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Faith Stories with Pastor Joe Coffey is a podcast about the real stories of real people and the real ways God moves in and through our lives. Each episode shares honest conversations of breakthrough and struggle–stories of faith, failure, drift, redemption, and the slow pull back to Jesus. From seasons of success to moments of darkness, these testimonies are reminders that no one is too far gone, no story is beyond redemption, and Jesus is still in the business of restoring what feels lost.
Welcome to Faith Stories, a podcast of Christ Community Chapel, where I get to talk to people about how Jesus has the power to change anything and everything. I'm Joe Coffey, your host, and today I have with me my guest, Dave Bergen, who's a great friend. Dave, welcome.
Thanks. Excited to be here.
All right. Let's start by… tell me something about how you grew up, what your family was like?
Yeah, we were a sports family. Three boys, I was the youngest. Went to a small Baptist church in Hinckley, Ohio, our entire lives. So, you know, it was the typical Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday, summer revivals, that kind of thing. And a competitive family, especially being the youngest.
Now, I know that you wrestled in college—a really good wrestler. Were you involved with other sports too? Football?
High school, I was football and wrestling. College, it was just wrestling. Yeah.
People usually stay with football and wrestling. They don't go basketball and wrestling. I’ve noticed that—they don’t mesh well. All right, so you grew up with two other brothers, you’re the youngest. Church-going family. Did you come to faith in Christ at an early age?
Yeah, I… you know, back in the ‘60s, altar calls were very popular. And so, I responded to what I thought was the Holy Spirit prompting me to commit my life to Christ. I think it’s fair to bring up that when the pastor would normally tell us, "You never know if you're going to get hit by a car on the way home," I probably did that three more times just to make sure.
That was the motivator! Yeah, my dad was a preacher, so I went forward so many times because when he would give the invitation, I felt bad that no one was going, so I went up—I was padding up there all the time. Great son! All right, so you grew up in a church, you go to high school—what was your faith like in high school?
Um, I think it was, you know, probably in my early high school years, pretty… I was pretty active. I was active all throughout high school, but you know, I hung out with the football players and the wrestlers, and in the off-season, we ran around and, you know, I was like a normal teenage guy doing normal teenage things.
Yeah, I grew up I think in a similar way where sports were very important to me. And if I had to guess—I mean, if somebody was going to say in high school what was more important… I mean, I was doing all the youth group stuff and stuff, but if somebody was to ask me which was more important, it would be sports.
Oh yeah, I would agree.
All right, so then you decide you go to college. You go to Taylor University, right? Studied what?
Um, I ended up as an education major, secondary ed. I changed a few times along the way.
Thought you were going to be a teacher?
Thought I’d be a teacher and coach, yeah.
Okay. Met your wife?
Met my wife, yeah, my junior year. And fell in love.
And then got married?
Got married halfway through my senior year. So, she was already graduated—she was a year ahead of me. So, she had a job, we lived in the off-campus trailer park.
Nice. I know that well.
In the smallest trailer in the park—38 feet long. It was real tiny, but we had a blast.
That’s what my wife told me; I could get her anywhere, but don't make her live in a trailer. So you were living the dream.
I was living the dream indeed.
All right, so then you graduate, but you don’t become… do you become a teacher? No?
No. Interestingly, I went through everything, I student-taught, you know, graduated… but then at that time, believe it or not, there was a real surplus of teachers on the market and the pay wasn't great. So fortunately, we had made connection with a pretty wealthy guy in the Upland area, and I went to work for him for three years.
Oh boy. I didn't know you worked for him for three years.
Yeah, it was wild.
Okay, so you’re married now, you start having a family. You have kids—three kids, four kids?
We have three kids. First one was born in Indiana. My dad gets ill—he has his own business here in Northeast Ohio—and my oldest brother was working for him. Then I get the call: "Hey, I really think you need to come home and work for Dad. We don't know how long he has." And much to my wife's disappointment, we came back to Ohio.
Okay. So you start working for your dad. That’s the gravel thing, right?
Yep. Hauling gravel.
Hauling gravel.
