The Project on Rural Ministry (PRM)
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Guiding Churches Through Transition

The pandemic has brought significant struggles to congregations and those who pastor them. For a lot of churches, standard issues and dilemmas became magnified with COVID and all the difficulties it ushered in. But even before the pandemic, churches dealt with questions relating to staying open, hiring new pastors, and working through change. In general, and not just during these times of transitions, it is important for churches to be encouraged in faith, ministry, and mission. Jason Schepp, pastor of EastBrook Presbyterian Church (ECO), is dedicated to providing this encouragement and counsel to other churches. He was gracious to answer our questions about his unique experience in ministry. 

Churches in Transition 

As someone who churches turn to in times of questioning, and the pastor of his own congregation in New Castle, PA, Schepp has seen churches in transition. Recently, his own has dealt with a decline in attendance due to COVID. “EastBrook is a church in transition, as are many others at this time. In response to COVID, we have been working to transition ourselves to better suit the message of the gospel in the times we live.” 

His experience in this area led to him being someone who is asked to help other congregations. “Our church went through a transformation process about three years ago, in which we made some significant changes to our ministry, style, and evangelism processes,” he comments. “Through that, I was able to pick up some knowledge, learn some lessons and grow in the way I led our church.” As a result, Schepp was asked to work with smaller churches within his denomination to help out when they were without a pastor. 

Transitions come in many forms, whether it is in deciding to hire a full-time or part-time pastor, considering merging, or shutting down. Keeping in mind that every church is unique and an expression of God’s grace is how Schepp first approaches dealing with these issues. “With that in mind, we try to help each of those churches first find their strengths in ministry. From the tools they have to the opportunities for ministry in hand, we try to then define vision and mission for the church.” 

It is a process of hard work, prayer, and discerning God’s call through working with the elders of the churches he helps. “In many of our cases, a full-time pastor is a financial challenge and therefore full-time, part-time, or supply is assessed based on the size.” In the case of merging, that is a decision made with both congregations in prayer and discernment. “In some cases, merging churches makes sense for both the church and more importantly the kingdom work that can be done,” Schepp reflects.  

Difficult Questions 

One of the difficulties of transitions that Schepp recognizes is the emotions that are often involved during the process. “We get emotionally attached to our facilities, and for many with good reason. A lot of our churches were built, funded, and maintained by generational families in our communities. They have been a part of the church for some 100+ years.”  

He recalls a meeting during which someone stated they did not want to see their church become a winery. “The most common fear in a small church is the ability to stay open and not close the doors. The fear of the church not being there runs strong.” When a decision needs to be made about staying open or letting go of a facility, the process of working through those concerns and coming up with a solution is taken seriously. 

“In order to work through that,” Schepp says, “we have to help all of our members re-think their image of the church. In short, we have to help them see the church as the people doing ministry instead of the building that is used as a tool for the ministry.” Schepp spends time with the church leaders carefully considering options and sharing stories of God’s ministry outside of their buildings to be reminded how God works and moves through people.  

Kingdom Growth Amidst Loss 

A great difficulty is having to decide to shut down a church. But this process is still one that can be done well, despite the heavy-hearted nature of the decision. “For most, I believe shutting down the church feels like a failure in ministry,” Schepp says. “When they have to consider a closure, they have a feeling of loss and disappointment in their role. I believe one of the best ways we have seen to close churches well is to help them find a way to enhance or start a new ministry with the resources they have left.” 

This can be done in different ways, but Schepp particularly recalls a church in another state that needed to close. “After the liquidation of assets, they were able to fund a church plant that has reached a number of new Christians. In their loss, they were able to see God’s kingdom grow well. If we can help our churches see future, then it helps them deal with the mourning process of losing their own church.” 

Vision and Mission 

Choices and decisions are always made with thought towards what will better equip a church to be actively making new disciples in their community of influence. Schepp sees this as a big part of his calling, not only in helping other congregations but in pastoring his own. “I see vision and mission as one of the major roles of pastoring. Our work is not to build buildings or maintain facilities, but to gather sheep and lead them to Jesus.” 

Helping other congregations while still pastoring his own requires a great amount of time management and support from family and church. “We have a church that sees the need for help in our community through ministry outside of our walls. If the church was not supportive, there would not be enough time to make it happen.” Through the blessings he has felt and experienced, Schepp sees an opportunity to bless others in kingdom work.  

Published: December 7, 2021

PROJECT
For the culmination of Grove City College’s English studies, the Senior Capstone should explore a topic that holds significance to my literary studies.

SOLUTION
I chose my favorite novel, The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers, and designed and wrote a comprehensive reading guide. It is intended to guide readers through the text and provide them with a full context of the author, his work, and the book’s elements.

