Don’t look for Robby Gallaty to be throwing any stones. He’s the first one to tell you he’s not without sin.
Fortunately, most of the big ones are behind the 34-year-old senior pastor of Brainerd Baptist Church. Since his arrival there more than two years ago, the church has increased attendance in its traditional worship service from 900 to 1,570 and in its contemporary service from 200 to 650.
But Gallaty’s checkered past, including a three-year addiction to drugs, successful drug trafficking business and theft of some $15,000 from his family, allows people to see him as flawed as they may see themselves.
“I’ve been honest with the church,” he said. “I’m on a journey just like they are. They feel comfortable because they can resonate with me. l understand where they’ve been, where they are.”
Gallaty, a scholarship basketball player at William Carey University in Hattiesburg, Miss., and later founder and operator of a successful computer business, was rear-ended and pushed into a guardrail while driving on a New Orleans interstate highway on Nov. 22, 1999.
“That’s when everything started to change,” he said.
With two herniated discs in his neck and one in his back, Gallaty was sent home with prescriptions for OxyContin, Valium, Soma and Percocet.
“I’d never done drugs before,” he said. “I’d go home and would be in pain. I took them every four to six hours as prescribed. In three months, I was addicted to pharmaceutical drugs.”
Soon, Gallaty was going through a 30-day supply in two weeks. Then, someone kindly suggested he was wasting his time with pharmaceutical drugs when he could be doing heroin and cocaine.
Eventually, he realized he could apply the business acumen from the company he’d started to drug trafficking.
“You name it, we had it,” said Gallaty, who calculated his own habit at $180 a day. “Times were good for about a year.”
Suddenly, a buddy died of an overdose, he said. And by the time he’d done drugs for three years, eight close friends had died from drug-related problems and six went to jail.
Gallaty said he also scammed $15,000 from his father, almost bankrupting the parents who’d bankrolled two trips to rehab centers for him.
Ultimately, he said, he had nowhere else to turn to but God, the same God he heard about growing up in the Catholic church, the same God revered in his religious family, the same God a college friend told him he could cry out to when he was in a bind.
“I’d tried everything else,” Gallaty said.
So, in his room, he did cry out as his former college friend had suggested to him.
“Lord,” Gallaty said he prayed, “if you’re real and you save me, I’ll put my faith in Christ, and I will not be ashamed to tell people about what you did.”
After what he said was a “24-hour experience with Christ,” he told his dad he was going to become a preacher. That was Nov. 12, 2002.
Now, more than eight years later, Gallaty has graduated from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, married and is the father of two young boys, survived the loss of his home and all of his belongings to Hurricane Katrina, completed two books and is on track to earn a doctorate from the same seminary.
What he is today, he said, is imperfect. He’s not the i’s-dotted, t’s-crossed pastor with a spotless background.
People seeking a leader today can spot a fraud, Gallaty said.
“They want someone who has integrity, [who] is real,” he said. “They want to follow someone who is transparent.”