Yeah, we had dump trucks, we did a lot of heavy highway construction.
Okay. So you’re doing that, you’re doing the family thing… how’s your marriage?
Marriage was great. In the matter of five years, we have three kids—two girls and a boy—and you know, we’re just, I think, the normal family attending a church in Parma Heights. Very active once again, you know, in all aspects, and really enjoying life.
Okay. Now, I know kind of where your story goes—where it starts and then of course where it ends up, which is a dip and back up. Right? So when your life… I guess this is a spoiler alert… your life comes unraveled at some point. But I’m interested in how—I was thinking about this—people kind of go into darkness one shade at a time. And you can’t… and we’re going to get there, but it seems like if you’re going to come out into the light, you’ve got to come out all at once. Yeah, you can’t… people try to shade out of the darkness and it doesn't work. But tell me how the shade went. You’re checking all the boxes: good family man, good marriage.
Yeah, so I… that drift that you’re talking about, I’ve talked about it as "the one degree." The dreaded one degree that you don’t even notice, but over time it has a cumulative effect. And that’s kind of what happened. I worked for my dad for ten years, went on to work for a couple limestone quarries and stayed in that industry for my entire work career. But wanting to be influential, I realized that my drugs of choice were power and influence. Being the youngest of three boys and, I think, in some fashion being overlooked—I’m certainly not blaming my parents, this is all on me, right?—but I sought after that. I wanted to be somebody, and I felt for a lot of years I was a nobody. And so I started to find real success in this industry. And so to do that, it meant, you know, meeting guys at bars to do business. That led to going other places, you know, strip clubs, and that just kind of led me down a really dark path.
Okay, wait, wait. Let me back up now. So, like the first time that you decide to go… like, it’s one thing to go to a bar, meet a guy for a beer and stuff. It’s another thing when a guy goes, "Hey, let's go to this place." And you know where you’re going. What was that first—that first step—like?
Thrilling and scary at the same time. I think I can remember I was actually shaking inside, but I walked in.
Right. All right. So then, like, when you do that, when you go home, what do you do with… like, I know that whenever somebody goes into darkness, like one of the things that you say… I mean, your story is one of my favorite stories, in both a bad and a good way. It ends good, so I’m all in. Sure. But when people start making that step, deception almost always has to happen almost right away, because you didn't come home and tell your wife.
Right.
So when she says, "How was your night?" or "Where’d you go?" do you know when the first time you started to lie?
Right then.
Right then?
Sure. "Yeah, I went out and had a couple drinks with this guy, you know, he has a job he wants me to quote and is going to do business with us," and so… and that was all true.
Right. So that’s the thing too. It’s all true. You didn't at that time, you didn't really lie, you just didn't tell everything. That’s why I just read when we swear in somebody, when we say "tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth," that’s to cover that kind of thing where you are withholding information that then allows them to have a perception that is not accurate. All right. So you do that the first time. How long does it take you before the next?
Oh, not long. Not long. And when I started to feel like, "Hey, I am being sought after by businessmen who want my business and want me," that really fed something in me. And listen, my wife was a great wife, loved my kids, we did a lot of great activities, but there was something in me that needed this affirmation in a business sense, but it was all my own ego, right? So it didn’t take long. In fact, I might have been the guy to say, "Hey, why don't we meet at such-and-such?"
Boy, that’s really interesting though, because what you’re saying is that it fed a part of you that was not… it wasn't like you weren't getting sex at home or anything like that. It wasn't connected to that. It was connected to something else, but it would eventually move its way into that. That’s interesting, because sin starts one place and it’s… but I always think Satan’s desire is to destroy you. All right. So he is looking—and then he always goes for the kill shot. I think a little earlier, which we’ll get to. All right. So you start… like how old are you when you start this?
Um, probably… let’s see, I made that switch probably in my mid-40s.
Mid-40s. That’s probably a pretty vulnerable spot. That’s when you’re hitting your prime, it’s now or never if you’re going to be an important… if you’re going to feed that part of you. All right. So then it starts to progress. All right. When does it—when do you feel like, or did you ever feel like, it went to the part where it tipped and you were no longer in control?
