Gallant Fool: Tragic Effects of Leading with Wounds and a Surprising Solution

By Larry Cooney

"My solution was to keep marching forward, a gallant fool. I was most angry at this fool's seemingly unstoppable march."

Gallant Fool examines the painful subject of carrying emotional wounds into Christian leadership. It follows the author's life in ministry and toxic relationship with shame and anxiety through starting a church, peaching and leading a congregation, managing staff members at Gospel missions, and working with authority figures like board members, a CEO, and other pastors.

Ministry requires faith; shame and anxiety corrode it. Living in a paradox this way is a burden. The author's burdens followed him into his faith in Christ and stayed with him through his career and marriage. He now realizes that for years, he believed and preached a Christian message that often worked against bringing peace and resolution.

The book contains sixteen short essays and ten chapters to describe carrying this burden and an eventual resolution, which the author describes as Christ's deliverance through a process of awareness, acknowledgment, and acceptance.

Cooney makes the point that Jesus offers relief to anyone carrying burdens, and he delivers his children regardless of the nature, duration, and magnitude of the burden; that's because God delivers us by grace through faith, a message that is familiar and at the same time elusive for its simplicity and refusal to credit anyone for a successful deliverance, except God. Gallant Fool offers hope by putting the spotlight on where it belongs: God and his grace.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781685172008

Book preview

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Gallant Fool

Tragic Effects of Leading with Wounds and a Surprising Solution

Larry Cooney

ISBN 978-1-68517-199-5 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-68517-200-8 (digital)

Copyright © 2022 by Larry Cooney

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Foreword

Preface

Escalante—An Essay

1

Family of Origin

The Ant House—An Essay

2

Legitimacy Issues

How to Start a Church Conference—An Essay

Planets and Idols—An Essay

3

Anxiety, Conflict, and Anger

Hardware Store—An Essay

Typewriter Lab—An Essay

4

Anxious Prayer

Prayer Closet—An Essay

Sack Lunch on Third and James—An Essay

5

Leading a Staff—A New Kind of Performance Trap

Consultant's Report—An Essay

Termination—An Essay

6

Anxiety, Shame, and Authority

Whispers on Interstate 5—An Essay

It Took an Earthquake—An Essay

7

Anxiety, Shame, and the Holy Spirit

Happy Prophets—An Essay

Sonics Warmup—An Essay

8

Anxiety, Shame, and Marriage

Lompoc Hilton Gardens—An Essay

Walk in the Park—An Essay

9

Gospel and Freedom

10

Acceptance

Addendum—Prayer of Gratitude and Renewal

About the Author

Foreword

There are a lot of people who want to write a book. You hear it come up frequently in Christian circles, God wants me to write a book! There are probably many stories that would be interesting to read, and God might want it written down, but the reality is that many books never see the light of day. As an author of a book, a previously syndicated columnist, and a regular curriculum designer, I know how hard it is to write. It is even more complicated when you attempt to write a book that lays bare the naked truth of your own life.

It takes a lot of grit to get up early, put down words, and not get discouraged or distracted. It takes an inner passion for keeping going when all the other demands of life, work, and family also want our daily devotion. It is even harder to do when the subject matter reveals all the junk and failures of your life fighting against our inner resistance to shame. Think about Adam and Eve after they sinned. They hid, and they were as perfect as you could get to that point in history.

Larry has come out from the hidden fig leaf of ministry, written a book of hope for the discouraged Christian, and shown us a path of healing that leads directly back to Christ.

What makes this even more striking is that Larry is a genuinely good guy! That's the thing. Good people struggle and suffer as much as anyone. Pastors struggle and sin. People who love God and desire to follow him with their whole hearts deal with addictions and attitudes. The fact that he is a good guy who loves God and his family makes this book relevant to all of us.

I'm glad that Larry wanted to write this book, and I'll suggest that he needed to write it. I hope that every Christian who wants to walk with God in an authentic impactful way will read this book. As a trauma therapist who works mainly with the Christian community, I know that Christians suffer from depression, anxiety, substances, porn addiction, self-hatred, and broken marriages, just like everyone else. Jesus warned us the trials and tribulations would come. I don't know why we are so often shocked when they do. His promise was that we can learn how to be overcomers just like he overcame to find peace or balance in our lives (John 16:33).

Trauma affects the body, mind, and spirit. The spirit connects with the Holy Spirit, guiding our mind with its thoughts and feelings. The mind oversees the body, brain, and behavior. When this alignment occurs, the Christian person will have tremendous success against temptations and be less reactive in the face of stressful or traumatic events. The Bible states that we do not have a spirit of fear, but of love, power, and a sound mind (2 Timothy 1:7).

