marriage

In 2015, I turned 50. I also moved my family to Connecticut to become the vicar of New Hope Anglican Church in Oakville. This was to be my “second career” ministry as I wanted to pastor the wonderful people of New Hope until I retired.

When I left Saint Robert, Missouri, I felt unaware of the awful earthquake coming to my marriage. Alisa and I were married in June 2004, had a beautiful special needs daughter that we both adored, and had navigated some choppy waters when I came home from Iraq in 2007. I loved Alisa very much, but I was not the perfect husband. She wasn’t the perfect wife either. In fact, she had an ulterior agenda I never knew. I later found out she started undermining our marriage the day after our legal wedding. She never told me she went to find out how to annul our marriage. Throughout our relationship, she was secretive and hid things from me. She didn’t deal with her own issues…she was more content to blame me for her personal lack of happiness or fulfillment in her life. In short, Alisa began planning to destroy our family from the beginning.

Alisa was my second wife. My first wife left me for another man. It was a similar story: Deb was secretive and deceptive, didn’t deal with her own personal issues, but blamed me for everything wrong in her life and her disappointment in our relationship. Whereas Alisa just destroyed our family and ran for home, Deb destroyed our family and took our children with her into a relationship with an abusive man who did untold damage to our children.

Truth is that I share responsibility for these two situations. My family of origin issues are plenteous…involving gender roles, communication, closeness and distance, and of course managing personal issues by blaming the other marriage partner for unhappiness. My targeting computer was flawless both times to select women guaranteed to recreate my parents’ marriage and then drag children into the mess. I am responsible.

After moving the family to Connecticut and beginning my ministry with New Hope, something went very wrong. Alisa was miserable. One day, our daughter and I were laughing and making funny little jokes about things when Alisa exploded. It was the event that brought me to the realization that she was struggling and frustrated to a flashpoint. We talked about the situation a couple of days later. I told her that her unhappiness was not something I could fix…that she needed to find her own answers. I would be with her and do what I could to encourage her and love her, but she needed to do the work.

Her answer was to move out and take our daughter back to Missouri.

Right away I contacted the man I thought was my bishop to explain what happened. In retrospect, resigning was the right decision at that point. Lesson learned…

What followed was a disaster of the highest order. Without getting into the weeds, Alisa eventually sued for divorce, I did resign from being the Vicar of New Hope, and my life turned upside down.

What made things worst was the bishops. Their level of incompetence was astounding. Their lack of honesty and boundaries was frankly the most unprofessional of any clerics I’ve ever seen or experienced. In short, I became the scapegoat and “bad guy”.

But it wasn’t just the two bishops involved, it was the lay leadership of the congregation. They treated me like I was a leper and left me to “die on the vine”. In fairness, one of the bishops directed them to behave that way, but they didn’t respond in Christian charity…and for that, I blame them for their choices.

It’s been ten years since all this played out. I disappeared from institutional church for 7 years because of the severe psychological trauma inflicted on me. By God’s grace and the wisdom of Mike and Susan Warnke, I was able to slowly make my way back…and now, my priesthood intact and restoration completed, I am able to function as a shepherd with Fr. John Prenger, a dear friend and my “boss”. He has helped restore trust in clergy.

Why am I sharing this story? It’s not to grind an axe. By God’s grace, I’ve forgiven the people involved in this sad time of my life…and believe they should be forgiven by everyone. No, I have two goals. First, I want to give hope to my fellow clerics that God’s gifts and callings are without repentance. You are not anathema if personal crisis comes. There is hope.

Second, I want to send a message to people who were harmed by one of the primary actors in my saga, Derek Jones. Again, you are not alone…his weaknesses and limitations personally and professionally cannot destroy your ministry and family unless you give in to the hatred and bitterness. Derek’s saga is a sad one…and is playing out in the press now. Do not rejoice in his suffering…pray for him and his family. But most importantly, take care of yourself and your families.

This is not the tale of a hero who overcame evil to rise like a phoenix from the ashes of destruction. God forbid you think that! I am a sinner who did so many things wrong in this drama…in marriage, in ministry, and in the aftermath of my sad defrocking. No, this is about a magnificent Savior…who graciously saved a sinner by grace. And if there is a hero here, it is Jesus Christ.

Worship him!

The United States suffers from two massive frauds: Federal government tyranny and the ease in which couples divorce and destroy their families. I’m rather infamous for bloviating about the first, but not nearly enough to lambast the latter.

Before diving in, there’s a few things to clear up from the beginning. I’m a twice divorced person, though in both cases, my wives sought the divorce over my strenuous objections. In addition, the vocational pursuit of my life has been Christian ministry. My current denomination (The International Communion of the Charismatic Episcopal Church) has a very specific rule about divorced clergy that I’m vowed to support. Finally, I am a student of the Bible…not just the texts themselves, but also the cultural backgrounds of those sacred writings that help us understand the intentions of the authors.

Divorce in the ancient world was a reflection of the patriarchy. Women had no power over who they married – their parents arranged that. As a result, divorce was a rare occurrence. Generally, the man was the only person empowered to divorce his wife, though there were exceptions to this rule, especially in European empires like the Greeks and Romans.

Divorce laws in Western civilization changed as marriages became the choice of the partners and family influence over these unions waned. By the mid-1800’s, women could freely divorce their husbands, but only under certain conditions like repeated adultery, physical abuse, or abandonment. This was further changed in the 1900’s when “no fault” divorce laws allowed either party to divorce for any reason at all.

The divorce rate in the United States in 1900 was around 8% according to a Valerie Schweitzer, a researcher from Bowling Green State University. When the “no fault” divorce laws began to affect couples, the divorce rate was at 9%. Within 40 years, that rate spiked to 52%. The current rates (according to the study from 2018) are around 45% in rough numbers.

The historic church developed rules about the clergy over the centuries from the time of the Apostles based on several factors: Judaism’s practices, the teachings of the Old and New Testaments, the current laws of the geographical areas, and the practices of the church in the business of marriage and family life. In the early church, there was nothing specific mentioned about leadership’s familial status, but the Apostle Paul made several important rules that exist in his letters to this day.

The general practice of the church in the Medieval centuries was for a member of the clergy to be male (yes, there were female clergy but that’s for another time…) and have one wife. Tradition has suggested that this meant a man could only have one wife in his lifetime. So if a deacon’s wife died or he divorced her, he must remain single or lay down his orders. This was true for bishops and presbyters as well.

This practice continues today in the Eastern Orthodox tradition and Roman Catholic in those extremely rare conditions where their priests are married and their deacons (who are allowed to be married as a matter of canon law).

But is this tradition the correct or the best reading of those texts concerning, “the husband of one wife”? I say no for two important reasons: The texts are rather clear in how they are written that the issue is not one wife throughout the life of the man, but rather he cannot more than one wife at a time. Second, the sacred tradition of the Church was dealing with a whole different set of circumstances than we have in current society. For example, a divorced presbyter at the time (unless he was married to a Roman citizen for a wife) must have been the divorcing party…and that was an arranged marriage, which meant their were political ramifications behind the divorce.

There is a pastoral concern that the current practice does not address. Divorce.com says that women initiate divorce in 70% of divorces. That number rises to over 90% when the wife has a college degree. To a large degree, women are now the initiators of divorce, which may explain why the divorce rate is so high in Western Society.

The fathers of the Church created a system that worked for centuries in a world where the conditions were different. Do we really think that our forebears wanted a system where a cleric’s wife could divorce him for any reason, which necessarily ended that cleric’s ministry?

In my next blog entry, I will discuss the remarriage of divorced or widowed clergy…and why forcing clergy to be single can be very dangerous.