Preachers Often Held to Higher Parental Standard : Society: Arizona conference provides an anonymous setting for ministers to confront the challenges of healing their drug-addicted children.

There are Bible passages in which parents brought their children to Jesus for healing, and whether the child was sick or maimed, Christ would cure them.

It was a testament to the faith of their parents.

On a blazing summer day in a suburban Arizona church, 63 parents came to ask the Lord to heal their children. They too were sick, though not in a way the Bible refers to.

Their sons and daughters were addicted to drugs.

But the faith of those parents in the church auditorium was strong. They weren’t neglectful or addicts themselves. They were pastors and missionaries.

They came from throughout the country, arriving on Friday and departing on Saturday to get home in time for Sunday services, to share the pain of losing their children to marijuana, alcohol, heroin.

They came in search of answers.

They came to find a way to heal--their children and themselves.

*

“Mom, Dad. What in the hell are you doing here?”

Stephanie Vawter shot up in bed. It was midnight on July 7, 1997, and she had just driven home to Denver after spending a week in Mexico shooting black tar heroin.

She’d been home all of an hour when her parents burst in. Exhausted and strung out, her last hit six hours earlier now wearing off, she couldn’t imagine what had brought them from their home in Arizona.

But through the darkness, Stephanie could see the shimmer of tears in her mother’s eyes.

“We know you’re on heroin,” her father began, “and we want you to get help.”

*

In today’s culture of teen violence, sex and drug addiction, society says strong families and religion may be the buffers needed to keep children from making bad choices. The 63 ministers and missionaries who attended the Arizona drug seminar, believed the first of its kind, had both.

They reared their children in two-parent homes. They talked to them about right and wrong. Most importantly, they taught them to love and honor God and themselves.

Religion was the foundation of their lives, but it could not immunize them against misery.

“It’s not rare for clergy to go through family problems,” says Louis McBurney, a psychiatrist at Colorado-based Marble Retreat, a clergy counseling center. “Their own kind of work demands and the kind of fishbowl life they live gets focused on their children, and the children often feel they have to live up to an unusually high standard.”

But as ministers and missionaries, these parents also are held to a higher standard. They’re supposed to be able to keep their own houses in order if they are preaching to others about doing the same.

And so when they learned their children were addicts, many of these ministers did not confide in their congregations because they feared rejection or ridicule. Others were fired after telling the truth.

The drug conference, titled “You’re Not Alone,” allowed them to finally discuss their experiences in an anonymous setting. Those who attended registered by first name and Zip Code only, but they included Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, Baptists and evangelicals.

One family agreed to share their story.

*

John Vawter couldn’t believe what he was saying.

“We know you’re on heroin,” he told his daughter, “and we want you to get help.”

The call had come 31 hours earlier, at 5 p.m. on Sunday. John and Susan Vawter’s son, Michael, told them their 25-year-old daughter was addicted to heroin and in Mexico buying drugs.

The family became suspicious after Stephanie called her mother, her brother and an aunt asking for money. She told them she was in Mexico visiting friends and her car had broken down.

Finally, Michael did some checking and one of Stephanie’s friends confirmed the truth.

“Sit down,” he told his parents over the phone, before destroying them.

It had, until then, been a day for celebration.

It was the couple’s 30th wedding anniversary and John’s first day to preach at Bethany Community Church in Tempe since accepting the job as head pastor.

He and Susan were debating whether to go out to dinner when they found themselves wondering whether their daughter was still alive.

They got on the phone and learned from Stephanie’s friend that she was due back in Denver the next day. After another series of calls to church counselors and substance abuse centers, they decided to try to persuade their daughter to seek treatment.

“If your daughter agrees to come,” one drug counselor told them, “you may have to let her shoot up to get her on the plane.”

As naive as any two people could be about drugs, John and Susan had no idea what that meant.

But there was so much more they didn’t know.

They didn’t know Steff, as she liked to be called, had been doing heroin for a year, spending at least $70 a day to support her habit.

They didn’t know she had hocked her stereo, television, golf clubs, hedge clipper--even a “Snow White” video for $5--for drug money. Or that when she was really desperate she simply sold drugs herself.

They didn’t know her veins were so weak that she shot up in between her toes and fingers, even in her thighs, where the vessels were stained black from the drugs that flowed through them.