Um, I don't know that it got there because I think sin deceives us to believe we're in control. Okay. Along with that, I think it’s important that my… the company I was working for, I was just blowing it out of the water. Our sales increased by 300%. And so, you know, they're just loving the business that’s coming in and all of a sudden, I get free rein to do whatever I want.
Which is super intoxicating, toxic… that’s a cocktail.
So it also fed that need for power and affirmation, right? So this perfect storm is starting to create. Right. Okay. So then how does that… how do the dominoes start to fall?
Well, let me say one thing. Um, sin always wants to take you further. Like, so, I always think, with pornography, there was a reason that magazines would come out with a new edition every month because one magazine wasn't enough. And the next magazine was very, very similar, probably—I mean, I say probably, I knew they were when I was a kid. And but there's something about sin too, and there's a progression. So Satan always wants to take you like one step further. When did, like, strip clubs and that success, when did it go, "Oh, I need to take another step?"
Yeah, so along with that, I worked in a remote location, so I could pull up pornography for eight hours a day. It was just myself and a few other employees because I was in charge of several different docks, if you will. And so I would just put it on in the background, I’d work a little bit, watch porn… got on some interactive sites, did some chatting and stuff, you know. And that, along with living this increasingly promiscuous lifestyle, that fed my ego. I thought, "Well, you know, I'm right at the gate. I think it’d be kind of cool to take it one step further."
Okay. So then you dive headlong in. And how long did you stay in that?
I'm trying to think of years… probably three years doing that and lying to myself.
Yeah. And what do you feel like that’s—how are you feeling, how are you processing? I know for me, when I had my South Florida thing where I went on a moral freefall for 13 months, I remember walking by a mirror and looking at myself and just going, "Man, I don't like what I see. It’s not doing what I thought it would do."
Um, it still affirmed me, you know. That lifestyle still affirmed me, but what started out as a power trip—and it was—I had a half-hour ride home from downtown Cleveland to where I lived. And the conviction started. I would shout at myself all the way home, pounding the steering wheel: "What are you doing? You’ve got to stop this. You know, you’ve got this great family at home." And I would do that on the way home, but the next day it would just be a repeat. Just be a repeat. I was really powerless at that point.
And what was happening with you and your wife? Could she tell anything?
I don't believe she could. Okay. Along with screaming at myself and talking to myself, I then began to say, "I think I can keep these two worlds separate." I actually remember trying to convince myself and did convince myself of that. I think I can just keep them separate.
All right. And then they didn't stay separate.
They didn't stay separate.
What happened?
Well, you know, I was drinking a lot in addition to everything else. And… but you’re still being successful. Oh yeah. I mean, you know, drinking two, three times a week, but you know, still connecting with some very large contractors and bringing in some great business. And the unraveling, if you will, of all this was I went to a golf outing—which that’s what I was doing as well, you know, golf outings and people are stroking your ego and you’re drinking on a golf course and drinking at dinner. And so I thought it was a wise idea to drive home after all of that. My wife was out of town at the time. And so I got pulled over and got a DUI. And looking back, I see God's hand in that because this highway patrol left my car on the side of the road, took me to the outpost, gave me a ticket, and then gave me a ride home.
Wow. Yeah. Okay. So then what happened? I mean, how did that…
My wife's out of town, of course I have to call her and tell her. But as was my nature, I downplayed it. I said, "Oh, you know how many people that work for blank company have had these? Our company, I can tell you, name them all, and it’s not a big deal.
And drinking is not... yeah. Okay. So you had one extra drink, whatever. And it's not a big deal.
And so she's pretty upset—she's taking care of her parents in New Jersey, comes home three, four days later. But during that time, my kids expressed their concern too. They were in their early 20s at that point. And so they were pretty upset. And I started… I sat for several days after work just kind of thinking, and something's off. Still thinking I can lie my way through it, though. The whole time. Right.
So then what?
