Chapter 3: Returning to a Place of Grief

 

Shortly after resigning from my position in Muncie, and dropping out of Earlham School of Religion, with the intention of returning to West Virginia and getting a job somewhere and letting myself heal, I ran into Oliver Hogue at a wedding in Indiana.  He simply said, “You will be coming to work at the church.”  I did not know what that would entail, but I thought, okay, I am a minister now, maybe I will be accepted as one.” 

In March 1984, I made the trip back home to West Virginia.  A couple of months before, my engagement with R had ended for certain.  We had finally agreed there was no hope for us to ever be able to get together.  The September wedding was called off, but she held out hope she could get over whatever was holding her back and we could be married in the spring.  I realized it was not going to happen, and I decided the right thing to do was just let her know I was releasing her from any expectations on my part.  I am sorry to say her brothers gave her some grief over this, and when I learned of it, I demanded that they lay off.  She was going through enough, and I did not want them or anyone else shaming her and making it worse.  I realized that if permanently breaking it off was my idea, that was best for everyone involved.  But inwardly I was dying, and it was excruciating.  It was with this horrendous pain inside me that I moved back to West Virginia.  I would only stay three months.

I remember when I got there, I walked into Pastor Steve Reinhardt’s office.  Steven and I had finally become good friends and spent some quality time together after I was able to move past some hurtful comments he had made to me.  I had gone fishing with him and had eaten with Steven and his wife Linda many times.  He looked at me that morning and said, “Welcome home, I’m leaving.”  He was going to be the pastor of the fellowship in his hometown of Hickory, NC.  Linda taught a couple of periods in the Christian school. I ended up inheriting Steve’s office, his responsibility for the Christian Education program, and the two classes Linda taught at the school, Bible for 5^th and 6^th graders.

Teaching those kids was fun.  But they had been with Mrs. Reinhardt for three-fourths of the school year.  Whenever I would do things in class which they were not accustomed to, someone would say,

“Mr. White, Mrs. Reinhardt always…” And whatever it was, my response was, “I’m not Mrs. Reinhardt.”  By the time school was out in June, whenever someone mentioned what Mrs. Reinhardt would do, the class would say, in unison, “He’s not Mrs. Reinhardt!”

I was working 10-12 hours a day and being paid about $100 a week.  I got the work other people on the pastoral staff did not want to do, and never got recognition as a full member of the staff.  I felt used.  One day I was asked to take some money to a member of the church who had some economic need, and the amount of the check was much more than I was being paid.  I refused.  I began to suspect there were improprieties going on.  It took another decade for that to become clear, but that was exactly what was going on.  I began thinking this was not where I wanted to be.

At that time there was an ordained Baptist minister attending the church who was living a double life, and he was interested in having a sexual relationship with me.  I was not interested, but he was persistent.  Now, same-sex relationships were considered sinful in this church.  I let the pastor know what was going on.  I would have thought he did not want one of his employees being harassed like this, but he made it clear he was not touching this situation.  I was on my own.

I remember during these three months sitting in worship, they did not think enough of me to let me sit with the ministers on what Quakers call the “Facing Bench”.   I sat out in the congregation.  And waves of grief would come over me and I would weep profusely during church.  And Pastor Hogue would say, “it is ok, folks, God is just talking to him.”  I thought, “yeah…and you are the person God is talking to me about.”

I did not know the specifics of what was going on, but Oliver was involved in both sexual and financial improprieties.  This was the spring of 1984.  It was not until 1994 that it all came to light.  I had no details, but I felt like the Holy Spirit was repeatedly telling me that the pastor was not doing God’s will.  God was grieved, and I was privileged to have God share some of that grief with me.  Nearly 35 years later, I heard Dr. William Barber use the phrase “prophetic grief.”  I knew right away what that was.

