Some Pastors are Lusting for a Different Life

By Hazel Trice EdneyNNPA Washington Correspondent WASHINGTON (NNPA) – Rev. Kenneth Dennis seemed to have it all. At 38, he was the successful pastor of the socially active Greater Mount Moriah Baptist Church in Richmond, Va. He was also serving as the first Black chaplain of the city Police Department. And he was highly respected as a leading clergyman in the community. That was 10 years ago. Now, Dennis could be headed for a jail. Twice convicted of drunk driving and once convicted of cocaine-possession over the past seven months, he has attended a string of court hearings and enrolled in drug and alcohol rehabilitation. Next month, a judge will decide whether to send him to prison. Similar stories are repeated in city after city, leaving behind devastated wives and families, angry and divided congregations, preachers fighting their own leadership boards and ending tortured in personal humiliation and self-loathing. “It’s an epidemic,” Bishop T. D. Jakes says in an interview. “Most clergy become clergy because they feel called to make a difference and they have passion for people in pain because they’ve been there themselves. But just because a doctor is a physician doesn’t mean that he can’t get the flu. And I think it’s important that we understand that our pastors are men. And they have issues and they have problems and the great mistake that we have made and have not corrected to this date – not just Black pastors, but Whites also – is we have no place for pastors to recover. If you deal with a CEO, you can put him in a Betty Ford Clinic and then rehabilitate them and send them back. Yet, the church, for all of its touting of being a hospital, has no rooms for its shepherds.” Because of that lack, Jakes organized a three-day pastors’ conference in September and called it “Leading While Bleeding.” It drew more than 6,000 clerics from across the country to his Potter’s House in Dallas. “A lot of clergy feel like it’s a disgrace to the cross to get counseling,” Jakes explains. “They don’t want to admit that prayer didn’t fix it. So they’re embarrassed to go to anybody and say, ‘I need help.’ But the Bible says that in the multitude of counsel there is safety.” Some ministers say their denominations haven’t provided that safety. “Unlike the Catholic Church, which has a very clear procedure for this type of behavior, there’s not a defined procedure for this type of behavior in protestant denominations, those denominations that have self-autonomy like the Congregational church, the Baptist Church,” says Rev. Anthony Evans, president of the Washington, D.C.-based National Black Church Initiative, representing approximately 6,000 congregations committed to promoting physical, emotional, spiritual and mental health among their members and the community. “I believe there should be procedures within that denomination to remove them from pastoral ministry for a length of time that it can be determined that the person is healed from that sin.” Hundreds of ministerial leaders stepped forward at the Jakes conference, confessing to weaknesses, failures and sins that they would normally preach about to their congregations. Following the conference, Jakes has been directing pastors to the American Association of Christian Counselors (AACC) in Forest, Va., which has a network of 7,000 counselors across the country. Timothy E. Clinton, president of the AACC, says many ministers are conflicted. “In ministry, we’re often placed on a pedestal and expected to be perfect. And in many ways, that is scriptural. God expects for us to lead from a position of strength and to be ‘blameless’ like the word says in I Timothy 3:2,” Clinton explains. “And out of that I think we first detach ourselves almost from being human. So it’s the human parts of our selves that get hidden. They say, ‘If I do show some type of weakness or sin in my life, where do I turn without being betrayed and sold out?'” Steve Gallagher, president of Pure Life Ministries, a Dry Ridge, Ky.-based counseling center for Christians plagued with sexual misbehavior, is not as sympathetic. “Number one, if a man is serious and really wants help, if he’s to the point that he’s desperate for help, he is going to find it,” says the former Los Angeles police officer. “And number two, the Lord is a factor in this as well because when a man starts crying out for help to the Lord, God answers and He will do what he can to help a person.” Dennis, the pastor from Richmond, did not cry out for help. “People see their minister as a kind of a robot, I guess. And if you reach out for help, it shows that you are human. People don’t want their minister to be human. They want a god,” he says. He pointed out that most biblical heroes had flaws. David, for example, was an adulterer and murderer. Paul had persecuted Christians. Dennis says, “That’s why God used them.” Dennis, whose story has made headlines in Richmond, says he feels better now that he has no more secrets about his lifestyle. His congregation voted to keep him as pastor. “I’ve lost a bunch of so-called friends,” he says. “I don’t get to preach at other churches anymore. Other than that, I’m okay.” Jakes says pastors play a special role in Black America. “The Black community has never had a president, only a preacher. And from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King to Jesse Jackson to Al Sharpton to T. D. Jakes, it doesn’t matter who you want to name, they’re always clergy,” he says. “And so, if we lose our clergy, what then? We must preserve them. And when they’re sick, we must heal them. And when they’re broken, we must fix them.” No one knows know many pastors need to be fixed. A “Christianity Today” magazine survey discovered that 23 percent of the 300 pastors who responded to its survey admitted to having been sexually involved with someone other than their wife. Hasani Pettiford, author of the book, “Pimpin’ from the Pulpit to the Pews, Exposing & Expelling the Spirit of Lust in the Church,” writes that sexual immorality has been the church’s dirty little secret. “Sex has not been given the attention that it deserves within the body of Christ. For this very reason, it has been one of the most overwhelming problems in the church,” he writes. “A former Baptist preacher once said that sex within the church is so bad that condoms should be passed around in offering baskets and preachers should be the first in line to receive them. Dirty deacons, evil elders and perverted preachers have relentlessly sexually preyed on their own congregations.” About his latest book, “HE-MOTIONS, Even Strong Men Struggle,” Jakes observes: “Our men are in crisis. It’s hard to be everybody’s hero. Even Superman has got to take his cape off sometimes and be Clark Kent. And I think that it’s vitally important that pastors find that refuge.”The “Leading While Bleeding” conference was just a beginning, Jakes says. He plans to build a center where troubled pastors and their spouses can get help out of the public spotlight. “You can’t just go to a secular place when you have a spiritual problem. You are a spiritual being so your [perspective] affects how you process sin, how you process marriage, how you process lust. It’s all filtered through this religious filter,” Jakes says. “And I would love to be a part of lighting a candle for pastors and their wives.”