January 20, 1999
Oates continues 50-year
legacy in pastoral care
___By Mark Wingfield
___Managing Editor
___LOUISVILLE, Ky. (ABP)-- If a minister in your Baptist church excels at pastoral care, or if you've been touched by the ministry of a Christian chaplain in a hospital, military or business setting, you probably have a professor in Louisville, Ky., to thank.
___Wayne Oates may never have set foot in the church, hospital or military base where you received ministry, but his writings and teachings over the past 50 years have influenced the ministers and chaplains you encountered.
___Not only is Oates the nation'smost prolific writer of books on pastoral care, with his 58th volume soon to be published, he's one of three or four people credited with giving birth to the modern concept of pastoral care and counseling.
WAYNE OATES speaks at an Oates Institute conference under the approving gaze of his pastor, Leslie Hollon, who is married to Vicki Hollon, director of the Oates Institute.
___In the minds of many ministers, counselors and chaplains, he is the patriarch of the pastoral care and counseling movement, having taught from 1948-1974 at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and then since 1974 at the University of Louisville School of Medicine.
___"He has made a significant impact on generations of Southern Baptist ministers who have made pastoral care part of their ongoing ministry simply because of their course with Wayne Oates at Southern Seminary," said Andy Lester, one of Oates' former students who now teaches pastoral theology and pastoral counseling at Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth.
___In addition, Lester said, "There are very few pastoral care specialists who are Baptists who couldn't track their roots back to Oates."
___But his reach has extended well beyond Baptists, too, added Vicki Hollon, director of the Wayne Oates Institute in Louisville. She recalled a recent phone call from a high-ranking chaplain in the Air Force who called Oates "the grandfather of clinical pastoral education for the Air Force.
___"I got the program started," the man said, "but he's the one I learned from."
___Oates is credited most often with being among the first to integrate theology with psychology and psychiatry.
___"He put together the practice of pastoral ministry ... with the wisdom and resources of psychiatry and psychology in a masterful way," said Roy Woodruff, executive director of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors. "He became bilingual (in theology and psychiatry) and could move back and forth with amazing agility."
___Oates, now 81, admits the improbability of someone from his background making such a far-reaching impact on Christian ministry and academia.
___"I grew up in poverty in the cotton mill area of South Carolina," he said in a recent interview. "None of my people went past the sixth grade."
___His mother worked in the cotton mills. Oates' father had left the family when he was born, although his mother still wore her wedding ring when she was buried in 1972.
___"I saw my way out of this was education," Oates said. "I got through the eighth grade, and then was appointed a page for Congress in Washington." After completing high school, he went back to work in the South Carolina mills for two years before earning an undergraduate degree from Wake Forest University.
___Finally he landed in Louisville at Southern Seminary, where he met Gaines Dobbins, a pioneering professor in several practical ministry disciplines. Through the influence of Dobbins, Oates developed an interest in what he calls "sick religion." (Oates book titled "When Religion Gets Sick" is still in use and was recently republished on CD-ROM by the Wayne Oates Institute.)
___The integration of theology and psychiatry not only was a new concept in the 1940s, but was considered heretical by some in the seminary community.
___ After graduating from Southern with both a master's degree and a doctorate, Oates assumed a full-time faculty post at the seminary in 1948, much to the consternation of other academics.
___When his second book, "The Bible in Pastoral Care," was published, five professors went to then-President Duke McCall to protest, Oates recalled. They "complained that I didn't have any right to write on the Bible."
___McCall, he said, was unimpressed by the protest and told the professors they ought to write their own books about the Bible instead of criticizing Oates.
___One of Oates' first students was Myron Madden, who later went on to become a major figure in pastoral-care education. Madden recalled the emerging tension of those early days.
___"When I was in the seminary, the assumption was you're just given the Bible and that's enough," he said. "But that's not enough. You've got to relate it."
___What Oates advocated was putting feet to theology, Madden said, although it was a "one-man battle" to get this added to the curriculum.
___That's why the seminary department Oates founded was called "psychology of religion" rather than "pastoral theology," Lester added. "They would not allow the word theology to be used."
___Although most of the academic emphasis Oates established at Southern has been dismantled in recent years, it was a "classic program" in the field of pastoral care, said Woodruff, who also was one of Oates' students. "It was one of the two or three most outstanding degree programs and a very exciting place to be with him."
___Oates believes in the power of laying hands on people, not just at ordinations but in everyday situations of blessing. The power of touch conveys a comforting sense of blessing, he said.
___This is such an integral part of Oates' life and ministry that those he touches may not distinguish it, Hollon suggested. "It doesn't stand separate in a way that sometimes I've experienced in pastoral care people. It's not, 'Now let me give you a big hug.'"
___For many former students, the Oates legacy does not end at the graduation line. Hundreds have kept in touch and call or write or visit him regularly.
___"He has been a pastor with a capital P," Lester said. "He's been their comforter, their counselor, their confessor, their priest. ... His ability to hear you out, to know where you're hurting and give the care you need is an unbelievable part of his legacy."
___For Oates himself, these relationships are a blessing. "The crucial test of maturity," he said, "is the capacity of a person to form and maintain durable relationships."
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