SPE Program Spotlight
Ashland Pastors Find Healing in “Come Away with Me” Retreats
For most of his 16 years as a pastor, the Rev. Eric Sandberg was a “people pleaser,” driven by the need to win the approval of others. Haunted by the prospect of disappointing anyone, he avoided confrontation and conflict at all costs. If an unpleasant discussion loomed at church, he generally made sure it never took place. If people were upset or mad at him, or if he otherwise felt he had let anyone down, he would dodge them for days or even weeks, until things blew over.
The Rev. Keith McLaughlin, on the other hand, wasn’t much concerned one way or the other about winning approval. Instead, he preferred to keep people at bay. Though his ministry and his church appeared to be flourishing, beneath the surface McLaughlin worked hard to make sure no one got too close to him. Sure, he was comfortable enough with his parishioners, was readily available, and usually had a good answer for their questions or concerns. But he always kept them and the rest of the world at arms length.
“It was like I had a wall,” he says. “People could come up to the wall and look and interact with me through the bars, but I wasn’t going to let anybody in. Nobody was going to get in to my heart.”
McLaughlin allowed only his wife, Michelle, to get close. Even his three small children, he kept at a slight distance.
Until recently, neither pastor fully realized what they were doing. They didn’t’ know why they acted as they did or where their behaviors came from. They were only vaguely aware, if at all, of both their actions and the damage it was doing to their lives and their ministries.
With the help of the Pastors of Excellence program at Ashland Theological Seminary, however, Sandberg and McLaughlin had their eyes opened to wounds they had been carrying around for years. Even more, they received a measure of healing, initially in the regular PoE program, and then later and more deeply in “Come Away with Me,” an intensive, week-long, small-group retreat. A later addition to the original PoE program, the Come Away with Me retreats combine teaching, individual counseling, guided prayer and worship to help wounded pastors—and in many cases, their spouses—find healing for the brokenness they have carried into and experienced in ministry.
“The results have been life-changing, far more than we ever imagined,” says Eugene Heacock, program director for Pastors of Excellence. “We have had several pastors tell us the Come Away with Me retreat has been one of the most profound experiences in their life.”
Count Sandberg and McLaughlin among them. Today, Sandberg no longer avoids conflict. Now the director of alumni relations at Ashland seminary and pastor of a new church plant, he’s willing to step up and challenge parishioners on difficult issues in his congregation. At home, he and his wife, Diana, who attended the Come Away with Me with him, are closer than ever before.
“It was a life changing personal transformation,” says Sandberg. “Looking back, it was probably the most significant event in my life since my conversion experience.”
Likewise, McLaughlin says PoE and the Come Away with Me retreat changed him as a pastor, husband and father. He’s more open and compassionate with his parishioners, more patient and understanding of their flaws. While before he tended to put his work before his children, now he makes sure to carve out time for them and can often be found at home, down on the floor playing with his kids. He’s more willing to express himself emotionally and tells his children many times each day how much he loves them.
“In my son’s first eight months of life, I think I told him maybe twice that I loved him,” says McLaughlin, pastor of Three Crosses United Methodist Church in Butler, Ohio. “Now, I tell him five or six times a day. It just naturally flows out of me in a deeper way.”
When the PoE program was launched in 2003, the program was aimed at transforming pastors—and, ultimately, the church—by providing opportunities for much-needed support, study, and reflection. The basic premise, says Heacock, was that a sustainable healthy and balanced ministry requires a healthy and balanced pastor. Under the program, small clergy groups attend a series of six retreats, ranging from two to five days, with each retreat focused on a particular subject such as healthy relationships, spiritual vitality, personal well-being, and church renewal. For married pastors, the final retreat is a weekend-long couples retreat aimed primarily at rest and relaxation.
In the retreat on personal well-being—called “Inward Journey”—the PoE participants address the emotional pitfalls of pastoral ministry and the brokenness that pastors and others can carry from emotional wounds and unresolved issues stretching back to childhood.
The response was overwhelming, says Terry Wardle, a professor of church planting and spiritual formation at Ashland and a member of the PoE administrative team. Program officials soon realized that the two-day retreat was not enough to address the brokenness they were seeing in some pastors.
“The pastors were telling us that the Inward Journey retreat had opened their eyes to issues they had been struggling with their whole life,” says Wardle. “Many of them said they had more issues they needed to process and work through, and they asked us for additional programs, both for them and their spouses.”
Drawing on his work in woundedness and inner healing, Wardle put together a proposal for an additional, optional seven-day retreat for PoE pastors and their spouses. Underwritten with an additional Lilly Endowment grant in 2005, the Come Away with Me retreats got underway in 2006.
Both Sandberg and McLaughlin say the retreat was one of the most intense and exhausting experiences of their lives.
“It was like running a marathon,” says McLaughlin. “You’re pushing yourself into emotionally difficult places and into stuff you’d prefer not to deal with or talk about. You’re churning up stuff that you’ve spent 30 years working at not talking or thinking about, and then you spend a week digging through it.”
