This article was written by Rev. Chuck Freeman, founding minister of

Free Souls Church in Round Rock, Tejas and Executive Director of the Texas Unitarian Universalist Justice Ministry.

I sat in my freshly wood paneled office in Ft. Stockton, Texas, circa 1980.  This was my initial full time ministry.  Many a morning as I did my Bible study and prayer I would experience a duel feeling of helplessness and heavy shouldered responsibility.  The world is going to hell without Jesus to save them and I am Minister of this gospel.  How can I possibly make a holy dent in this mammoth calling from a Podunk West Texas town one hundred miles from water, one mile from hell?

I am perfectly suited to make sure Jesus doesn’t bear the cross alone.  I am the eldest and only son of an evangelical Preacher in a Southern family.  I was groomed to elevate the ministry mantle to greater heights and crowned the family hero.  I was reared in a religious culture where Jesus was seen foremost as a Savior whose finest hour was at the Altar call with unrelenting verses of “Just As I Am.”

As my ministry and humanity evolved I moved to Houston, left my position in the church and went into a two – year clinical training for hospital chaplaincy.  My world salvation passion shifted from altars to bedsides.  How do I relieve the spiritual suffering of the sick, dying, and their kin?  How can I chaplain them to engage these crises with emotional honesty and integrity of faith?

I clearly stated to my intern peer group that my goal was to be the best chaplain of the bunch and to make more visits than them all.  Chuck the Savior had kicked into warp saving speed!  It didn’t take many “on call” sessions for the Messiah to have a Gethsemane moment. For 16 hours during my rotation all the pain was heroically mine and mine alone.

Some twenty years later I still have a visceral vibration in my body reliving the first time I encountered a weeping woman in the hall and passed by on the other side.  I was just like the priestly foils in the Good Samaritan story, and I felt like the cruelest, most calloused man alive.  In that moment I resigned as Savior of the world.  Hell, I couldn’t even save a medium sized hospital off I-59 and Beechnut in Houston, Texas.

As the experience soaked in and with due reflection I came to a painful truth – I needed to save people more than they neeed savin’.    I began to consciously focus on being a channel rather than a hero.  After many years I embodied an acceptable level of mastery in this practice.

These days I fancy myself in the lineage of the Biblical Prophets seeking to cure the conditions that cause great suffering.  This brand of salvation is more systemic than individual.

I inwardly weep at family separation on our border.  I feel soul sickness with people of color being shot in the streets by those sworn to protect them.  I cringe at the rise of immigrants being scapegoated in our nation and around the world because of their nationality, religion, gender, sexual orientation or skin color.  I feel like I have to do something about it yesterday. 

Like Moses’ burning bush, how does the passion burn through me, without burning me up?  I am discovering anew this subtle sacred art.

St. Paul offers palliative spiritual medicine.  “I planted, Apollos watered, God made it grow.”  Our calling is not to accomplish but to be faithful.  The rest is cosmic horticulture.

Hi, I’m Chuck.  I’m a Savioraholic.  Perhaps you are in the circle with me.  Let’s resign as Saviors one day at a time.