Pastor Tony Rose is a former chairman of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Mental Health Advisory Board (2014-2015), pastor of a church in Kentucky, and…. a life-long depressive.
Yes, a depressive pastor. Well, that’s no biggie, because there are tons out there (38.7% of church leaders say they’ve suffered from a mood disorder).
What’s so rare and wonderful is that Rose is one of the few willing to talk about it (here he is talking with Rick Warren and Russell Moore) and write about it.
And not just discuss it — but own it and use it to help inspire others like myself with the message that you can be a man of God and of sorrows (Jesus was the most famous one to fit that bill).
We know, based on surveys, that Rose is far from alone in being a pastor battling depression and anxiety.
But we also know that very few are willing to talk about it, publicly. Author Amy Simpson has speculated that it’s possibly because of two things.
A) Pastors fear losing their ministry because they won’t seem “victorious enough” and B) Pastors may be especially prone to viewing these medical problems as spiritual ones.
Here’s part 1 of Tony and mine’s discussion, which centers around how reading the Puritans helped Rose come to grips with his melancholy.
The Weary Christian: Can you talk about your own experience with depression?
Tony Rose: I had a spell when I was fourteen years old that I didn’t understand. I had a starting position on the varsity football team. On our first game, I was doing fine, and I went to intercept a pass and I barely missed it and the guy caught it and ran for a touchdown. The coach immediately took me out of the game, and I never started another game that year.
I got nervous about it, I probably had something close to panic attack, but had no idea what those things were then and then slowly got over it, never thought much about it.
Then I went to college, played football there, so I was in a man’s world. But in college, I even started obsessing over some things, worrying about them once I’d really deepened my commitment to Christ.
I was a natural born legalist, so I viewed God as my head coach. If he said “jump,” I wanted to know how high, because I wanted to be on the first team. Perfectionism and depression are cousins, and they don’t go well with the Gospel.
So I met my wife-to-be, had a wonderful time dating, graduated from college one weekend, got married the next, moved to Memphis for seminary, and off and on through seminary years, I’d go through bouts of doubting about my salvation – that was one of my chief obsessions.
I got a full-time position at church and ended up as a church planter in South Florida.
So when I was about 31 years old, things started getting very inward.
I was having thoughts that I felt like I couldn’t control, that were just totally improper for a Christian, and I started some legalistic method of confessing every thought I ever had. And before I knew what was happening, I was in a downward spiral of a tornado that took me to a pit. I did not know what was going on. I had no experience with it, no education, I figured I had a brain tumor, I was so sick.
It all culminated in literally four sleepless nights.
I was lying there, in sweating fear, not knowing what was going to happen. And I woke up on a Sunday morning, and I was supposed to go preach and I rolled over in tears and told my wife, “I cannot go face those people this morning. I’m supposed to go tell them Jesus can help them, and he’s not helping me, and I think it’s my fault.”
And my dear wife loaded our minivan and the three girls and me and drove us 20 hours home from South Florida, and that’s when my pursuit of how does a person deal with such things began.
That was 1991, and I could not find a single voice in the Christian community that spoke a vocabulary that could reach my soul.
And that’s when I jokingly say I stumbled onto the Puritans. They were experiential writers, and they’re not known for this so much because they’re known for their doctrine, but their pastoral work is second to none. I have not read anything in what I’ve studied about neuroscience that the Puritans by close observation of people had not commented on. That’s how astute they were.
And Richard Baxter in his four huge volumes of works – I think it’s probably in the first volume – says, “Directions to the melancholy and those who care for them,” and to the Puritans, melancholy meant any kind of mental disorder and they would take in almost everything in the modern DSM.
But they just used the term “melancholy.” And in those several pages, he describes all the possible symptoms someone may have – and he says you may have some, but not all – and he writes with an accuracy that you know he went through it, too.
And that’s where I found my first friend.
The second one was John Bunyan, who was bold enough to write his story in his autobiography that was published six times before he died. If Bunyan were alive today and wrote that, no evangelical church would call him to be their pastor.
His statement in the front of the book is priceless: “God did not play with me in testing me, the devil did not play with me in tempting me, and neither did I play in writing down this account. He that liketh it, may he be blessed. He that doesn’t, let him write a better.”
Since then, it’s been a 30 plus year journey, studying learning and helping people since that time.
The Weary Christian: Was that experience with the Puritans in and alone sufficient for your recovery, or were there other means along the way the Lord used?
I can only use that in the present tense – recovering – I can almost say, “Hi, my name’s Tony I’m an alcoholic,” except I’d say, “Hi My name’s Tony, I’m a depressive.”
I thought I would get over it. And there are some people who go through a major depression – and it’s either event-caused or specifically medically-caused – and is curable. But there are those of us who are given to life-long melancholy.
