In the late 1970s, my wife and I went through a year of marital counseling. This was a painful time for us both, and involved three hours of driving twice monthly for two-hour sessions with the counselor. Briefly, her expectations and mine regarding marriage were poles apart, and we needed a friend to help us untangle 15 years of offenses, slights and misunderstandings.
In early 1981, at the encouragement of our church staff, Margaret and I took the entire Sunday evening worship service at First Baptist Church, Columbus, Miss., and told the story of our near-divorce and the hard work of reconciliation. It was a painful story, told to a packed out house. I thought that was the end of it. But God had other plans.
That week, the Office of Communications with our denomination called from Nashville. “By an odd coincidence, a person from our office was in your church Sunday night and heard your testimony. We would like to send a reporter down to interview you and your wife and publish the story for Christian Home Week in early May.”
I was hesitant. What preacher—particularly in 1981 before news of marital problems among the clergy had become so commonplace!—wants to tell such a story. When I called Margaret at home to get her thoughts, she said, “Oh good. I knew God was going to use this.”
Gail Rothwell spent two days with us, interviewing, taking photos, etc. Her article was published in the SBC “Facts and Trends” in May, 1981, and ran in most of the state Baptist weeklies. Even some dailies such as the Houston Chronicle ran the story. Somewhere I still have a file with over 40 letters from people thanking us for telling the story, with two or three saying it saved their marriage.
Now, fast forward a few years.
By then, we had moved to a church several states away. To our surprise, several members of the church were unhappy about us. To this day, I do not know what was going on with all of them. One of them, a dentist almost disbarred (I was told) because of dishonesty, began trying to dig up dirt on us in order to discredit us and drive us out.
Some who read this will be surprised that church people could be so cruel. But they are there. Thankfully, they are overwhelmingly outnumbered by God’s faithful, but even one or two can do great damage.
Soon a rumor began to circulate that “somewhere in their past, there was a newspaper article about a divorce and some kind of scandal involving Joe and Margaret.”
It was just that nebulous.
The rumor circulated for months before I learned of it. As I began trying to trace it down, everything pointed back to the dishonest dentist. When I called him, he gave me the name of a denominational worker in Memphis as his source. So I called him.
He said, “Joe, I simply told the man I did not know the details, but that the Baptist papers had written about your marital problems. That’s all I said.”
That was sufficient for a man with a mind set on mischief.
There was no running down and ending such a rumor.
My mistake, I realized, was not telling the pastor search committee of that church of our year’s counseling and the newspaper article from five years earlier. Honestly, I was hoping to put that behind us. It never occurred to me that someone would stoop so low as to use it against us.
I stayed at that church only three years. (It’s the “difficult church” referred to in our first story above.) As I was leaving the church, I managed to ask a few members whom I thought of as our closest friends, “Had you heard the rumor about us being divorced?”
They each had.
I said, “Why did you not ask me about it?”
To a person, they said, “I was afraid of your answer.”
