MINISTERS, MISSIONARIES STRUGGLE TO COPE WITH DRUG-ADDICTED CHILDREN

TEMPE, Ariz. - 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 around 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 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 raised 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
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 was 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 admits 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 starting smoking marijuana. The drugs, 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."