When they got on that plane, they understood Steff was no longer the daughter they knew. They had no idea whether they could get the old Steff back.

“The first thing we wanted to do is find her, tell her we knew she was using and ask her to come get help,” says John. “We weren’t going to force her. You can’t do that.”

*

Even Stephanie acknowledges that she couldn’t have asked for a better childhood.

“I had a bike. I had a treehouse. A tire swing. My own room. Two parents. My mom was home when we got home from school,” she says. “I was not abused, I was not neglected--nothing like that.”

She was, however, big for a girl her age. And on top of the insecurities about her weight, she was a preacher’s kid, expected to be in church every Sunday, expected to behave all the time, expected to be a happy, well-adjusted child.

“It’s like being the president’s kid on a smaller scale,” she says. “It was a lot of pressure. I felt a lot of pressure with the church.”

Stephanie’s parents met in 1966, when they joined the staff of Campus Crusade for Christ, and married the following year. In 1977, when Steff was 5 years old, the family moved to Wayzata, Minn., a suburb of Minneapolis, where John became senior pastor of the Wayzata Evangelical Free Church.

The kids were active in the church, attending Sunday school each week and youth group events. Religion also was part of their home life. John and Susan set aside at least once a week for “family time,” during which they discussed a Bible principle with their children.

But by her sophomore year in high school, Steff stopped going to church, and, as John recalls, “She was surly at home, and she wasn’t happy at school.”

The year before, Steff had started smoking marijuana. The drug, she says, erased both the pressures of the church and the insecurities about her weight. “It was the release that I had been looking for.”

The day after she turned 18, Steff graduated from high school. Two weeks later she moved to Seattle, where she worked in a bakery, drank and smoked pot when it was available.

Within the year Steff moved to Denver, where she worked odd jobs and went to college off and on, and where drugs became part of her everyday life.

She began smoking pot daily, she says, because “I was intimidated by school.” Then, for about six months, she turned to acid. In 1992 she tried cocaine for the first time. Three years later she switched to methamphetamines.

All the while, Steff kept looking for that ultimate high, and in March 1996 she found it. At a friend’s apartment, she had her first hit of heroin.

By May, Steff was shooting heroin daily. She’d wake up and do a hit. Have some coffee, smoke some cigarettes, go out, come home, watch TV and do another hit. Every once in a while she’d smoke some crack for variety.

When she began going into debt, Steff tried to quit the heroin but would get “dope sick” after just 12 hours without a hit. “You throw up, your bones hurt, your muscles hurt, everything hurts.”

By May of 1997, Steff’s tolerance for heroin had grown too strong. She wasn’t getting high anymore, so she and her dealer went to Mexico to buy prescription drugs to help them get off the heroin. Instead, they found better heroin.

In July the two returned to Mexico to buy more dope. But Steff had become too desperate. She was about to be found out.

She looked from her mom to her dad and made a split-second decision.

“OK,” she said, reaching into her purse and pulling out a plastic sandwich bag stuffed with heroin. “That’s all I have.”

Within two hours, Steff was in detox. Two years after her parents confronted her, she remains clean.

This summer, with his daughter’s permission, John Vawter organized the “You’re Not Alone” conference and held it at his church. He was one of the lucky ones there: Not only had his daughter made it into recovery, his church had been supportive throughout the ordeal.

When John once offered to resign his position at Bethany, the church elders “laughed at me and said no,” he recalls.

Nonetheless, he and Susan grappled with guilt. Although they never knew Steff was using until that fateful phone call, they wondered what they could have done differently, where they had gone wrong.

“I don’t think there is an answer,” Susan says now. “There are no formulas on how you can raise your kids and it’s all going to come out great in the end. I just feel like you have to do your very best.

“The pain and sorrow of life can happen to anybody--the good people and the bad.”

Now living in Arizona with her parents, Steff attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings five times a week and works as an assistant manager at a children’s store while studying anthropology in college.

She also teaches Sunday school at her father’s church. At the conference, Steff shared her story.

When one parent asked what role, if any, God had in her recovery, Steff responded by reciting one of the 12 steps in Alcoholics Anonymous.

“Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”

“For me,” she said, “spirituality was being able to get close to God and knowing that whatever I did, God was going to forgive me, and he had forgiven me for all the things I had done.”