APPLICATIONS USED
Adobe InDesign
Adobe Photoshop

Term Paper for a 400 level English class

ASSIGNMENT
Choose an issue in Victorian society and explore it through the lens of one of the books on the syllabus.

Lady Audley’s Secret and the Plight of the Criminal Lunatic

The conversations and practices swirling around mental institutions and the issue of mental health have been constantly evolving for hundreds of years. This dialogue had its rough start in the Victorian era, a time during which Victorians were struggling and failing to understand mental health—every factor that affected it, how it showed itself positively and negatively in the individual, and how to treat it when it went bad. Especially challenging to Victorian society during this time was knowing how to deal with the criminal who exhibited signs of insanity or an otherwise debilitating mental illness. With no criteria for assessing mental wellness, it became easy for anyone to be contained in a Victorian madhouse for a variety of reasons aside from mental unwellness. Mary Elizabeth Braddon tackles the multi-faceted topic of Victorian knowledge and perceptions of mental health in the criminally inclined head-on in Lady Audley’s Secret, a sensation novel of the mid to late 1800’s. The novel follows the life and crimes of Lady Audley, and a man’s unrelenting pursuit of the truth surrounding her actions. Braddon shows the pitfalls of the Victorian attitude regarding mental health through the characters of the text suffering lasting negative effects. Specifically, through the character of Lady Audley, Braddon makes a case for the mistreatment of the then deemed “criminal lunatic,” suggesting that Victorian society’s vague conception of insanity could be mutated into both a defense and a weapon that succeeded in liberating the guilty and ostracizing perceived vagrants from society.

Throughout the text, and leading up to her institutionalization, the reader gleans necessary background about what motivates Lady Audley in all her actions. She is driven relentlessly by the desire for things of material wealth and status. After a long pursuit of the truth, Robert Audley finally corners his captive in the library of the extravagant house that she has lied, attempted murder, and committed arson to keep. Her history is one of difficult situations. After growing up wanting and being deserted by George—unsure if he will ever return with the much-needed money he has promised to keep their family afloat—Lady Audley makes a decision to get herself out of poverty once and for all. Haunted by her past of misfortune, she will do anything to ensure her place in the high ramparts of society. “You and your nephew have been rich all your lives, and can very well afford to despise me,” she confesses to Sir Michael in the library, “but I knew how far poverty can affect a life, and I looked forward with a sick terror to a life so affected” (359). Thus, she is driven to extreme emotional responses again and again to desperately keep ahold of the life she has secured for herself. She continuously displays no regard for the means by which she maintains her status, but acts out in selfish vanity to further herself and no one else. Lady Audley finally achieves everything she desires in her marriage to Sir Michael, and the dynamic of their relationship puts her at a place of power, according to scholar Herbert Klein:

It is made abundantly clear throughout the novel that Sir Michael is completely dependent upon his much younger wife who rules him in every way. With his marriage, he gives up all claims to independent activity and even to independent thought. His wife’s word or even her slightest whim are law to him and he would never dream of disobliging his spouse (162).

This setup of the elderly, besotted husband who would do anything for the beautiful, young wife is perfect for Lady Audley to secure herself a future of fine dining, gorgeous furniture, and bejeweled garments. She can finally and ultimately satisfy her material desires and the monetary security she has wanted for so long. But there is one thing that disrupts her perfectly contrived reality, and that is her secret. The secret she carries with her to three-quarters of the way through the text and blurts out to Robert Audley in the library: “You have conquered—a MADWOMAN! I killed [George] because I AM MAD! Because my intellect is a little way upon the wrong side of that narrow boundary between sanity and insanity” (355). Although not all the poor circumstances she has been put in are her own fault, the secret of her hidden insanity is what derails her life once and for all. It displays an “endangering of the social and moral order,” because this beautiful and esteemed woman is actually “a bigamist, an imposter, an absent mother, an arsonist and a would-be murderess” (Klein 164). Lady Audley’s admission of insanity opens doors that allow her mental state to be utilized either for her benefit or for her demise. By showing how both these possibilities play out, Braddon presents her critique of a society that allows such things to happen due to the sparse knowledge that Victorians possessed of cases like Lady Audley’s.

