The worship team was making its way off stage, and Pastor Mike was making his way up when he noticed movement on one side of the auditorium. A woman he'd never seen before, with flaming red hair, stood to her feet, eyes shut, face to the sky, hands in the air. At the top of her lungs, she uttered unintelligible syllables: "Ah shalamakea lohiritu. Gristomay tomballo. Lavamar formallat sisternia."
Pastor Mike was as stunned as everyone else.
"This was a 135-year-old Baptist church where this sort of thing had never been done," he said later. "Other than the woman belting it out, you could have heard a pin drop. A few in the congregation looked at me as if this was something staged, a creative sermon intro. But it wasn't.
I usually don't walk out of worship just glad to be alive. But I am today.
"As the woman continued, everyone looked at me, eyes wide, as if to say, 'Do something! What are you going to do about this?' The truth is, I had no idea. Nothing like this had been covered in seminary or ministry conferences. And I'd not been in churches where such utterances were practiced."
With a silent prayer, Mike slowly walked over to the woman, as attentive as possible to what was happening. With her eyes closed, the woman didn't see him coming.
When he got to her, Mike gently laid his hand on her shoulder to let her know that he was there.
With that, she switched and began speaking in English, but still with a voice that carried to every corner of the room: "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, the Ancient of Days, the Lion of Judah. Mighty are the works of my hands, and marvelous is that which is made. Great in glory and in majesty."
While her presentation was disruptive, Mike didn't hear anything that was irrational or unbiblical, so he simply let her continue for a moment or two ("although it seemed like an aching eternity," Mike said). Then he noticed that sitting next to her was a man who seemed very uncomfortable, touching her arm trying to coax her down.
The woman continued, "I love my daughter with a great love, and though she has been in treatment, even now my favor rests upon her …"
Mike bent down to quietly ask the man, "Is she speaking about herself right now?" The man nodded. So Mike asked, "What is her name?" He responded, "Darlene."
"At that moment I had my first clue what was happening here," Mike said later.
With that, Pastor Mike turned to the rapt faces in the congregation and with the benefit of the microphone said gently, "Church, this is Darlene, and she is our guest today. I think that we should pause right now to pray for her."
While Mike prayed, with his hand gently on her shoulder, Darlene continued speaking forcefully. Mike asked that God would touch Darlene in a special way, bringing comfort to her mind, clarity to her thoughts, and calmness to her soul. And that God's Holy Spirit, the spirit of peace, shalom, would be evident in her life. As he finished praying, to everyone's surprise and relief, Darlene also brought her prophecy to a close.
As Mike described it later with a grin: "As I said 'Amen,' she sat back down and rejoined the service already in progress."
Though he doubted if anyone would remember anything he had to say that morning, it seemed essential to press forward and reestablish a sense of normalcy. He preached on Ephesians 1.
At the end of the service, Darlene and her companion exited immediately, before Mike or anyone else could talk with them.
Afterward everyone wore nervous smiles.
"I usually don't walk out of worship just grateful to be alive, but I am today," one woman told Mike.
Others made a point of telling Mike they appreciated that Darlene had been treated with compassion. "We could have taken the service back lots of different ways," Mike said, "but the Lord enabled us to find one that treated her with honor as a person."
That week, after a few phone calls, Mike learned that Darlene had a treatable mental condition, that she had gone off her medication, and that had prompted her behavior on that Sunday morning.
"Knowing her situation enabled us to respond with greater understanding," Mike said.
Public disturbances such as this are rare, but other less dramatic encounters with mental illness in the church are increasingly common. In fact, mental disorders are the number-one cause of disability in North America. Some of the most common are mood disorders, depression, autism, and attention deficit disorder.
How widespread is this?
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, more than 25 percent of Americans ages 18 and older suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year. That's about equal to the total percentage of people diagnosed with cancer each year, those living with heart disease, people infected with HIV and AIDS, and those afflicted with diabetes—combined! Because many mental illnesses (like depressive episodes) are short-term and not chronic, a higher percentage of people are affected by a mental illness at some point in their lives.
The mentally ill often feel they are on the margins of society, but they're actually in the mainstream!
Serious and chronic mental illness is less common, but still present among 6 percent of the population, or 1 in 17 adults. Those mental illnesses include major depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), panic disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and borderline personality disorder.
If your church is typical, on any given Sunday one in four adults and 1 in 5 children sitting around you are suffering from a mental illness. Many are under the influence of powerful antipsychotic drugs and their side effects.
In a Leadership Journal survey of pastors, 37 percent indicated that someone in their congregation had suffered from a psychotic disorder such as schizophrenia.