In both the PoE “Inward Journey” retreat and to a much greater degree in the Come Away with Me retreat, participants spend time retrieving and exploring painful memories from childhood, hopefully re-narrating those events in light of their Christian faith. They recall and work through moments that made a huge impact on them but that, as children, they had never really known how to interpret or how to handle emotionally. Using a process of guided prayer called formational prayer or inner healing prayer, they invite Christ into those moments of brokenness, to sit with them and help them reframe the events in ways that will give healing and new meaning.
At the Inward Journey retreat, Sandberg found himself talking in his small group about a difficult period in first grade when he was struggling at school. In a well-intended but ultimately misguided effort to communicate between home and school, his mother and his first-grade teacher worked out a plan. If the young Sandberg had a good day at school, the teacher would send him home with a yellow, “smiley face” pinned to his jacket. If he’d had a bad day, the teacher sent him home wearing a blue “frownie” face.
Whether Smiley or Frownie, the faces were far from a hit with other kids at the school bus stop, and made for a long ride home for Sandberg, filled with taunts and ridicule.
As he recounted the story to the other pastors in his group, Sandberg realized that it was much more than just a painful memory. Indeed, it was one of the formational events of his life. He began to understand for the first time that, deep down, he really didn’t believe he was inherently acceptable to anybody—not his parishioners, his wife, or even God. Instead, he now saw, he had spent much of his life believing that the love and approval of others was conditional and had to be won, again and again and again.
“It was just one event, but there were plenty of messages that reinforced it later,” says Sandberg. “I began to see that my need to please people was directly related to this badge concept. It taught me early on that if you behave well, you’re acceptable. If you don’t behave, you’re not.”
Using healing prayer, Sandberg “invited” Jesus into the brokenness he had experienced as a child.
“Without going into the fullness of the experience, the Lord sat with me and pinned upon me his image and said ‘You’re always acceptable, always a joy to me,’” says Sandberg.
McLaughlin tells a similar story about his experience with PoE and Come Away with Me. Like many men, McLaughlin did not have a close relationship with his father growing up. Though their relationship wasn’t bad, there was much distance between McLaughlin and his father, and they spoke only rarely with one another. McLaughlin, of course, had long been aware of that distance but had never realized the deep sense of loss and pain it caused him. As he delved into that relationship at the Inward Journey retreat, McLaughlin began to see himself in the role of the prodigal son.
“I could see myself being embraced by God the Father,” he says. “It confirmed for me that God is loving and that everything in my past was irrelevant because he was welcoming me home.”
At the Come Away with Me retreat, McLaughlin plumbed deeper and deeper into his childhood, recalling small hurts that he had harbored within himself for years. Individually, they were nothing. Small slights. Sibling jealousies and anger. But cumulatively, he now saw, they had been an incredible burden that had caused great damage to him and to those he loved. He began to understand why he had spent a lifetime pushing people away.
“Basically, I began to realize that I just did not believe that I was all that important to anybody, except maybe my wife,” says McLaughlin. “But through healing prayer and other work, I began to see that whatever happens, I am always a delight to God. And that has changed my relationship with my wife and my children.”
Both McLaughlin and Sandberg attended the Come Away with Me retreat with their spouses, as do about 60 percent of the retreat participants. Wardle said program officials opened the retreat to spouses because these same issues of brokenness and woundedness can have a devastating impact on a clergy marriage.
Even so, Come Away with Me is not a marriage retreat. The spouses are there to work on their own individual issues and problems.
“Our basic premise was that a lot of the heartache that can occur in a clergy marriage is rooted in these same unaddressed wounds of the past, for both the pastor and the spouse,” says Wardle. “But I tell them ‘If you want to have a healthy marriage, the starting point is for you as individual to choose health. You’re here to work on you, and not each other.’”
Both Diana Sandberg and Michelle McLaughlin readily attest to the changes they’ve seen in their husbands, in themselves, and in their marriages.
“I believe we are all wounded and we all have issues we need to work on,” says Diana Sandberg. “For me, this strengthened my walk, and it did for Eric too. Both of us know each other better now.”
Though the retreat was difficult and emotionally draining at times, Sandberg says it was an extraordinarily healing experience that left both her and her husband hungering for more. Since then, they’ve attended additional classes and retreats together and talk and pray and understand each other better than ever.
Michelle McLaughlin says she had seen her husband undergo tremendous healing over the course of the PoE retreats and jumped at the chance to attend the Come Away with Me retreat with him. There, over those seven days, she experienced that same deep healing.
“God moved in ways that I had never experienced before,” says Michelle, a self-described people pleaser and perfectionist. “For the first time in my life, I was comfortable with who I am and who God is creating me to be. It’s like I met myself for the first time and gave myself permission to be the person I am.”
In a society that drives people to be and to perform and to do, and that measures their worth accordingly, few people ever feel adequate, says McLaughlin. But the Come Away with Me retreat was a rare opportunity to hear the simple message that we are all God’s beloved, she says.