When fear takes root in our lives, it upsets this alignment, causing the body and destructive behaviors to govern how we think and feel, shutting down our spiritual natures. This negative cycle can cause people who are going through tough times to stop reading the Word of God, praying, and going to church; their spirit grows weak, and the effects of trauma and sin take over their thoughts, which can lead to depression and anxiety.

When our alignments become reversed, the enemy's lies become unbreakably true because of how strongly they feel true. These are the strongholds that set themselves up against the truth of God. The purpose of feelings is to create memories that can provide wisdom for future choices. Feelings are sensory-based recordings in the body that protect us against harm or guide us to pleasure. The body could be called our subconscious mind, constantly scanning and reacting in the background. It is like the smog detector in the home, faithfully alerting us to any sign of smoke. Its purpose is to help us escape a burning house, but it doesn't know the difference between a burning house and burnt toast in the toaster.

The body's reactions to real or perceived threats are fast, much faster than the conscious mind that needs to take slowly analyze the best course of action. If we step out in front of a car, the conscious mind would pull out our phones, Google the ten best ways to avoid being hit by a car, and it would be too late. The body would throw us to the side of the road, breath coming rapidly, heart racing, body sweating, and the mind feeling disoriented. When our mind came back online, we would realize that we narrowly escaped death after the body saved us.

Unfortunately, the body would register the intense emotion of a narrow escape from a vehicle into a deep emotional program that might take over our life. We are now living in irrational fear of all cars or driving or street corners, etc. A strong feeling and its reaction in the body is hard to outthink. You can't do it on your own. It is the same for any bodily-based fear, addiction, or compulsion.

The good news is that the Holy Spirit is more convincing than our most intense emotion and more decisive than our most irrational thought. Larry shares his process of this with the tools of awareness, acknowledgment, and acceptance. He opens the stark realities of his own story to illustrate how the Spirit of God can transform us. I might summarize his processes with one word: agreement. When we choose to agree with God's truth against what we feel, regardless of how real that feeling seems, we find the absolute truth that sets us free (John 8:31–32).

Interestingly, the beginning of John 8:31 explains how God's truth takes over the body's truth. It occurs in our abiding with Christ. Abiding is a misunderstood process of healing in the church. It is a resting state, not a striving state where we stand on the Word of God and are in agreement with him. It may not feel authentic, but we declare that it is accurate, and miraculously, the body, through repetition of God's Word, starts falling in line with the renewed mind and spirit.

It isn't easy. It is tough, but it gets easier as we get in proper alignment with God. It is why the Bible says that if we confess our sins, he is faithful to forgive us our sins and bring us back into the right relationship with Him.

Roman's 12:1 explains that we have to give our lives to Christ, and Roman's 12:2 explains the need to start thinking like Christ. We get a new wineskin, and now we have to pour in the wine of real communion with God. It is the process of agreement and abiding that facilitates transformation.

Larry's book takes all of us—layman and pastor, new Christian, or hardened follower—to an opportunity to agree with Gospel, grace, and Spirit. The generous space of grace and our abiding in Christ helps us to realign our body, mind, and spirit. As Larry has successfully done, our shame is no longer hidden but exposed, and healing comes.

Ron Huxley, LMFT

Ron Huxley is the founder of the ParentingToolbox and has helped parents improve their family life for over two decades! He is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist currently practicing on the Central California Coast. He specializes in trauma, attachment, and nontraditional families (like divorced, step, and adoptive families). He is the author of Love and Limits: Achieving a Balance in Parenting and trains parents and professionals on a national level.

Preface

My joke always was that after I had won the Most Likely to Succeed Award upon graduating from Bible College, I ended up at a homeless shelter. Both parts happened. After winning the award in 1987, I went on to plant a church that still gathers to this day, and after that, as director for the Bread of Life Mission, I helped that struggling homeless shelter in Seattle to keep its doors open, and it's doing well to this day. After ten years in Seattle, I started another shelter in Bremerton, Washington, which is still open and active, but that seemed to be the end of my successes. I was fifty-four years old, and something relentless had finally tracked me down for the kill.

Unresolved early childhood wounds caught up with me, and within another six years, my career would be, for all practical purposes, finished with as much or more shame than honor.

When I packed my car to go to Bible College in 1984, I was unimaginably excited and filled with faith. Two and a half years earlier, I had accepted Jesus into my life. It was a profound life-changing experience, but I was not aware then of the dark emotional storm that was brewing in my soul. Thirty-four years later, shame and despair grounded me on rocky shores. And even then, I seemed to be satisfied with remaining on the rocks, allowing the storm to beat me while I looked for and finally found refuge.

