Spirituality Adventures 10/26/20 Spirituality Adventures 10/26/20

What to Do and Be When I Grow Up?

Listen: “Fell On Dark Days” by Soundgarden

Caveat: I will be sharing my story from my perspective. I realize that some of you may have been disappointed or even deeply hurt by my actions. If this is the case for you, I truly seek your forgiveness and would encourage you to reach out to a professional therapist to process those issues. If you and your therapist think it would be helpful, I would be willing to make personal amends.

This is perhaps the hardest blog for me to write. Mostly because I have gone through so much darkness—still going through it in some ways—but there’s always hope for healing. However, the darkness complicated my desire to move forward.

So first let me describe the darkness. When I was sent to rehab on November 10, 2018, I felt utterly lost. By that, I mean I felt disconnected from my identity in every role or context of my life. I even felt disconnected from myself and God. While I was in rehab I confessed to my wife that I had been sexually unfaithful to her (the four rehab drugs I was taking did not help my sensitivity). While I had been faithful to her for over 35 years, this confession was traumatic for her and those she told. (My wife understandably confided in my board of directors at Vineyard Church.) I had a panic attack (which I’d never had before) and they put me on suicide watch for a couple of days in rehab (even though I told them I was not suicidal). What I shared with my wife in private on approximately November 13, 2018 was on the front page of the Kansas City Star by December 6, 2018 before I could process privately with my family and friends. At the end of a 30-day rehab, I was sent to a second 90-day rehab. I wanted to return to Kansas City and face the harsh realities of my sinful behavior. During the 90-day rehab, I was not allowed to call my wife. Two things happened while I was in rehab that changed my life forever: (1) my wife filed for divorce in February 2019, and (2) my board of directors called for my resignation.

Needless to say, when I got home February 28, 2019 I was angry, hurt, embarrassed, and humiliated. I was primarily angry at myself. I was angry at God. I was angry at people whom I felt betrayed me in certain ways (a personal feeling statement). I was not blind to the irony: the one who had betrayed others felt betrayed. But the anger was off the charts, and here’s the difficult thing, anger was never an acceptable emotion for me. I always suppressed, avoided, or ignored anger. I don’t like anger and resentment or shame and guilt, but I was drowning in these negative emotions.

Once I got back to Kansas City I wanted to leave in shame and embarrassment, but I felt like I was supposed to stay largely because of family and friends. In 2019, I resigned as the pastor of the church I founded and labored over for 28 years. Due to a series of bad choices, I lost my marriage of 37 years, my vocation of 42 years, my community, and my faith. I am so thankful my mom and dad, my sisters and brother-in-law’s, my nephews and nieces stuck with me. I wanted to run like Jonah. I did in a way. I worked for a medical marijuana startup company in Missouri. I raised investment capital and learned much about the business of marijuana. Emotionally, I felt like an atheist. If god existed, I was angry as hell at him/her/it. I was like a wounded animal. I tried church. I tried counseling. I tried recovery groups. I just couldn’t connect. I honestly didn’t let anybody in too deeply (not wise). It was too dark, even for me. I had always sporadically journaled, but in this state journaling was a constant companion through which I poured out my unedited feelings. Here is a quote from my journal:

I’m in a free-fall. A deconstruction of Fred. WTF. Who am I? I’m clueless. What am I to do with my life? I have felt so depressed today.
So lost in myself. So frustrated with my new story. Rohr quotes Paula D’Arcy: ‘God comes to you disguised as your life.’ This really sucks.
For me. For most people. Necessary suffering. It feels like such bullshit. Is god really in this story of mine? Can I trust a god like this?
How do I have faith in chaos, death, pain, even evil? Sounds like bullshit. Tastes like bullshit.