I have been told that my calling from God is that of a prophet.  I do not know if that is true or not.  I do know that most people do not have a proper understanding of what it is that prophets do.  I was in confession with a young priest.  I said, “Father, I get really frustrated because I see connections between things which other people in church do not see.”  He immediately said, “That is one of the hallmarks of being one of God’s prophets.” Over the next couple of weeks, independently of one another, two other priests told me the same thing. I say independently because the priest is not supposed to discuss with anyone else what is said in the confessional.  I guess you could say this is some measure of confirmation.

If that is correct, I believe that gift was functioning before I was Catholic.  I shared all of this with one of my former Quaker pastoral colleagues who said he thought this about me 30 years ago.  I will just leave it there.  Suffice it to say I believe that gift was operating when I was weeping over the disobedience to God that I saw in the leadership of the fellowship I was in.

Most people, in my view, have an incorrect understanding of what prophets do.  Their task is not primarily to predict the future.  I believe the biblical prophets were overwhelmingly speaking to their own time and their own people about what God was doing in their midst.  One of the tasks of prophets is to warn people of danger.  My friend Tripp Fuller said one time what a prophet does is to say “Here is the trajectory you are on.  And here is where you will end up if you do not change directions.”  That makes sense to me because the biblical word for repentance literally means to turn around, to change directions. When we are in need of repentance it means we are moving away from God, and when we repent, we turn around and move toward God.

The Old Testament prophets were not, as I understand, speaking about the future much at all.  They were speaking to their people, in their time, about what was going on in their community.  The message of the prophets was nearly always twofold.  First, it was a message of judgment or impending disaster because they were on the wrong path, and second, it was a message of hope and comfort for God’s people as they repented and sought God’s mercy and forgiveness.  They were speaking to their own time.

New Testament authors appropriated the prophetic texts and correlated them with the life of Jesus.  I do not think that there is anything wrong with that.  But whenever one of the Gospel writers says, “this took place to fulfill the words of the prophet…”  I do not think what they were talking about was really what the prophet had in mind.  Even the book of Revelation is not about the future.  Not at all.  It is about the time in which it was written.  It is the story of the struggle of the early church with the Roman Empire.  It is not intended to be taken literally.

Here I am, at age 24, walking through this prophetic grief over the hard-heartedness of two prominent religious leaders.  I felt alone.  It was a time of despair.  I wondered if I needed to be hospitalized to care for my own mental hygiene.

All of this was transpiring while my heart was still mending of my grief over not marrying R.  I missed her, and still wanted to marry her, even though I had let her go.  I remember coming to work at the church one morning and as I turned the corner into the parking lot, a wave of grief came over me.  I missed her deeply.  I went into the staff men’s room and just wept.

Before I left Indiana, I had dropped out of school, but my advisor encouraged me to talk with a lady named Peet Pearson, who taught pastoral counseling.  Peet met with me a few times.  She said something which truly surprised me but made all the sense in the world.  She told me I was grieving.  I had never thought of grief as anything other than for people dying.  Peet explained to me that grief is the response to any sense of loss, and I was grieving.  She said grief is like ocean waves—they come in and crash upon us and they go out.  High tide is followed by low tide, and intense grief comes in waves.  Gradually, she said, the tide would be out more than it would be in, but there would never be a last wave.  I have found this to be true.  Now, almost forty years later, with a wonderful wife and family, and a career which has included being a pastor, a professor and college dean, and a Christian publishing executive, I still have an occasional wave of grief over this period of my life.

Peet also told me that sometimes we grieve the loss of things we did not ever actually have.  People with disabilities are among those my teacher Wayne Oates said deal with “no-end grief.”  Some people call this chronic grief.  Those three months in West Virginia in 1984 were all about grief.

The cumulative effect of what took place in these months made me want to get out of there.  I was in despair.  The church sent me to North Carolina to pray with a travelling minister about what I was feeling.  Like I said, I was thinking I need to commit myself to a mental health facility.  I just knew something needed to change.  I was severely distraught over what was happening around me, the grief I felt over the church and the pastor, and the despair I felt because I knew God had called me, but at the same time it seemed there was no way forward.  I was in a place where I thought God’s plan for my life was going to be totally thwarted.

