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	Church Relying on Faith after Pastor's Arrest By Carolyn Click The State March 4, 2007 http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/16828783.htm Camden — First came shock. Then disbelief. Then tears of grief mixed, perhaps, with a sense of betrayal. Now, nearly two weeks after the arrest of their pastor, parishioners at Northgate Colonial Baptist Church say they are pulling together in faith, discerning God's will for them. "We're a family," Mike Clifton, head of the church's board of deacons, said last week. "We are there for each other. We keep each other lifted up." The Northgate family, hurting as it might be, includes its fallen pastor, the Rev. Kevin Ogle, who sits in a Walton County, Ga., jail for allegedly sending pornographic messages and pictures of himself over the Internet to a police officer posing as a teenage girl. The 42-year-old Ogle of Lugoff faces 11 counts of sexual exploitation of children. The 100-member Southern Baptist congregation has offered prayers for Ogle and his family, organized meals for his wife and young children, and hugged each other especially hard in the wake of the Feb. 20 revelations. They say there was never a moment they lost hope. "We felt like we could go forward at once, that the Lord was on our side," said Evora Price, a member for nearly 20 years. "He knows that we all love each other and that we love the Lord." FINDING FOCUS Like the other members, Price was summoned to the church on the evening of Ogle's arrest, not knowing the reason for the emergency meeting. Even as they tried to absorb the allegations against their popular pastor, members turned to the larger questions at the heart of a church: What does it mean to be a faith community? How can our faith heal the hurt? What would God want us to do? "As a congregation, and as Christians, we have to focus on what God wants us to focus on," Clifton said. A quiet, self-effacing man, Clifton has borne the brunt of the congregation's burden, acting as "the rock of the church," said member Margaret Sowell. He patiently answered media inquiries even as he and other deacons responded to parishioners' own questions and concerns. "A lot of them are hurting, and hurting very deeply, and it is just going to take time," Clifton said. Healing "is not going to happen overnight." The Rev. Eric McAvoy, the church's part-time, associate pastor, has offered strong encouraging words, looking to the Apostle Paul for guidance. "Can you hear the confidence in the scriptures? Can you hear the confidence of Paul?" he asked during Wednesday night's prayer service. "We've got to line up our hearts, minds and speech with the word of God." REBUILDING TRUST Pastoral indiscretion, whether supposedly anonymous Internet activity, an affair outside of marriage or child abuse, cuts to the heart of congregational trust, experts say. It's a kind of "divorce and a betrayal of sacred trust," said the Rev. Tony Everett, a professor of pastoral care at the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary in Columbia. Everett has worked with congregations seeking to heal after conflict or great hurt. The most successful, he said, are those that ask hard questions and work through the emotional roller coaster of denial, anger, grief and sadness. The least successful are those that simply "want to put it behind them." "When they ask me how long it may take, I give them the biblical number 40," which in Hebrew also means "many," Everett said. The number appears often in the Bible: the Israelites spent 40 years in the wilderness before entering the promised land, Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness being tempted by Satan. Complete healing "may take a generation," Everett said. The Rev. Bill Drees, head of the Kershaw Baptist Association, is providing the congregation with resources through the association and the S.C. Baptist Convention. Drees plans to be in the pulpit today, bringing a message he hopes will transcend the pain. "My message for this Sunday is that the transforming word of Christ is transforming bad news to good," he said. "There is always hope in Christ, no matter how bad the news is." SEEKING FORGIVENESS As the congregation gathered Feb. 28, the first Sunday after Ogle's arrest, Virginia Locke stood in front of a group of rapt children near the pulpit, a necklace of heavy bricks around her neck. "Today we are going to talk about forgiveness," said Locke, who brings a weekly message to the children. She had prayed particularly hard for guidance on this Sunday, knowing that adults also would be listening. Her message could not have been more heartfelt. If we put our faith in God and Jesus Christ, he will lift our burdens, she said, removing the heavy bricks from her neck. Among the congregation, there is a palpable determination to live out their faith in love, to strengthen each other even as they pray for their arrested pastor. "Some people wouldn't probably question, and some people have, that we would stand by him," said Price, the longtime member. "But you know, the Lord said you have to forgive in order to be forgiven. "We love Kevin, and he is a sinner. We surely don't love his sin, and we are not taking up for him because of his sin," she said. Clifton holds out hope that adversity will bring strength. "I think an event like this, if it is handled in the right way, will make us more cohesive and stronger than we were before," Clifton said. "I think it shows how weak we can get sometimes if we don't stay part of the group and rely on everybody — and especially God." Reach Click at (803) 771-8386.
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