I woke up every morning hoping I was in a bad nightmare.
After my divorce was finalized in July 2019, I finally got serious about the hard work of shadowboxing. I started attending church, recovery groups, and therapy regularly. I was praying every day to a god I wasn’t sure I believed in. But I surrendered to the emptiness as though God might be found in it. I was asking for guidance and direction and hope. What do I do with my life? Nothing. Silence. Long silence. And more silence. Days and months on end. Nothing. I networked with business leaders in the city hoping something might crystalize. Nothing. Discouragement. Most of my suffering was my own fault. Self-hatred ensued and the darkness was still real, even if self-inflicted. I came across this quote from Richard Rohr in the Universal Christ:

God creates the pullback too, “hiding his face” as it was called by so many mystics and Scriptures. God creates a vacuum that God alone can fill.
Then God waits to see if we will trust our God partner to eventually fill the space in us, which now has grown even more spacious and receptive.
This is the central theme of darkness, necessary doubt, or what the mystics called “God withdrawing his love.” They knew that what feels like
suffering, depression, uselessness—moments when God has withdrawn—these moments are often deep acts of trust and invitation to intimacy
on God’s part.

Hard for me to believe. Whether or not suffering is self-inflicted or inflicted by fallen human beings or a fallen world, we still process it emotionally. I was experiencing mostly enormous darkness. The darkness engulfed me and made it challenging to move forward. I continued networking with business leaders in Kansas City but still nothing opened up. I attended an African American church (my home church for over a year), and during the month of February 2020 we celebrated black history month. We sang a song every week that brought me to tears entitled “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” It’s called the “Black National Anthem.” The song speaks of the dark struggle for freedom from slavery, but it also speaks of the gospel of freedom. I was experiencing my own dark bondage and as I identified with my faith family the tears flowed as we sang:

Lift every voice and sing
‘Til earth and heaven ring
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the list’ning skies
Let it resound loud as the rolling seas
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has brought us
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun
Let us march on ‘till victory is won

Stony the road we trod
Bitter the chastening rod
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died
Yet with a steady beat
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered
Out from the gloomy past
‘Til now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast

I finally started asking, “Well, if god isn’t there or doesn’t make it clear what I am supposed to do, then how do I move forward with some sense of purpose bigger than myself?” And then something clicked. It was very subtle. I was reading a book by Parker Palmer entitled Let Your Life Speak. Palmer’s main thesis is that God speaks to us about our vocation from the depths of our life, even the dark places of our life. We need to learn to listen to our life. I had been getting in touch with my negative core emotions (fear, anger, grief, disgust) and my inhibitory emotions (shame, guilt, anxiety). So listening to my life, even the darkness, seemed like an easy task at this point.

While I was reading Let Your Life Speak, I met with a friend who was savvy with social media entrepreneurship. This was before the Coronavirus, and he gave me a challenge. He said, “Fred, just start posting content on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter every day for two months and I will help you figure out how to monetize it.” He also wanted me to read a book by Gary Vaynerchuk called Crushing It. I didn’t have a lot of confidence in this proposition, but I took it seriously. I completed Let Your Life Speak and started reading Crushing It. I also started rereading a favorite of mine called Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon. All three books were saying the same thing from different perspectives: (1) spiritual vocation perspective, (2) personal branding through social media perspective, and (3) creative content perspective. I started thinking about the kinds of things I love and the content I would like to put out on different social media platforms. After a month or so of thinking along these lines I was excited about the potential for a vocation built on the things I love and the content I could produce on social media around the things I love. Not earthshaking, but it’s the only thing that has gotten me excited. I’ve never had a plan B, and I have always been a pastor/teacher and storyteller at heart. I’ve also had some painful life experiences to which many people can relate. Maybe God is speaking to me through my life and guiding me on a new journey. As a pastor I heard how so many people struggled with a sense of calling. What is God’s will for my life? Now I understand how difficult that quest can be, especially in the dark.

However, I have some hope for the first time in a long time. I’m excited about the content I want to put out. I hope you will join me on the journey. I think you will enjoy the content I have planned so I encourage you to follow me on all the social media platforms. Thanks for your interest and prayers.