Kim gets home. The kids have been talking to her, and she gets home and, okay, we're going to have a family meeting. And I was like, sure, yeah, I know the kids are upset and I want to address their concern. So they come over—it might have been the night Kim got home—and so we sit down and before the kids got there, I said, okay, I know I screwed up, but let's pray that God will, you know, show up in this meeting. So we pray.
You and Kim prayed?
We prayed.
You said, let's pray.
Yeah.
Weird. Very weird. Go ahead.
What a dangerous prayer you're about to pray. Right? You're in the midst of going, I'm going to keep it separate, I'm going to still live in this. Lord… and you said it out loud. You said words out loud. Okay, go ahead.
Lord, we want truth to come out, we want to be transparent, and we want healing to begin. I had no clue what was coming.
Okay, so then what?
Kids show up. They're fiery. They're very upset. Because that is just the tip—I mean, the drinking thing, I was just going, I could explain that away.
Yeah.
And so, you know, I'm trying to say, hey, everybody drinks, you know, I know it was a dumb decision, and then my kids… Kim was really still supporting me, God bless her, what a wonderful wife. But the kids are saying, dad, something's off.
Oh wow.
I'm like, what do you mean? I don't know, you know. I think my son caught a whiff of me looking at porn one time and he happened to bring that up. I didn't think he saw me—it was a quick thing on the television, right? But it made a difference right then. I said, no, guys. I said, you know, I went to a strip club, and again downplaying all this. But I can speak pretty well. I mean, I talk to people for a living. And literally, the Holy Spirit started confounding my speech. I couldn't put a sentence together. I said out loud, why can't I say what I want to say? I said that out loud, my kids heard me, and I'm kind of sweating and kind of, you know, jerky… I believe that was the Holy Spirit convicting me in that moment. And so the more I talked, the more upset they became because they knew I was lying, and now Kim is starting to believe I'm lying as well. The kids leave, and they were very upset. And Kim went upstairs and I'm sitting on a couch and I said, either I'm going to tell her the truth or I will put a bullet in my head. And I've never had any thoughts like that at all. But that was the heavy conviction of the Holy Spirit. And I said, okay. I walked upstairs and I walked in and I said, I've been… I've cheated on you and I'm addicted to pornography. And that was pretty hard time for her, right? And really explosive. Yeah. And then of course she contacted the kids right away and told them.
So this is still all one night?
This is the same night, yeah.
Okay. So you go through a sleepless night, she goes through a sleepless night. She kicks me out. Yeah. Where do you go?
I went to the Holiday Inn on 21 in Richfield because I was driving around—oh, by the way, I didn't have a valid driver's license because it had gotten taken away the week before. My son had come back when he heard the news and took my golf clubs and busted out like three windows in my pickup truck. So now I'm driving with no license with a shattered windshield and no side windows in a pickup truck in at 11:30 at night, thinking I'm just going to get arrested and thrown in jail.
Wow. Yeah. Okay. So then what happened? I mean, how did that…
A friend of mine, a business friend of mine—not a believer—he really stepped up, God used him. He would call me and call Kim, call me, call Kim—we're not sleeping, right? And he says, hey, your wife said show up at CCC because we were attending here at the time tomorrow morning. So that would have been a Friday morning in August of 2008. And we did. And I'm parked out front, she's parked out back. We haven't talked; we just know that each other is there. She did call me and she said, quit your job.
And I was pretty successful in that industry. And I simply said, okay. And so I called my boss...
Wait, I already quit my job. Right there. On the front steps of CCC, quit my job. And you haven't come in the building yet.
No. Now, had you left the note already?
No. I think you got the note after I initially met with Jim, if I'm not mistaken. Because now that I work at CCC, on Friday mornings I know people don't get here super early. I'm a construction guy, so I'm thinking everybody's working at 7:00 a.m. So we're waiting; 7:00, 7:30, we're waiting. And I think some gentlemen were meeting in the atrium having a small Bible study or something. I said, hey, any of the pastors here yet? Because I don't really know you guys. We're just consumers at this point. And they said, no, but they'll be rolling in. And my idea was the first pastor that walks in, I'm going to talk to. And it happened to be Jim.