I will be pleased if this story causes even one other faith-filled young person to pause, take an honest self-inventory, and consider what is in their heart before entering vocational ministry or any career path for that matter. Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it, wrote Solomon (Proverbs 4:23 NIV). So I wrote Gallant Fool for young leaders so that they'd reflect on whether or not they, too, might have a potential career-ending storm brewing in their hearts, and if so, to get help. It's a tragedy when any person who strikes out in faith to serve Jesus ends up in the proverbial ditch of vocational ministry, especially when the young minister could have avoided that wreckage.

And I hope older leaders, especially those who feel like they have failed and now live with despair and loss, would consider these pages and find peace reading them. I also hope that the book's ninth and tenth chapters prove to be a good application of the Gospel to untangle shame's pains and destructive forces. I believe that Christ's kingdom has untapped potential to advance when those leaders who feel that the Church has judged them as failures and relegated them to insignificant positions discover that grace brings healing and repositions them for a next fruitful season, regardless of age and circumstances.

I heard God whisper these verses to me while the storm was still battering me:

Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations… Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead—since he was about a hundred years old—and that Sarah's womb was also dead. Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised (Romans 4:18-21).

The whisper encouraged me to understand that tragedy and failure never define any of us. God, who gives life to the dead, and calls into being things that were not (Romans 4:17) was repositioning me.

Is vocational ministry a battleground with winners and losers? Are the winners those who have avoided falling and can show specific achievements? And are losers those who fell or failed and retreated to the shadows of shame and dishonor? That can't be the case. We can't possibly restrict the accessible grace that Paul announces in Romans 5:1 only to those who gained outward success. God has already removed whatever sins or character flaws that contributed to any ministry collapse or moral failure. God chooses not to remember them any longer and has pointed both winners and losers to view the same glory as ransomed and equally restored children. Who would look back and compare respective temporal successes and failures and consider them worthwhile metrics when eternal glory is near?

This book consists of ten chapters and sixteen essays. The essays describe my relationship with Christ through my ministry career and how I experienced the grace and miracle of God through life's twists and turns from salvation through adversity, and finally to restoration. The ten chapters describe my unhealthy relationship with shame and anxiety and how I finally acknowledged them and found peace.

Shame and anxiety are formidable foes. They found root in me in my very early years, laid concealed behind masks and covers, through salvation, and the following years when I prepared to become a pastor. I built false foundations of striving and performance to protect me until the very end when I had no position or status behind which to hide.

It's easy to doubt one of the book's chief premises: unresolved childhood wounds caused shame, anxiety, and the resultant problems. What's not to say that I had some deeper mental or emotional flaw than my siblings? Perhaps I was of a weaker frame than the rest, a slow learner, or simply inferior. Perhaps my premise is just an excuse behind which I'm excusing my failures and sins. In truth, I thought my problem was anxiety; as I wrote these pages, I discovered the problem was shame. I believe there are tight connections between the two, and behind these chief culprits follow depression, anger, insecurity, low self-esteem, paranoia, and other dark emotions.

When does a child intellectually understand an emotional deficit? In the best of circumstances, the child understands only years after the deficiency already has begun to send signals of inferiority, trouble, and insecurity; they, in turn, cause the child to protect, become frustrated, and hate himself or herself. Finally, because this deficit has its roots in sin, a deceiving characteristic keeps the young person from understanding this tangle of hurt and sin until it has entrenched itself for future self-destruction.

Another topic I want to address upfront is, why didn't Jesus heal me entirely at salvation? And the accompanying question, why didn't I do all of what was necessary to receive healing? I make the case in the book that I received the Spirit of God at salvation, and that's a big deal. So why then, having the Spirit, did I drag this monster with me throughout my life, marriage, and career? A question in Christian circles today is what we can expect from God related to getting well. Was my Christian life a mediocre one because I failed in some discipline, devotion, prayer, or measure of faith? Did I settle for a mediocre result when large sections of the Christian Church would instruct me to hold out for a complete victory? Had I conceded to evil by allowing shame to mount a seemingly successful war against me? Had I let God down?

These are helpful questions to ask as increasing numbers of Christians, not to mention people with no Christian faith, look for answers and solutions in prescriptions that a new societal morality commands and instructs. Sales of anti-anxiety medicines skyrocket, and so do supplements, therapy sessions, and eastern meditations as people in and out of the church seek wellness. Meanwhile, large parts of the church seem to flounder under a message from the pulpit that offers only prescriptions and unclear exhortations.