The line between what was constituted as sane or insane was blurred almost past the point of recognition due to the idea of insanity that was commonly held by Victorians at the time. A medical pamphlet of the early 1800’s presented the newfound fact that “intellectual pursuits are not necessarily unhealthful. The mind must be occupied, else discontented and gloomy, if not wicked, feelings, will be likely to take possession of it” (Sweetser 3). This knowledge they were gaining was barely scratching the surface of the effects the mental state could have on the individual’s actions. Another authoritative medical text of the 1830’s introduced the idea of “moral insanity.” It was defined as: “Madness consisting in a morbid perversion of the natural feelings, affections, inclinations, temper, habits, moral dispositions, and natural impulses, without any remarkable disorder or defect of the interest or knowing and reasoning faculties” (Prichard 12). In other words, someone suffering from “moral insanity” displayed emotional stress but appeared otherwise rational. Not showing any outward signs of delusions or hallucinations, someone could suffer from this phenomenon their entire lives without ever knowing. Or, in Lady Audley’s case, live what was considered a “normal” life until someone or something triggered an emotional break. In describing her madness, Lady Audley attributes its appearance to George: “When George Talboys goaded me, and reproached me, and threatened me; my mind, never properly balanced, utterly lost its balance; and I was mad!” (355). Throughout the course of her marriage to Sir Michael before her secret is revealed, the reader sees Lady Audley being a perfect housewife: doting on her husband, receiving guests, and charming everyone she meets. The idea of her being mad is one that could not be further from everyone’s minds. Thus, Lady Audley closely fits the bill of the morally insane person—who Victorian society had no idea how to deal with. But her transportation to an asylum under the efforts of Robert Audley make her the epitome of the “criminal lunatic” wronged by Victorian society that Braddon critiqued.

Another facet of knowledge surrounding the issue of mental health that the Victorians lacked is that regarding the mental institution. In the early years of the Victorian asylum, it was quickly realized that criminal offenders were out of place in the asylum’s treatment system. The term “criminal lunatics,” now out of use, referred to patients who were unfit to plead or insane, but the Insane Prisoner’s Act of 1840 provided an addition to this definition that posed a problem: it “formalized the transfer of insane prisoners to asylums, and this included prisoners awaiting trials as well as those convicted” (Smith 22). This meant that an untried offender could be sent to asylum at the signature of any two justices. The Criminal Lunatics Act of 1800 had essentially required the immediate detention of someone who had committed a crime in a bout of insanity, instead of leaving the decision up to the judge and jury. In addition to the legal acts of the 1800’s, prison doctors posed another problem for the person deemed a “criminal lunatic.” Oftentimes, prison doctors saw offenders who rarely exhibited symptoms to necessitate their removal to an asylum but deemed them serious cases anyway. The physician who examined Lady Audley declared that she was not mad, but there was “insanity which might never appear; or which may appear only once or twice in a lifetime… its duration would be very brief, and it would arise only under extreme mental pressure” (385). There were many people in Victorian society like Lady Audley who would fall into the category of the “criminal lunatic,” a term which encompassed cases of highly varying degrees of severity. These people’s mental states were not accurately evaluated before being thrown into an asylum at the signature of a doctor who could be obliged to operate at the whims of powerful members of society. And to make it worse, many of these asylums were places of malpractice and abuse. Harriet Martineau, an English social theorist of the Victorian time, observed:

Even in private asylums, where the rich patients are supposed to be well taken care of in proportion to the quantity of money expended on their account, there is as much idleness, moping, raving, exasperating infliction, and destitution of sympathy, though the horror is attempted to be veiled by a more decent arrangement of externals (2).

Because of the lack of process in place to deal with the mentally ill, much less the “criminal lunatic,” they were often placed in institutions wrongly. It became an incentive for family members to hide them away to avoid trouble, or for someone who was not insane to plead insanity in order to live out their days at a cushioned asylum rather than a prison.

Lady Audley’s claim to insanity acting as a scapegoat to shift the blame from herself alludes to Braddon’s condemning of the Victorian treatment of mental health. After she has attempted murder not only on George, but on Robert too, along with her slew of other crimes, the reader feels a certain dissatisfaction at the end of the text when Lady Audley is riding in the carriage to the mental institution “comfortably wrapped in her furs” and still surrounded by her greatest joys: “She had not forgotten her favorite Russian sables even in this last hour… she had hidden away fragile tea-cups and covered vases of Sevres and Dresden among the folds of her silken dinner dresses. She had secreted jeweled and golden drinking cups amongst her delicate linen” (388). The institution where she ends up is somewhere she can live comfortably and undisturbed “among faded splendor of shabby velvet, and tarnished gilding, and polished wood” (394). Not only that, but Robert ensures that she will be treated with tenderness and compassion there, and receive any indulgence that she desires, as long as it is reasonable. This situation is certainly one that someone like Lady Audley does not deserve, but she is able to attain it due to a note written by a physician that Robert Audley calls to examine her. The physician declares her dangerous at worst. Lady Audley’s madness being the sole reason for her crimes would disregard her other motivations of selfishness and vanity that run rampant through the text. Thus, her declaration of her secret is not an adequate explanation of her actions and ends up working in her favor by providing her with a comfortable place to live out the remainder of her days. As scholar Jill Matus explains, “after she has been certified, Lady Audley can be handily dispatched to a homelike asylum. On the face of it, madness is the secret now told, but it functions in significant ways more as coverup” (1). This usage of insanity as a defense and coverup was made possible by Victorians’ lack of knowledge and processes regarding mental illness and how to treat it. This enabled someone who had committed crimes to be sent to an agreeable institution with a ten-minute conversation with a physician, a note, and a reluctant detective behind it.