Okay. A good one.
A very good one. He scared me to death. But I walked in and I said, hey, my wife's in the back, our life's a mess and we need help. And he said, okay.
What a good one.
Well, your note was pretty… you vomited on a note basically and just said, it's everything. I mean, this is it, I'm in trouble.
Gosh, I remember that. Oh my goodness.
Yeah. Thank you for remembering. It was a powerful… it was like one of those things where we're going, wow, Dave's in trouble, and he put it all out. And you and I have dealt with enough people that very few people come willingly into the light. Like they'll go; you'll get little bit by little bit, right? And they'll say, it was an emotional affair, it wasn't a physical affair, and you're going, yeah, I don't—I think there's more. I look at pornography once in a while, not very often, whatever it is, it's little by little until they have to come out. You just were like, boom, I'm out. And you would say that is probably a result of the crazy prayer you prayed.
I believe it was. I believe it was. What a great prayer. I mean, what a great, what a gracious thing for God to go, I know you don't even mean that, but I'm coming. I'm coming to save you.
Amen. I didn't—boy, didn't feel like it, but he sure did.
All right, so you meet with Jim.
Yeah.
The overall tone was, Kim, we're going to support you; Dave, you're really a pretty rotten guy. So Kim will take care of you, whatever you need, and if you want to do something, you better act now. And so he did great triage. I mean, he prescribed some things and we were like, okay, I'll do it. And really, for a guy that was on a power trip, that is just… the Lord was already beginning to transform my attitude, right? To recognize—I didn't recognize it to the depth yet, but my brokenness. And I was just like, okay, okay, I'll do whatever.
Okay, so when did brokenness—brokenness begins to heal, but when does brokenness start to feel like freedom for you? Because you are one of the most free people—I remember you in a meeting one time just going, I have no secrets. Do you know how that feels? I have no secrets. Like, and you never do, you don't, right? Which is why you're here. But when did you start to feel healing and then when did you start to feel freedom? And then joy. I mean, I got—I want all those.
Okay, so healing, freedom, and joy, right? Healing I believe when I… when I confessed to Kim in our bedroom right before she kicked me out. I was like, oh my gosh, finally the cork is popped. Whether I acknowledged it at that point, I could feel relief. Like instant relief. Knowing that a storm was coming, that was instant relief. Now, that wasn't healing, but whatever Jim prescribed, we did. And he got us in with Don Litchy at Emergent Ministries, and they said it's going to be four weeks and my wife is like, oh no, we can't wait four weeks. And we're praying together, even though she's really pretty angry at me, we're praying together. And he gets a cancellation, we're in four days later.
Wow.
And so the Lord starts orchestrating these kind of things. And so we get in to see Don. We had planned to go to Florida—we had a condo at the time—over Labor Day. And we asked Don, should we go? And he says, yeah, go. And I'm sweating bullets because my wife is really pretty mad at me and I'm going to spend four days in Florida with her. But God used that; we talked for hours and hours. And I can't even conceptualize her, the depth of her character to be able to do that. Wow. But I'm just kind of going over this stuff and just kind of unloading. Now, Don has given us great direction on how to do that, too.
Now, are you asking Kim for forgiveness and stuff at that time?
I asked Kim for forgiveness. But this was a pivotal statement—and this happened before we went to Florida because we had several days. I was sitting in my chair just heaving, weeping, couldn't control myself because God was breaking me. And I said, you can stay or you can go, but I'm not going to be this guy anymore. Just didn't matter what you were going to do; I couldn't be this guy. I just felt the hand of God on me and I knew that no matter the outcome—I was going to try to control the outcome. She could divorce me and she had not made any promises; she said, I'm going to wait and see. And so she did. And I got a couple accountability partners: Roger Taylor was one of them, Fred Lester was the other one, and these guys just literally every day were talking and they were just walking with me. And I spent time with you and then in counseling, and I was… I went to Courage to Change because I knew I had a drinking problem. So all these things were working in the same direction, but I was to the point where I no longer wanted to be that… I was sick and tired.
