried to integrate it into our lives and into our decision making.
Canceling your big community holiday programs was gutsy. We even heard about it at our office.
There was criticism from people involved in the Christmas musical, the Easter program, the children’s programs, and the Sunday afternoon committees. But enough was enough. With all our programs we weren’t leaving room for God.
Leaving room for God?
Yes. Long before I came, the church had an interim pastor, an older man in his seventies. The board went to a country club one night for a strategic planning meeting. They brought in a consultant to help them set long-range goals and plan a move to a beautiful new facility. Throughout the meeting, the interim pastor sat there quietly, patiently, listening. He never said a word.
At the end of the meeting they asked the pastor if he would say a few words and offer a prayer. He said, “Yes. I have four words I’d like to say. Leave room for God. “Then he prayed.
The leadership of the church has never forgotten those words. After all the strategy and planning, they ended up throwing all the plans away. With those four words he brought the church back from self-reliance to seeking God.
After our church’s year-long tour of prayer, we saw a return to that pastor’s wise words. Our board meetings, for example, used to begin with prayer, but the whole time we’d be thinking, Hurry up and get this prayer over with. We’ve got a lot of business to do. Now we spend extended time in prayer. Praying for direction doesn’t get in the way of the church leader’s business because praying for direction is the church leader’s business.
How does that affect the decisions the church makes?
The process of growing in prayer has profoundly affected how we plan for the future. Our board is made up of mostly lawyers, doctors, CEO’s—their mindset is very business oriented. But that’s not the way the church operates. We don’t have any one-, two-, or ten-year plans.
That leaves a lot of room. Is it too flexible?
Not at all. A couple of years ago we decided we were going to build a youth center and add on to our auditorium—a $4.5 million project. The facility committee had the plans drawn. The finance committee had worked out all the details. The board had presented the plan to the congregation. But we decided to wait one more month before proceeding just to pray and make sure we had peace with it.
At the next meeting, the entire board agreed there was something wrong. We didn’t sense God leading us to continue. And so, in spite of the fact that we had presented it to the congregation, spent money on the plans, set up committees, and had everything printed, we decided unanimously not to proceed.
When I announced the next Sunday that we weren’t going to do it, many in the congregation came up and said, “I was willing to support the board’s decision to build, but truthfully, I wasn’t real settled that we should do this.”
We still haven’t built that building. In fact, we made the commitment that we weren’t going to. Last year we gave 39 percent of our total income away to missions and community projects, and we felt building would greatly inhibit our ability to give resources away.
Leaving room for God released a greater freedom to respond to the Spirit of God.
You’re the leader of a congregation. Do you find you have to think about and plan for their future?
No. Leave room for God. Of course, part of me thinks I really ought to begin looking for someone who can begin taking responsibilities and who may one day pastor this church. Another part of me realizes that God dropped me in here even though I never intended to come. He’s got someone else who doesn’t intend to be here either that he’ll bring at the right time.
Many of the things we do as a church we didn’t set out to do. The social work we do, and the Mars Hill congregation we helped start, these just happened as we followed the Lord and his opening of certain doors.
If you’re not worried about the church, what fears do you wrestle with?
I don’t worry about being dead because I know where I’m going. But I do worry about dying itself. Will I choke to death? When I can’t breathe, will I panic in that moment? The process of dying is fearsome.
I pray about that fear and repeat Scriptures I’ve memorized: God has said, “I will never leave you. I will never forsake you.” The Lord is my helper, I will not be afraid.
For a while after I was diagnosed, every conversation with my wife, no matter what subject we started on, always got back to my disease. You’re tempted to spend so much time worrying over the future, obsessing about your disease and your death. My wife prays that God will help me to spend my last days living, rather than dying. I pray the same for others.
When I visit a terminally ill patient now, it’s not a thirty-minute visitation, but a two-hour soul-to-soul. While the sick and hurting may have appreciated what I said before, and what I said was true, now they know it’s coming from a person who is facing what they’re facing.
What’s going on inside of you when you’re praying for someone else’s healing, and yet you yearn for that healing yourself?
When you’re terminally ill, you’re never jealous if somebody else gets healed because you don’t wish what you have on anybody. I’ve learned that from a network of friends who have ALS.
I visit with a man here in town who can move nothing but one eyebrow and one eye. He’s on a ventilator, has a feeding tube, and communicates through a computer. He keeps saying, “I hope you don’t have ALS. I’ll be thrilled if the doctors are mistaken.”
So if somebody else gets healed and not me, I’m just happy for them, genuinely happy.
Do you pray for healing now?
Yes, but not every day. I no more want to obsess about healing than about dying.
I have muscle atrophy and nerve damage in my right hand and arm, and I have twitches all over my body. There’s a remote possibility that the disease could remain localized in that arm, in which case it wouldn’t kill me.
So I have three prayers for healing—a small-faith version, a medium-faith one, and a big-faith prayer.
When my faith is small I pray, Lord, I’ll give up my right hand, just let the disease stop there. If I’m a little stronger in my faith, I’ll pray, Lord, stop it right where it is, no worse than it is today. If I’m feeling particularly bold I pray, Maybe you could heal me, Lord. Maybe you could reverse this disease.
One night I asked my friend, the former pastor of First Assembly, to come over and anoint me with oil. He talked to me about people he has anointed who got healed and people he anointed who didn’t.
He said to me, “You need to get lost in the wonder of God. If you’ll get lost in that wonder, who knows what he’ll do for you.”
A CHURCH THAT PRAYS:
I understood him to mean that if I get lost in the love of God, the faithfulness of God, the power of God—if I can focus not on healing, but on the Healer—then watch out. That perspective really changes how I pray.
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