Fountain UMC pastor to speak on healing ministries with veterans

Submitted by the Rev. Dr. David Bachelor
Pastor, First United Methodist Church, Fountain, Colorado

The Rev. Dr. David Bachelor, pastor of First United Methodist Church in Fountain, Colorado, will speak at Tarrant County College in Fort Worth, Texas, on Oct. 19 and 20 as part of the National Endowment of the Arts Big Read national initiative. Bachelor will discuss Tim O'Brien's book, The Things They Carried as it relates to post-traumatic stress and moral injury.

Bachelor is the director of Warrior Wash Ministry, a nonprofit organization that helps veterans heal from post-traumatic stress and assists churches to start veterans' ministries. As a chaplain in the Navy Reserves, he was deployed twice to Iraq with U.S. Marines and once to Afghanistan with Navy Special Warfare units. In his youth, he also served in the infantry of the U.S. Army.

In addition to military deployments, Bachelor was part of the law enforcement response to the Los Angeles riots in 1992. It was his own struggle to re-integrate after war that led him to seek God's method of restoring warriors after deployment.

His education includes a B.A. in Social Science from California State University at Sacramento, a Master's of Divinity from Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, and a Ph.D from Trinity Seminary, Newburgh, Indiana. Bachelor is the author of Death-Shadow: Christianity and Post-traumatic Stress and Sacraments of War: The Sword and the Warrior Wash.

Tarrant County College is located at 5301 Campus Drive, Fort Worth, TX 76119. Bachelor will speak from 7 to 9 p.m. Oct. 19.