©realfredherron 2020

Spirituality Adventures 10/19/20 Spirituality Adventures 10/19/20

Deconstructing Fred

Listen: “Demons” Imagine Dragons

I was a mega-church pastor of one of the fastest growing churches in America and I felt utterly lost (read my description in “What is a Prodigal Pastor?”). I had worked hard at being a good Christian: not that I didn’t understand grace. Grace was the hallmark of my preaching. I knew I was saved by grace (Ephesians 2:8-9) and that everything was grace, but I also knew that we need to participate—that is, work out our salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12). So I prayed long hours every day; I studied scripture, earned graduate degrees, started a church, pastored a growing church, helped start churches (wrote a doctoral dissertation on this topic) and spoke at conferences around the world, and led people to Jesus. I enjoyed much of it, but my soul wasn’t entirely healthy. (Listen to my soon to be released series “What Happened to Fred? An Anatomy of an Epic Failure.”) After founding and pastoring a church faithfully for almost 28 years, I found myself headed to rehab in Georgia in November of 2018. The life I had lived with God had collapsed around me. In 2019, I would lose my 37-year marriage, my vocation as pastor, my church community that I loved and labored over for decades, and in some ways I had lost my faith. (Read The Second Mountain by David Brooks for some perspective.)

As my life collapsed around me, I wandered in darkness for months. My divorce proceedings were speeding ahead while I helped a startup medical marijuana company in Missouri. (I was trying to get away from the pastor identity and just ended up being the MMJ Pastor.) I finally got serious about some work on my own soul. After my divorce was finalized in July of 2019, I started attending various recovery groups and regularly seeing two therapists. This was an emotionally dark time. I woke up every morning hating my life and hoping I was in one long horrible nightmare. I didn’t feel or sense God’s presence, and I was having some serious doubts about his/her/its existence. I didn’t even want to read which had always been one of my main spiritual habits for growth. (I did learn an enormous amount about MMJ in Missouri.) My life felt devoid of all purpose and joy.

I did have a thought to contact an acquaintance of mine, Stan Kroenigsfeld. I had met him at the National Prayer Breakfast through one of my board members. I called Stan and we met and talked. He sent me a book by Richard Rohr which proved to be a lifeline to my faltering faith. It didn’t erase my doubts and questions and dark struggles, but it did give me some hope (Falling Upward is the book). Maybe something redemptive could emerge out of all my darkness? It sparked a fresh hunger and I started reading voraciously again.

Through my experience in rehab and therapy, I had become interested in some therapy models—Family Systems developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz, AEDP by Dr. Diana Fosha, The Change Triangle by Hilary Jacob Hendel, and DBT by Dr. Marsha Linehan. My work in therapy helped me sort out core emotions, inhibitory emotions (like a lifetime of shame, guilt, and anxiety), and the need for radical acceptance and change. But Richard Rohr challenged me with what he calls “shadowboxing.”

Every great spiritual tradition has a form of shadow work under different names. They are not necessarily identical in concepts, but their presence does point to the universal nature of this struggle. In the Hebrew tradition you have the “yetzer hara” and the “yetzer hatov.” The Christian tradition talks about the old nature before Christ and the new nature in Christ. In my preaching I spoke about the gap we have between our ideal self (what we want to be based on our highest values) and where we actually are. We all have a gap between the two. Rohr talks about the True Self and the False Self. (He credits Carl Jung and Thomas Merton for many of his insights along these lines. Jung and other spiritual teachers speak of ego and self.)

Rohr talks about our shadow self which is connected to our persona (meaning “stage mask” in Greek). He says, “Your stage mask is not bad, evil, or necessarily egocentric; it is not ‘true.’ It is manufactured and sustained unconsciously by your mind; but it can and will die, as all fictions must die. Your shadow is what you refuse to see about yourself, and what you do not want others to see.” Rohr believes that the more you have lived out of your persona, the more shadow work or “shadowboxing” you will have to do. Our shadow self makes us all into hypocrites on some level—the gap. Hypocrite is a Greek word which means “actor,” someone playing a role rather than being “real.” Rohr believes our true self is who you are “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). Or what the Zen masters call “the face you had before you were born.”