So I think that's when healing began. And then God healed me—I had no urge to drink. I had no urge to look at porn. I started consuming the word of God for hours because I quit my job, I didn't have much else to do.
Yeah, I gotta get to the job sometime, but… but okay, so when you came to worship for those, let's say, the first two months, what was that like?
It was brutal because I was so hypersensitive to where my eyes would go, I would literally be standing in the atrium looking at the ceiling, waiting to go in and sit down because I just didn't want to fix my eyes on a female or have any anything lock in. And I'm feeling this weight. But also knowing that the Lord is shedding that from me and being in service was great because I don't know how many people I've seen walk down the aisle of this church. But I did, and you received me so well. The words you said, you said very simply: let the healing begin. And I don't know why I felt the need to walk down front, but I did. And I don't know, it was just maybe another stage of saying, okay, you know what? I'm outing myself. I'm not sitting in a pew, I'm not going to… I've got to make some act of movement physically to represent what's going on in my heart.
Okay, and then you became—you have become—one of the best kind of wounded healers that I know. Right? So when did you go from being the wounded to the one that would recognize that in other guys, be able to minister to them, have them turn to you? When did you become that? Because for those of you who are listening to the podcast, one of the things that happened at the Men's Summit this last year was… makes me tear up… but Zach's was talking about how God redeems people and then he took—he said, if you're here and your life has been touched and impacted by Dave Bergen, please stand up. And it was unbelievable.
I know it had to be.
It was overwhelming. Yeah. When did that happen?
Well, I'm just going to say quickly: God healed us at warp speed. What we accomplished in four months most people don't accomplish in four years. So God's hand was in it.
What do you attribute that to?
I attribute that to, I believe, my own surrendered heart. I believe Kim's utter obedience to listening to the Holy Spirit of God and my willingness to absolutely be open, transparent, and not hold anything back. And because of that, God took these two hearts, wounded, and back together we came, and just continues to grow like crazy.
Okay, and how long ago did I bring you here on staff? Great job, by the way, on that.
About ten and a half years ago. Ten and a half years you and I met at Starbucks. I remember my least favorite coffee shop, but you asked me to meet, so I thought I should. And we had a great time and I was just kind of updating you because we didn't meet frequently, maybe a couple—two, three times a year. And I just remember you kind of said, you know, I think you ought to come work at the church. And I had no clue what that meant. And so you had me meet with Michael Ammora at the time and kind of worked out a job description and I started working here and you gave me a guy even before I started working here; you said, hey, you need to meet with this guy. He's hurting. And actually I still meet with that guy here ten years later.
Yeah, it has been remarkable to watch how God uses you and so grateful for you telling your story. Before we end, I want you to—if you had one thing to say to a man who was taking his first step into darkness, what would you say to him? And then the other thing is if somebody is stuck in the midst of darkness, what's the one thing you'd say to him?
To the first guy, I would tell him: sin will take you further than you ever wanted to go, keep you longer than you ever wanted to stay, and cost you more than you ever wanted to pay. And that is the absolute truth. And run from it. To the guy caught, I would say: reach out. Reach out to me. The worst thing you could do is nothing. Because sin, the progressive nature of sin, will destroy your life quicker than you ever thought possible. So act now. Don't wait. It doesn't get better; it gets worse.
Yeah, and I would say when you come out into the light, what I have seen with you is such freedom, such joy, such peace. The stuff that you never had before.
Doctor took my blood pressure a couple days ago and I'm not on any medication—it was a 106 over 68. And he's like, what are you doing? I said, listen, doc, when you've got no secrets, when you're content and walking with Jesus, this is what happens.
That was awesome. Good. Well, thanks so much for joining us.
Thank you. This has been a pleasure.
Yeah. Thanks for listening to Faith Stories. We do this podcast because we believe that Jesus can do anything and everything. So if you're listening to this episode and you feel like you want Jesus to do more in your life, then you can reach out to us. You can find the address in the description of the podcast, but we would love for you to reach out because we want to meet you where you are and then take you further along with Jesus. Thanks again for listening.