In most cases, those with mental illness do not themselves present a direct danger to the church. In the rare cases in which there is a real threat of violence, churches often get a restraining order, which can be enforced by the police.
Most often, those with mental illness complicate church life in other ways. They may indirectly generate problems because people in the church will differ dramatically over how much accommodation the church should make for them.
For instance, in one church a girl with a form of autism had a service dog, without which she had difficulty coping in a group setting. Her parents assumed her dog would be welcome in the Sunday school room. Normally that would've been true, except that another child in that Sunday school class had an allergy to pets. The two mothers, determined to protect the welfare of their two children, forced the church to decide between the two. Each mother saw it as an "us or them" situation.
If a person with a mental illness has tics or involuntary vocalization, how much tolerance does the church have for disruption of the worship service? If a child with ADHD wants to dance during the music or wander onstage … or if a person with schizophrenia "has something to say," will that be permitted?
Given the pervasive presence of various forms of mental illness, how can church leaders respond in ways that benefit the persons with mental illness while not derailing the overall ministry of the church?
Pastor Mike took some key steps and learned some ministry-altering lessons.
Knowing that it was up to him, as pastor, to guide the church's response, Mike met on Monday with the church leaders to process the experience, pray, and plan their next steps.
"For better or worse, the church was going to be watching me to keep the peace, set the tone, and interpret what has happened. I knew I needed to do that right away—addressing both the personal and theological issues that the Sunday morning experience had raised."
On Tuesday he sent an email to the congregation, mostly to set the tone. "They knew we had made it through the disruption, the woman had been treated with kindness, and order had been restored—but they also needed to know that I was still smiling. People carefully watch their pastors. Are they worried? Is there something to fear? They needed to be assured that I was confident, faith-filled, and excited to be back with them the next weekend."
In the email Mike wrote: "Someone once said that 'If you have the Word without the Spirit, you'll dry up. If you have the Spirit without the Word, you'll blow up. But if you have the Word and the Spirit, you'll grow up.' I can't wait until next Sunday because we're going to have both the Word and the Spirit." He indicated that next Sunday he wanted to share with them some reflections on the unusual circumstances of the week before. "They needed to hear from me that this was going to end up being a good thing," Mike said.
The next Sunday morning, Darlene was nowhere to be seen ("but I promise you, we were looking," Mike said). Attendance was high. "People were eager to find out how we were going to handle what we had been through." So in the service, Mike took ten minutes to have a "fireside chat" with the congregation.
He shared how it was important that they do everything they can to treat everyone with respect, even those that stretch us out of our comfort zone.
"Often we get opportunities during the week to practice that. This past Sunday, we had an opportunity to all practice it together. And I want you to know how proud I am of you," Mike said.
"We've focused on embracing outsiders," Mike said, "And we've worked hard to reach out and welcome in new kinds of attenders—the homeless and poor, ex-cons and drug addicts. We've been learning how it is sometimes too easy to simply serve the needs of the outsider and keep them at arm's length. The real test comes with how you welcome them into your own community.
"Darlene's visit was a watershed moment for us. We needed to see, in real time, how someone would be treated if they didn't exactly fit into our comfort zone. Could we welcome such people, treat them with grace, and still keep the church together? Darlene showed us that we could. It was a turning point, a defining moment."
The surprise (and secret) ending
But that's not the end of the story. Several months later, a very quiet woman with dark brown hair came up to Mike after the service with her Bible in hand. She seemed very shy, and she thanked Mike for the service.
Then she said, "You don't remember me, do you?"
"I'm sorry," Mike said. "I don't think I do. How do we know each other?"
"The last time I was here, I stood up in the service to say something," she said.
"You're Darlene?" He would never have recognized her. Gone was the flaming red hair. Gone was the loud voice.
"Yes," she replied bashfully. "That's me. I'm better now. But I don't want people to think of me the way I was the last time I was here."
Mike gave her a warm hug and welcomed her back. For the next several years, until she moved to Idaho, she was part of the church, faithful every Sunday and helping with community service projects.
"Although Darlene became a part of the congregation, I never pointed out who she was," Mike said. "No one recognized her, and she never brought it up with anyone else. It was obvious that God was working in her life. But I wasn't going to reveal her previous connection with our church. That was a story she could tell if she wanted to, but it wasn't my place to reveal it.
"To this day, no one ever realized that quiet, meek Darlene was the same wild-eyed prophet from that unforgettable Sunday. But the church embraced brown-haired Darlene, and it was also embracing those like the fiery-haired prophet, far more than they ever could have known."
Marshall Shelley is editor of Leadership Journal.
This article is excerpted from Ministering to Problem People in the Church, by Marshall Shelley (Bethany, 2013).
Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