We have to face our shadow self with radical acceptance, love, and grace. This has been hard work for me. I had a public persona which completely collapsed and I had an enormous amount of shame, guilt, embarrassment, and self-hatred. This process of shadowboxing starts with brutal honesty (so does recovery, step one in AA is about honesty). The challenging part for me has been not just focusing on a couple of symptomatic behaviors, but dealing with root issues, core emotions, inhibitory emotions, and defensive behaviors. Sorting out anxiety, shame, and guilt and how these are rooted in my childhood, and how I carried these emotions into my marriage and ministry was challenging for me. One aspect of my “mask” was being an endurance athlete—I believed I could power my way through anything. Just keep peddling, but the peddles fell off. This kind of emotional work proved exhausting, but vitally important.

Mental health is part of the journey to wholeness. Your true self emerges when you get honest with your shadow self. In a sense, you have to embrace your core emotions as they relate to your shadow self and listen to those emotions. Let them speak. They begin to tell a story of who you are. I had to let my shame speak, my guilt speak, my anxiety speak. They are my travelling companions which I ignored, avoided, or suppressed for the most part. I’ve never really treated my false self or my negative emotions with grace. I never let them speak. I always tried to beat them into submission. It didn’t work in the long run.

Let me close with a couple of more quotes that resonated with me:

An inevitable though often ignored dimension of the quest for ‘wholeness’ is that we must embrace what we dislike or find shameful about ourselves as well as what we are confident and proud of.—Parker Palmer

But this person [a spiritual guide] did not tell me that the path to humility, for some of us at least, goes through humiliation, where we are brought low, rendered powerless, stripped of pretense and defenses, and useless—a humiliation that allows us to regrow our lives from the ground up, from the humus of common ground.—Parker Palmer

One of the great surprises is that humans come to full consciousness precisely by shadowboxing, and making friends with their own mistakes and failings. People who have had no inner struggles are invariably both superficial and uninteresting. Shadow work is almost another name for falling upward. Lady Julian put it best of all: “First there is the fall, and then we recover from the fall. Both are the mercy of God!”—Richard Rohr

So I am on a new journey—one of grace and compassion with my shadow self and one of finding and embracing my true self. It’s a journey we are all on whether we realized it or not. I hope you’ll join me as we grow together.

Spirituality Adventures 10/12/20 Spirituality Adventures 10/12/20

What is a Prodigal Pastor?

Listen: “Lost” Coldplay/Jay Z

For those of you who do not know me, I am Fred Herron. You will learn much more about me if you follow me on social media, but here are few facts for now. I was the founding Pastor of Vineyard Church in Kansas City, Missouri from 1990 to 2019 (foundation to my resignation). The church grew from a few people to several thousand people whom I greatly loved. In 2019, due to a series of bad choices, I lost my 37-year marriage, my vocation, my church community, and in some ways my faith. (Read The Second Mountain by David Brooks for some perspective.) Through blogs and podcasts I will begin to unpack this story.

I can’t define “Prodigal Pastor.” It’s just a name I procured for myself, and I will describe what it means to me. The definition of “prodigal” has two nuances: (1) is the reckless or wasteful use of resources and (2) is the giving of something on an extravagant scale. The Bible contains a classic story called the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32). It’s about a son in the ancient Near Eastern culture who asks for his inheritance early (very inappropriate) and spends his inheritance on wild living. He winds up slopping pigs (about as low as you can go in Jewish culture) and decides to return home. His father sees him, runs to him, embraces him, and throws a party for him (extravagant and inappropriate for social norms of the period); however, the prodigal’s older brother is disgruntled. The older brother has obeyed all the rules and his father has never thrown a party for him. He resents his brother and he resents his father. The story is a classic because it reveals how grace can restore a wayward life; it reveals the extravagant heart of God towards wayward children; and it reveals how the “rule-followers” are wayward in their anger, resentment, and self-righteousness. (See Prodigal God by Tim Keller.)