Another question I ask that rubs against some popular doctrine is how, if I had the Spirit, did I miss grace? How well does the Church today understand grace? I didn't understand it well, even though I was saved, ordained, and spoke in tongues. It seems that performance, works, laws, and commands are easier understood than grace, and leaders distribute these more widely than grace amongst their followers. Grace that holds a believer caught in sin is not a popular message. Victory has one good look, it seems, namely complete triumph over sin. In truth, though, many believers loathe transparency and would rather hide behind a mask than apprehend grace.

I'll look at what I believe are two blind spots in Pentecostal doctrine. The first is the doctrine's emphasis that believers can't expect to have any significant experience with the Holy Spirit until after salvation (Fundamental Truth Seven, The Baptism in the Holy Ghost, in the Assemblies of God Sixteen Fundamentals states, This experience is distinct from and subsequent to the experience of the new birth.); the second blind spot is prioritizing this subsequent Spirit experience over sanctification (Fundamental Truth Nine). These blind spots were problematic for me in my battle against shame and anxiety. This battle was hard for me to comprehend in part because, according to Pentecostal doctrine, I had the Spirit, yet I struggled. This juxtaposition seemed to be in contradiction to Pentecostal doctrine. Only grace, I believe, can resolve this issue while shame splits and divides everywhere it can. And shame's pain is horrible.

I begin my story with my family of origin. I was the middle of seven siblings, born in 1956 into a Roman Catholic family from Philadelphia. We moved to Seattle and back, and then returned finally in the early 1970s. I worked in the back of restaurants, smoked marijuana, and drank beer until I accepted Christ in 1982, after which time I quickly enrolled in Bible College. I met Sandy Peck at church. We went to the same single-adult class at Bellevue's Neighborhood Church. I attended Bible College. She had already graduated; she worked as part of Neighborhood's office staff. We married in 1987.

Through Bible College and my first ministry position, between 1988 and 1990, I worked in retail and sold men's clothing. I received my ordination from the Northwest District Council of the Assemblies of God in 1989. Sandy and I planted Morningside Fellowship in 1990, which we later renamed Port Ludlow Community Church. We built a beautiful building, and about a year after we occupied it in 1998, I took a position in Seattle at the Bread of Life Mission where I stayed until 2009. After that time, I began the shelter in Bremerton, and a year later, I moved to California for a position within a more extensive mission organization. Unhappy there, I sabotaged myself; I had never resolved my inner wound; its destructive forces only seemed to grow beneath the masks I wore and the status behind which I hid.

Church and ministry are in the throes of a transition today ostensibly caused by pandemics, the rise of coercive forces in government, education, and science, and manufactured racial tensions that are dividing families and churches. Leaders are scrambling, keeping services moving along despite distractions and restrictions, keeping aware of the day's issues, and trying to understand discipleship in this new age. Additionally, the enemy of our souls still attacks leaders, marriages, and ministries. But the Gospel's power has not diminished, and it still can restore and preserve a broken soul.

I pray that this book contributes to a better awareness of how the enemy will use sin and brokenness to thwart God's purposes, even in a very young life. And I hope the reader discovers how the accessible grace that flows from Jesus's sacrifice on the cross is always and only the solution and strength for us who are being saved (1 Corinthians 15:2).

Note: Unless I indicate otherwise, I use the New International Version of the Bible for references.

Escalante—An Essay

He was the preacher, and I wanted to be him. He w ore a blue suit and carried a thick Bible. I just got saved. That's what they called it. Change coursed through me. Weed, cigarettes, beer, and magazines went away. I was full-on Jesus. When I wasn't working, I was at church. If there was no church, I was at home, reading the Bible I bought. I kissed it the first time I opened it.

Salvation took days, but it was years in the making. I came to Santa Maria from Los Angeles where I was kitchen manager for a chain out of Seattle. They wanted to try Los Angeles. They sent me. It nearly swallowed me. When I crossed the mountains into East Los Angeles, the lights went on forever. Anxiety gripped me.

My life was restaurants and parties. Partying in Los Angeles is dangerous. The city is massive. I was twenty miles east of it. The weather was hot; life was cold. My crew and I partied. They stole food. They drank and drugged at a whole other level on the proceeds of stolen lobster tails. The restaurant fired me.

By that time, I was living in a single room in La Puente with a cat. I left the cat out one night. When I found it in the morning, its tail was missing. The girl who came to Los Angeles with me had left me months earlier. She had started using heroin. I couldn't handle any of what was happening.

I caught a break; another restaurant chain hired me. They wanted a kitchen manager in Santa Maria. Sure, I'd go. I thought Santa Maria was one of the many cities surrounding Los Angeles. When I drove north on the 101, I was surprised it took