This travelling minister was Rev. Bill McPhail.  I knew Bill. I had travelled to the Holy Land with Bill.  I was able to open up and pour out my heart to him about what was going on.  This was the beginning of a friendship which lasted for another three decades.  In fact, at a later point in time, Bill’s own relationship with Loran Helm went awry.  And like me, every time Bill sought reconciliation, he was totally rebuffed and dismissed. I do think eventually Bill and Loran came to some level of reconciliation, some level of understanding they both could live with.

I have no idea, and it bothers me to this day, why some people were able to have some reconciliation and others were not. I worked hard for a couple of decades, periodically reaching out to try to achieve some sort of reconciliation with Loran Helm and his ministry. Some time after I had left the group, I wrote Loran and told him that the way he had been toward me was wrong and God was not pleased with him. The best I got back was a note which said, “I am sorry you feel the way you do about me.”  No mention of any sorrow for having wounded me.  I was very disappointed.

I will say though, that even though Bill McPhail and I were friends, as he went through this experience himself, we became closer.  The phone calls, and e-mails, and occasional visits we shared were now on a richer level.  It was very helpful to know I was not alone in what I had experienced at the hands of this ministry.

About the time I went to pray with Bill in North Carolina, the Louisville Christ Fellowship was inviting me to be their co-pastor.  I did not know, when I accepted, that this would be one of the most consequential moves of my entire life. 

I moved to Louisville, knowing they did not have funds to pay me a salary—all I wanted was respect.  I really did not get it there either, but good came out of it in the end.  I took a job teaching at a Christian School operated by a Nazarene church and rented a room in the home of a family in the church.  This was in July of 1984. I was misled, though.  We an agreement that this other pastor and I would be equals, co-pastors.  I had said I would not come otherwise.  But when I got there, it was different, he said he was the pastor, and I was co-pastor, like a pilot and co-pilot on an airplane.  I felt lied to, but I had nowhere else to go.

I was part of that fellowship for nearly three years, and again the prophetic grief weighed upon me there.  The pastor, Greg McBride, elicited the same kind of grief response in me that Oliver Hogue did.  Greg’s overriding principle of how to do ministry was that it was all about Greg.  He is one of the most self-centered people I have ever known.  When my father-in-law died, my mother-in-law said to me, “Well, I guess you are my spiritual leader now.”  When I told Greg that he motioned sharply with his hand and emphatically said, “I am responsible for her.”  I said, “That is good to know.  When she needs to go to the doctor, or to get her hair done, or grocery shopping, you can take her.”  Except for Forrest Richey, the pastors of these fellowships looked to me like they were building kingdoms for themselves.

We left the fellowship, and I served in a Nazarene church before the Lord called us to the pastorate of a couple of Friends Churches in Iowa.  When Greg learned about this, he called me and said, “Think of me as your bishop.  Call me and I will pray with you to make sure you are doing what God wants you to do in ministry there.”  I literally told him there was no way in hell that was going to happen.  He had nothing to do with our being sent there, and these churches had both already existed for well over 100 years.  The Friends Church does its business by seeking the leadership of the Holy Spirit.  They had made it for over a century.  The job of the Friends pastor is to “lead from behind.”  It is to minister to people’s pastoral needs and let the entire church discern together what God wants to do in their midst.  They did not need me to tell them what to do and they certainly did not need him.

There was a young lady named Lisa who I knew in the Louisville fellowship.  We did not get romantically involved, but if either of us needed a date for an event, we would accompany the other.  We were just friends.  But when the time came for the Christian school faculty Christmas party, Lisa had another commitment.  So, someone suggested I ask Gay Jansen.

