RELIGION / JOHN DART : Shifting From Sales to Sermons : Northridge: A search for the spiritual led Roger Barkley to the ministry. He says his wife’s failing health has brought him valuable insights.

Businessman Roger Barkley and his wife gave up a combined yearly income of $200,000 so that he could enter the ministry, a career he began this month as a pastor in Northridge.

Sadly, however, the Rev. Roger Barkley, 47, brings to the Congregational Church of Northridge not only insights from their sacrifice of material comfort for spiritual fulfillment but also the perspectives on life the couple gained from wife Amy’s battle with cancer.

Barkley, a confident non-believer 10 years ago, doubts he could have coped with the strain without his midlife spiritual discoveries.

“Faith has allowed me to find hope and happiness in the middle of a crisis,” said Barkley, whose wife suffered a serious relapse recently after a good year following a major operation.

“We’ve learned to find joy in the moment, which now may be only an hour free of pain,” he said. Although undergoing daily radiation treatments at present, Amy Barkley “has never been happier,” he said. “We’ve talked about this a lot.”

She was in the pews for her husband’s first two Sundays in the pulpit, said Charles Dugan, a former trustee of the 350-member congregation. “She has a wonderful spirit,” said Dugan, who was on the church’s search committee for a pastor. “He’s an energetic and sincere fellow who gives a very good sermon.”

The odyssey that took the onetime sales manager for Del Monte foods to a seminary, then to the wooded, five-acre grounds of the church on Balboa Boulevard is not entirely unusual.

“Seminary students looking to their second or third careers are very common these days,” said Kendell Rice, director of enrollment services for the School of Theology at Claremont, where the average age of students is between 35 and 38 years old. “It’s a national phenomenon; they have a need to serve others.”

But the story is unusual in that the Barkleys gave up a financially comfortable life in Orange County while well aware that her cancer, which at times seemed conquered, might return to thwart their quest.

When Roger and Amy, both divorced and caring for children, started dating, they quickly learned to avoid talking about religion. “She was faith-filled, and she and I totally disagreed on the subject,” he said.

That changed, he said, after he was “stopped in my tracks” while on a walk one day. “I didn’t hear a voice, but I knew I was surrounded by the presence of God.

“In that moment, I came to understand two things: one, that we live in a sea of God, and, two, that no one religion or denomination has got the whole picture. Each group has a little of it. As we open ourselves up, we can be transformed.”

He said he didn’t tell Amy about his experience, but instead visited a succession of Protestant churches each Sunday. “I was turned off at every one--by their rather polished sermons, academic in analysis, and by music that didn’t appeal to me,” he said.

Then, he tried the 3,000-member Huntington Beach Church of Religious Science, then pastored by the Rev. Peggy Bassett, who was prominent in the metaphysical, motivational denomination.

“It really spoke to me,” Barkley said.

“I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the church that Amy usually attended,” he said.

Barkley was then the Southern California sales manager for Del Monte, the food company’s district manager of the year in 1987. “In 11 years with the company, I never missed a sales quota,” he said.

Nevertheless, he says now, he felt that something was lacking. “I felt hollow,” he said.

While continuing in his job, he took Religious Science classes at night and after three years became a licensed practitioner--a pastoral counselor--in the Los Angeles-based denomination.

While Barkley and his future wife were still dating, she underwent surgery for breast cancer in an operation that was deemed successful.

After they married in 1988 and he was studying Religious Science, the couple talked about his entering the ministry--although his job and her work as a mortgage broker brought in about five times the income he could expect from pastoring a church.

They sold their home in Cypress in 1991 to finance his studies at Pacific School of Religion, an interdenominational seminary in Berkeley that is part of a Protestant-Catholic-Unitarian consortium called the Graduate Theological Union.

Amy Barkley had had no signs of cancer for about five years, but in Barkley’s first semester the disease reappeared and doctors told her she had about two years left to live, he said.

A suggested bone marrow replacement procedure was estimated to cost $240,000. Their insurance company was unwilling to cover it, he said.

“I put on a fund-raising campaign and in four months time donations to the hospital reached $107,000,” he said. Meanwhile, a compromise was reached with insurers to cover the rest.

At the end of his three years in the seminary, Barkley received a masters of divinity degree earlier this year. Although he had enrolled as a ministerial candidate from Religious Science, he had left that church body to join the United Church of Christ, a liberal Protestant denomination that is the principal supporter of the Pacific School of Religion.

“This was the hardest decision of my life,” he said. “Religious Science has a good deal to offer but in some ways I had run into a dead-end theologically,” he said. Religious Science is noted for its eclectic approach to holistic thought and world religions without being tied solely to Christian tenets.

Barkley had several offers from churches that needed ministers, but he was urged to seek the Northridge post by the Rev. Reiss Potterveld, who had left that congregation in early 1993 to become vice president of Pacific School of Religion.

“This church seemed just right,” Barkley said. With an average Sunday attendance of about 175 worshipers, Barkley said that it was a good place to try his ideas on church growth, and attracting “unchurched” people from the community.

“When I first interviewed for the pastor’s job in May, Amy was pretty healthy,” he said.

Since then, however, the cancer has spread and she undergoes daily treatments, he said.

Although he frankly describes Amy as bald now, and overweight, from the powerful medicines she must take, “yet I love her more deeply and passionately than when she was younger and more shapely,” he said. “Our love has deepened.”

And in the face of his personal tragedy, he said, he is still excited about launching his life as a minister, the path his wife backed him in choosing.

“We’re doing God’s business,” the former sales executive said. “We’re in partnership with God.”