I was a prodigal teenager when, at sixteen, I encountered Jesus and felt called to be a pastor. I never imagined I would find myself in a second prodigal story in my fifties, but I did. As a pastor of a progressive Evangelical mega-church, I always had a heart for people outside the church regardless of lifestyle or belief systems. I never really felt above them or superior to anyone, but I did feel like I had something to offer them—specifically Jesus and a faith community. However, in my darkest moments I lost this confidence.

By late 2017, I was a mega-church pastor of a growing faith community and yet I felt lost. By lost, I mean I felt disconnected from God, my wife, my vocational calling, and myself. Utterly lost. In November of 2018 I was “sent off” to Georgia for 120 days of rehab because of prescription Xanax and alcohol abuse. I also confessed to sexual unfaithfulness to my wife. When I returned to Kansas City in March 2019, I was full of shame, embarrassment, and anger. I felt shame concerning my failures, shame because I had potentially hurt several thousand people, shame concerning my broken marriage, and shame concerning my infidelity, my misuse of alcohol, and my lack of faith in what I had always believed and taught. I was an emotional wreck and in a very dark place. (I’m guessing there are pastors reading this who can identify with this description.)

In the midst of my journey of recovery, why do I still call myself a pastor, even a prodigal pastor? I actually tried to run from this identity when I got back from rehab. It was hard. I grew up in Kansas City. My parents and sisters and brother-in-law’s and nephews and nieces and great nephews and nieces attended Vineyard Church. I had people in my church with whom I went to elementary, junior high, and high school. I preached my first sermon in Kansas City when I was seventeen and was ordained at my home church at eighteen. Tens of thousands of people in Kansas City knew me as a pastor. Even though I haven’t done anything publicly or on social media until now, I would bump into people every day who would ask, “How are you doing, pastor?” People would meet with me and relate to me as a pastor even when I explained to them how lost I felt. I also found that I still cared for people in a pastoral way even though I felt so wounded. I was a wounded shepherd who still cared for wounded people. I was still concerned for people and their hurts, health, and wholeness. For example, during the first rehab I tried to disguise my identity as a pastor and by the end of the thirty days the most outspoken atheist asked everyone to read the gospel of Matthew in my honor and consider Jesus. (I was in two rehabs back to back, a thirty day and ninety day.) I only revealed my pastor identity and spoke of Jesus when directly asked and then reluctantly. Running from my pastoral calling wasn’t working, so I thought, “What kind of pastor am I?” Maybe a prodigal pastor.

A prodigal pastor should probably believe in God, but I was questioning everything. Every value and belief I’d ever had was coming under scrutiny by me. If there was a God, I hoped he/she/it was an extravagant God of grace. I needed it. In the Bible story, the father puts aside his dignity and runs to greet his wayward son with unconditional love—beautiful no matter what your belief system. I needed some unconditional love.

This brings me to my final thought (for now) about this “prodigal pastor” description. Perhaps a prodigal pastor identifies with prodigal people in need of a Prodigal God. This doesn’t mean I have all the answers. I am less certain about so many things. The consequences of my actions shattered everything for me and the losses were staggering. Now I find myself with doubts and questions. I still read broadly and I listen to people from all walks of life and spirituality. I’ve listened to drunks and addicts and prostitutes and atheists and rabbis and pantheists and Buddhists and doctors and prisoners and homeless and LGBTQ peoples. I’ve realized that everybody is spiritual and I have been inspired by every type of person as they wrestle with dignity, with the issues and questions of life. I have found courage and hope in the strangest places. So while I am less certain about many things, I am still extremely hungry to experience life fully. My new mantra is brutal honesty about everything. So I am on a journey of honesty and spirituality. I hope you will follow me on this journey, even if you feel like you know all the answers. We might learn some things and grow together.

What to Do and Be When I Grow Up?

Deconstructing Fred

What is a Prodigal Pastor?

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