Gay began attending the church about two months before I got there as co-pastor.  Her mom was a member, part of the group which had left a couple of Church of God congregations to start this group, which met in a home, then in a hotel meeting room, and finally in a storefront.  Gay’s dad was Roman Catholic, but her mother was not. Her mom had agreed, however, to raise their children—there ended up being six of them—in the Catholic church.  Gay was searching for something she was not getting at the Catholic church.  So, when she asked her mom what she wanted for Mother’s Day, the reply was “go to church with me.”  She said she felt like as these people shared, God was present in their lives, not distant like she always thought.  She kept coming.   This was May of 1984, and I arrived in July.

When I asked her to attend this party with me, said yes.  We enjoyed each other’s company, so we kept seeing one another.  We went to a play, went to dinner several times, and went out for pizza on New Year’s Eve.  So, in 25 days we had gone out maybe four or five times.  As it happened, the family with which I was staying had invited folks from church to celebrate the New Year.  About 8 pm, I dropped Gay off at her apartment, knowing I would see her later in the evening.  We went for pizza and walked on the Belvidere, overlooking the Ohio River.  It was cold and foggy.  I wanted to kiss her that night, but I held back.  But I knew I was growing feelings for her.

I had a life-changing experience that night.  As I left her place, a voice within me spoke, and I knew it was the Holy Spirit.  “I will lead you if you let me—and do not ask anyone else.”  That proved to be one of the most important moments in my whole life.

So, on a Saturday evening in mid-January of 1985, I had gone to Gay’s apartment.  She had made chili, and we were going to watch the Kentucky-Louisville basketball game on TV.  I do not even remember who won.  I had stopped and gotten her flowers.  I had feelings for her, but after living through what I had with B. and R., I did not want to get hurt again.  I was going to tell her it had been nice, but I thought it best if we did not continue to see one another.  Or so I thought!

I had rehearsed my speech, wanting to be kind and respectful and not hurtful.  I wanted her to know this was not because of her.  I had even been thinking about entering monastic life—maybe they were right.  Maybe marriage and family were not for me.  Maybe it was something I was not capable of.  I had this speech planned in my head about how I was going to thank her and bless her but say I do not think we should go any farther.

Before I even got the chance to speak, she looked at me and said, “I am really having feelings for you.  But I was raised Catholic and the thought of being married to a minister is kind of intimidating.”  Who said anything about marriage?  I thought, boy I am reading this situation wrong!  I finally kissed her.  I caught her in the hallway at church the next morning and kissed her again.  By Sunday evening, I felt like the Lord was showing me she was to be my wife.  We went back to the Belvedere, and I asked if she would marry me. She said yes.  On Valentine’s Day I put a ring on her finger.  I thought the Lord had shown me when we were to be married, on July 14, 1985.  We were married at the Caldwell Chapel of Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.  Seven months and eight days after our first date, we were married.

A crucial element in this story is my New Year’s Eve experience that God wanted to lead me without my asking those in the fellowship leadership what to do.  And then I am led to marry Gay, and this caused a problem because Loran Helm had told me not to marry anyone without his direct approval.  But God had made clear to me to do something else, so who am I supposed to listen to—God or Loran?   We ended up inviting the Helms to our wedding.  He was upset.  But the man did not ever have the decency to call me and ask about things.  He did ask the Louisville fellowship’s pastor.  He told Loran Gay really loved me.  She did, she does, she has for 36 years now, and that has not been an easy task.

I had studied philosophy, and logic, and something about Loran Helm never sat right with me.  He said he had not criticized anyone since something like 1942, and yet he would say things to other ministers like, “Clarence thinks God leads him, and once in a while that is true,” the clear implication being most of the time it was not true. That struck me as a sort of back-door criticism.  He claimed to love everyone in the world the same way Jesus loves them, and yet he tells me I would be so hard to love there is not a woman holy enough to do it.  Is that how Jesus loves me?

I knew from studying Aristotelian logic that if someone makes a statement which is absolute and admits of no exceptions, then all it takes is one counterexample, one instance to the contrary to refute it.  If a universally affirmative statement is made (for those familiar, the “A” corner on Aristotle’s square), all it takes is one exception to refute it.  Universally Affirmative statements are all-or-nothing.  No other logical options for them exist.  They are 100% true or 0% true.  There is no in-between. Not all statements are all or nothing, but universally affirmative statements are.  The statement that he loved everyone in the world just like Jesus did was a universally affirmative statement.