Lady Audley’s claim to insanity being turned into a weapon to extricate her from society displays Braddon’s critique of the knowledge Victorians had regarding mental health and its treatment. Up until Lady Audley’s declaration of madness, Robert Audley had been pursuing her in a cat-and-mouse chase, with her always one unattainable step ahead. Following an intricate chain of circumstantial evidence, he always needs just a little more proof to implicate her in the crimes he knows she has committed. But once she tells him of her insanity, he finally has complete control over her. Only once she calls herself mad, can he use that to his advantage to overpower her once and for all. Robert is not malicious in his intent; he despises his position as Lady Audley’s judge and jailer. But he takes it up out of necessity and a duty felt towards the truth and the lives of his friends and family: “Not until he had given up his charge into the safe keeping of the foreign madhouse doctor, not until then would the dreadful burden be removed from him and his duty done” (387). Robert primarily sends Lady Audley to a madhouse to protect his uncle, who is devastated by her betrayal, so as not to cause him unnecessary pain by drawing out the matter in a trial. It is a mad rush to ship Lady Audley off to a madhouse as fast as possible, to rid everyone of her unpredictable and vain ways that have caused the characters of the text much trouble and pain. Once there, she will be out of sight and out of mind, as explained by the physician:

From the moment in which Lady Audley enters that house, her life, so far as life is made up of action and variety, will be finished. Whatever secrets she may have will be secrets for ever! If you were to dig a grave for her in the nearest churchyard and bury her alive in it, you could not more safely shut her from the world (386).

This prospect of convenience is what brings relief to Robert and makes the decision to put Lady Audley in the institution seem like the best and only option—regardless of whether she would truly be treated well. The specifics of her treatment became irrelevant to Robert and everyone else outside the madhouse the second she stepped inside. Lady Audley’s claim to insanity led to the loss of her freedom through her convenient removal from the lives which she had harmed. Braddon further shows the convenience of this option through Lady Audley’s attempt to convince Sir Michael that Robert is insane, so her crimes will not be exposed. Her attempt is clearly futile—Robert is not the only one who knows about her crimes, and it would not absolve her of guilt—but this last-ditch attempt is an example of what kind of motivations containment in madhouses could be blatantly used for.

Ultimately, Lady Audley’s attempt to shift the blame and use madness as a defense gives others in the text the tools to use it as a weapon and expel her from Victorian society. This shows the drastic impact that suspicions of madness could have on a person’s life through Braddon’s careful weaving of these plot points and themes into the text. The character of Lady Audley presents two dichotomies that were entirely possible due to the Victorian sense of the issues regarding the criminal and the mentally ill. Either excusing their criminal actions on grounds of insanity in order to secure a better life than the deserved prison sentence would provide, or hidden in an institution to avoid inconvenience, the “criminal lunatic” was a misunderstood member of Victorian society.

WORKS CITED

Braddon, M. E., and Natalie M. Houston. Lady Audley's Secret. Broadview Press, 2003.

Klein, Herbert G. “Strong Women and Feeble Men: Upsetting Gender Stereotypes in MaryElizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret.” Atenea, vol. 28, no. 1, June 2008, pp. 161–174.

Martineau, Harriet. “The Hanwell Lunatic Asylum.” Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, June 1834, studymore.org.uk/xmad1834.htm.  

Matus, Jill L. “Disclosure as ‘Cover-up’: The Disclosure of Madness in ‘Lady Audley’s Secret.’” University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 62, no. 3, Spring 1993, pp. 334–355.

Prichard, James Cowles. A Treatise on Insanity, and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind. 1835. Print.  

Smith, Roger. Trial by Medicine: Insanity and Responsibility in Victorian Trials. Edinburgh University Press, 1981.  

Sweetser, William. Mental Hygiene, or, an Examination of the Intellect and Passions, Designed to Illustrate Their Influence on Health and the Duration of Life. 1850. JSTOR. Accessed 25 Mar. 2021.