Spurgeon has keenly observed that “some of God’s finest servants walk most the way to heaven in the dark.” He says, “it’s as if melancholy marked them from birth as her own.”
Now that’s sense.
But we don’t talk like that today.
People think that’s giving up. I say the best thing you can do to deal with your depression is admit and own that you are a depressive. Then you quit fearing it and being ashamed of it.
The Weary Christian: I’ve had a love-hate relationship with the Puritans my whole life. I’ve been obsessive about these things too. Thinking that God is tallying up every one of my sins, and at some point, you wonder how God can actually love you. But when I read the Puritans – yes, they talk about the beauty of being made perfect in Christ, but they also talk a lot about sin and what wretches we are.
And that’s all true, but my problem as an obsessive, as someone who’s depressed about myself is that I will listen to the stuff about sin and take it much more to heart than the stuff about Christ. So with the Puritans, sometimes their talk about sin can be tough on my psyche. Did you find that to be the case, or were you able to separate that?
Rose: Yes, very much so.
But it was also the Puritans who helped me to stop doing that. Baxter was key in that. Because the first thing I ever read of Baxter was in seminary. It was from a reformed pastor, and I thought him to be one of the most hard-nosed, legalistic guys that I’d ever heard in my life.
But through stumbling on Baxter’s article about melancholy, he understood my mind so well, because he made statements like this, “the melancholy person can read the word of God and think that all the promises of the Word are for other people and all the judgments of the Word are for them.”
In another treatise to his church people called “Directions for Weak and Distempered Christians,” he said, “our affections, our deepest emotions and longings follow our understanding’s conceptions.”
So when we use our understanding and reasoning and conceive of what God is like, our affections are either drawn to God or repelled from God. And he said if you conceive of God as someone who’s always seeking the advantage against you, God himself will become a devil to you.
Nobody every talked like that to me. Ever.
Because there were times I was like Martin Luther – love God, sometimes I hated him. But Luther gave me permission to say that without feeling like God was going to strike me down on the spot. I know better than that, and I know Luther didn’t, but he did hate the way his understanding of God made him feel.
But then I found myself getting into the vein of the Puritans’ works that are often ignored or just unknown. That is all their writings to the “weak believers” in their sermons. Their favorite passages are probably Psalm 42, and the other is Isaiah 50:10,11.
One of them has a 100 page treatise about those two verses in Isaiah about the child of light walking in darkness.
I was taught growing up “If you’re a Chrsitian, you never walk in darkness.”
The WC: Would you say Baxter and Bunyan really stand up to you as the top Puritans on this?
Rose: Those are the two major ones.
Probably the one I’ve read the most are the Letters of Samuel Rutherford.
Letters are actually better than sermons for this – because he’s writing to an individual about individual problems they’ve asked about. So you get to the heart of the man, the heart of his understanding about the Gospel, and all Puritans are hard to read, but Rutherford is one of the easiest and clearest, and he is a poetic man with his pen.
If I could say two sentences like he said a gazillion, it’d be wonderful. He was writing to one young man who was doubting, and he said, “Yes, your doubts are your sins, but they are Christ’s drugs to cure your pride.”
You have to think that through to milk it dry. That’s big. He said when he was taken captive from his pastorate, he called Christ, who is Truth himself, a “liar” to his face. He said that then he learned how good his mediator was “at handling my sinful heart.”
So he understood the sinfulness of man, but here’s what Puritans really taught about our sin. There’s a sermon by Christopher Love titled Overmuch Sorrow for Sin. Now have you ever heard anybody preach “Quit being so sorry for your sin?”
Melancholy people dwelt more on their sin than they did their Savior.
The basic principle was “Stop looking at yourself and your sin and cast your eyes on Jesus, because that’s the only way your faith grows.”
The WC: Here’s how someone with OCD can struggle with this. There was a recent study on OCD suggesting that once people with OCD fear something, they have a difficult time adjusting their sense of fear if it’s proven that the thing they fear is actually now safe. They don’t recognize it as now being safe. So maybe people with OCD struggle with the Gospel because they struggle with conceptualizing that God is now their Father, not judge.
Rose: That is the core of what a mind like yours or mine does.
The trouble is – there is an entire section of dealing with people with OCD called scrupulosity and when it turns religious. Well, the Puritans talked about scruples in the 1600s. Baxter said, “You worry about what you say, you worry about what you don’t say.”
The external observations that can be made of people like you and me. Ed Hallowell from Harvard says it best, “We have a Ferrari engine for our brain with bicycle brakes.” We don’t have an inhibitor. And man, when the fear gets inside of us, and we have that thought/action fusion that an OCD person can get, and just because we thought it or feel it, we’re a basket case for a minute. Sometimes for a week or longer.
The WC: Sometimes our whole life.
Rose: You got it, brother.
Part 2 of our interview coming soon.