I asked myself, would Jesus say to me what Loran said to me?  I concluded that the answer is no.  Therefore, I had to sadly realize that Loran Helm was making a false claim.

I can honestly say that even though I thought Loran Helm did not think I had a call from God, I became totally convinced of this after Gay and I got married.  He basically had no use for me after that.  He had likened me to the great missionary who had been his friend, E. Stanley Jones.  I had traveled to several states with this man as he preached, trying to be supportive of his ministry, but for all practical purposes after I married Gay, I was persona non grata to him.  He would be polite but distant. Looking back, I see him as the most masterful person at being passive-aggressive I have ever encountered.  He tried to tell people it was all about Jesus—but it was really all about Loran.  He preached that people should pray and seek God’s leading in their life decisions, but when I did, because I did not go through him, he resented it.  He had no use for me anymore.  I began to feel like what began as a sincere effort to encourage people to seek and follow Jesus (I eventually even had doubts about whether it was sincere at all) had devolved into a system designed to control people for the pleasures of the leadership.

By this time, I am married, we are at the Louisville fellowship, I have re-enrolled in seminary and am also doing graduate work in philosophy.  In 1986 I began to have a sense that it was time to be in ministry more substantially.  Being at Louisville Christ Fellowship was as painful as West Virginia was.  As I mentioned, the pastor, Greg McBride, was more like Oliver Hogue than Forrest Richey.  He was so jealous and threatened he did not want me to ever be in the pulpit.  I would spend hours praying with people and giving them counsel and then he would get the thanks for it.  I am doing well in seminary and being told my theological gifts were rare, and honestly, he had no ministry training and could not preach his way out of a paper bag.  I was becoming increasingly unhappy.

There was a small fellowship group in the Cleveland area, and I began to have a sense that I was to be their pastor.  The best I got from Loran Helm was we could go “on a trial basis.”  The Louisville group was going to ordain me on July 26, 1986, and the folks from Cleveland were supposed to come down and be a part of the celebration.  They decided there must be something wrong if we are going to do this on a “trial basis” so they did not come to Louisville and asked me not to come to Cleveland. 

I look back on this with a sense of frustration.  I still believe that God wanted us in Cleveland.  Also, I think that Loran Helm’s view of me was poisoned by Oliver Hogue.  I have no idea why.  I cannot for the life of me see what a threat I was.  But things like this frequently happened and there would be something said by either Loran or Oliver which was, as it seems, designed to cast suspicion on me and on my ministry.

Writing this has at times produced some of the “high tide” grief Peet Pearson had told me about.  Maybe because there were people in the group who I loved, and still do love, I wanted things to be different.  As blessed as I have been since leaving, I left a piece of my heart with that group and my friends in it.  To this day, I do not see any valid reason why I could not have served in ministry in this group.  If my disability was not disqualifying in the mainline church (keeping in mind I eventually held credentials in both the Friends Church and the American Baptists), why would it be disqualifying in this fellowship?  In fact, I can think of two brothers, both with disabilities, who are ministers in the group.  I concluded it is not a disability issue at all.  I do not know what it is.  Years later, I asked them, as Joseph told his brothers in Genesis chapter 50, “you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good”,” I know the good God intended for me.  What was the evil you intended for me?  I never received any answer.

The funny thing is, many times in Louisville, when I shared what I thought God was leading our little church to do, someone would run that idea “up the flagpole” to the top, and every single time, the leadership gave confirmation to what I was saying.  Yet, for a reason which is still inexplicable to me, I was viewed with suspicion.

        Despite Cleveland backing out, the ordination still took place.  Eric Boklage, our nephew-in-law sang “In This Very Room”, as he had at our wedding one year and twelve days earlier. So now I am an ordained minister, in seminary, teaching at a different Christian school, and very bewildered at what was going on around me.